November's Reading

   Anemones have nothing to do with November's reading but I was thinking about the Vancouver Aquarium and remembered that I have a bunch of pictures from the last time I went there uploaded so here we are. Aquarium pictures all up in here.

   At the beginning of November I went on a bit of a reading-rampage which quickly petered out, and I am back to starting books and quickly discarding them or getting books out of the library and then leaving them on my floor for several weeks until I have to return them. My current goal is to finally finish reading Bad Feminist and to finish listening to The Romanov Sisters.

the world's grumpiest frog

   Perhaps my problem with November's reading and therefore my dropoff in reading productivity is just comics-satiation. I read a lot of comics. I also started re-watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and oh boy, I love Phryne Fisher to Australia and back. However, I've started Cocaine Blues multiple times and never made it out of chapter one. Should I try again? I don't know.

   The books:

• Through the Woods / Emily Carroll - I highly, highly, highly, recommend this book. Spooky! Scary! Pretty! Moody! It has it all. 
• Revival, vol. 3 / Tim Seeley, et al. - this title continues to be good, I quite like it, recommend. 
• The Night Wanderer / Drew Taylor, et al. - Canadian Gothic in the strictest sense: mysterious First Nations vampires in Canada. 
• The Undertaking of Lily Chen / Danica Novgorodoff - I have mixed feelings about this one, but am inclined towards liking it. Water-colour-y and nice. I would like to know more about the history and mythology and whatnot. 
• Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore / Robin Sloan - a fairly resounding "meh" on this one. 
• The Secret Sharer / Joseph Conrad - I thought I was reading Heart of Darkness the whole time I was reading this, it was very confusing. 
• The Plain Janes / Cecil Castellucci, et al. - enjoyable, but ultimately not super memorable and didn't inspire me to read the next volume. 
• Lumberjames, vol. 1 / Noelle Stevenson, et al. - mysterious monsters at camp! If there's three things I love, it's mysteries, monster stories (sometimes), and summer camp. I'm quite delighted with Lumberjanes. 

   If you read one of these books, make it Through the Woods. I'm still thinking about it. As a bonus, reading comics will leave plenty of time for watching old-timey mysteries. 

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore / Robin Sloan

   This book has a lot of characters and a lot of locations and a lot of describing of screens and codes. There's also this one annoying part at the end that makes me think that Robin Sloan has never actually been to an indoor climbing wall, because you don't just toss the holds up on the wall and leave them there forever, Robin, you move them around or else they get polished and the climbers get bored because you can't just climb the exact same route a bazillion times sans consequence. This climbing gym thing is entirely unimportant to the overall plot, but it did push me over the edge from "this is okay" to "meh". Admittedly that is not a very big push over a very big edge, but what I'm trying to say is this: this book isn't overly thrilling or engaging, but it's fine.

   So. Clay, our protagonist, by way of some fortuitous events, finds himself working nights at the titular bookstore, where a bunch of weird happenings regularly occur. TURNS OUT, there is some kind of code buried in the books that the majority of customers obsess over. Clay starts figuring out that they are all in a secret bookish club, and so on and so forth aren't books great?

   Clay manages to be both dude-ly and nerdy, but he's not annoying so that's a bonus since this book is in first-person. He's a biiiit like Lincoln in Attachments by Rainbow Rowell but nothing about this book is as charming as Attachments. The story follows Clay as he discovers the secret book-based society, makes friends, dates someone who works at Google, and so on. The other characters in this book are an interesting lot, but there are so many of them and Dickens this is not. WHY SO MANY. I kept putting this book down for long-ish stretches of time and then picking it up again and having to review which one was what one and who was who.

   There's some conflict and some tension but it's all very minimal and somewhat anti-climactic. This book is a book that pats you on the back for being a person who reads books but doesn't do much else. Basically: it's a book about information, and the process of turning data into information and information into knowledge and how that process has changed and is likely to change and how sometimes things can revert back to data and how important good classification systems are. Well, maybe not so much about classification systems but BELIEVE ME, classification is very important to the getting of knowledge.

   I think this is a book that kinda wanted to be a movie, you know? It's neither here nor there and I wouldn't bother reading it if I were you. Read Attachments instead.