The Mysteriousness of Collecting

I’m staring at shelves again.  And some of them are even empty.  I’m also thinking about Booklist’s mystery theme this month, and there IS a connection.

There are certain kinds of mysteries I enjoy.  The ones I like, I really, really like.  The ones I don’t, simply don’t work for me.  My enjoyment of mystery series has so much to do with liking the point of view character.  In a series, the detective is the person you “live with” throughout the series–if you don’t like them and the “family” they create to investigate with, it’s difficult to like the series, or at least it is for me.

Janet Evanovich‘s Stephanie Plum is a truly likeable heroine.  The scrapes she gets into always seem not just far-fetched, but trouble that almost anyone with half a brain should have seen coming a mile (make that ten miles) away.  At the same time, I can identify with Stephanie’s multi-generational issues with her mother and her grandmother, and her Grandma Mazur is an absolute hoot!  I still want to read the next book in the series, even though I know Stephanie’s train wreck of a love life is never going to be resolved.  The mystery in the books is not the point, everything else in “the Burg” is.  The Plum books are a series I have read all of, but never owned.

A lot of my mystery reading falls into that category.  But there were a few series that I had collected, absolutely religiously.  I had all of the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters.  I love Amelia.  She’s someone I would have adored to have tea with, or more likely brandy.  Right up until she started ordering my life around, which she would have done upon 15 minutes acquaintance, tops.  Readers either love Amelia, or can’t stand her.  I found her attempts to reconcile her passionate marriage with Victorian circumlocution utterly hilarious. And, as Abdullah, their reis intones in an early book, “another season, another dead body”. Someone always dies, providing another mystery to investigate.

In a completely other vein, I had the entire run of Shirley Rousseau Murphy’s Joe Grey series.  Joe Grey is the narrator.  However, Joe Grey is a tomcat who both understands and speaks perfect English.  Joe doesn’t know why he is gifted, but he uses his talent, which he acquired as an adult cat, to help the police in his small town solve mysteries.  His owner does know about his gift, which Joe occasionally misuses to place delivery orders from the local deli.  Joe Grey is sarcastic and somewhat confused by his gift, which is shared by two other cats.  He doesn’t just speak human, he also thinks human, and he knows it’s wrong for a cat to be whatever it is he is.  There are a lot of times he’d rather be normal. But Joe somewhat subscribes to Spiderman’s credo, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Joe is able to help, so he must, in spite of the fact that sometimes he’d rather still be selfish, just like a cat.

Both these series are gone now.  I’m still not sure how I feel about that. These were long series, and took up a lot of space. I bought them because I wanted to read them as soon as they came out, not because I re-read them. But being able to see them on the shelves, especially the Peabody series, was very…comforting.  At the end of the Star Trek episode “Amok Time”, Spock tells T’Pring, “…having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”  When it comes to books, having them to read ASAP is very pleasurable indeed.  But I kept thinking I was going to re-read Amelia’s story, beginning with Crocodile on the Sandbank, someday. I guess if someday ever comes, I’ll just have to buy them all as ebooks!

House hunting redux: belt and suspenders defeat Murphy

Magician Murphy is the wizard who makes things go wrong in Castle Roogna, the third book in Piers Anthony’s never-ending Xanth series.  The original Xanth trilogy (A Spell for Chameleon, The Source of Magic, and Castle Roogna) was really funny, and I’ve never forgotten either the scene with the curse-burrs, or Magician Murphy.  It’s my humble opinion that Anthony should have quit while he was ahead.  His bank account probably disagrees in the extreme.

Magician Murphy paid us an extended visit.  After five days of sitting on his decision, the owner of the first house we applied for decided not to have our four cats as tenants. Renting a house with four cats in tow is always an interesting proposition, but generally frowned upon, as my Brisbane property valuers friends told me afterward.  On the other hand, attempting to sell a house every 2.5 years in the past 10 years would have been equally dicey.  This is certainly a case where one’s mileage varies.

After fighting down the indignation and panic, Galen and I planned a second trip to Atlanta. I-75 is truly a boring stretch of highway, only equaled by I-65 and I-74 between Chicago and Cincinnati for repetitive nothingness. But for this residence-hunting trip, we decided to try the proverbial “belt and suspenders” approach that frequently works in IT.

We picked a real estate agent that covered the areas we wanted to live in and called them. We didn’t have a referral this time, we just guessed.  And, I called and emailed apartment complexes as a backup.  All the apartment complexes said “2 cat limit”, but one of the them referred me to a place called Promove that specializes in rental referrals in the Atlanta area.  I shamelessly used Promove to get a list of apartment complexes that would take us, and then visited houses.

We did finally get a house.  The real estate agent came through, and after driving up on Sunday, we signed a lease on Tuesday.  Also, I had found three apartments that would take us, two were good, and one was great.  We would have had a place to live, no matter what happened.  I would recommend Promove to anyone who was looking for an apartment in Atlanta (they also serve Dallas).  If I’d known about them sooner, I might have skipped a lot of the anguish and just gotten an apartment on our first trip.  We had used a similar service in Chicago (Apartment People) and after this experience I’m not sure that it’s not a better idea altogether for big cities.  The house we’re renting is way, way out in the suburbs.

I think we defeated Murphy by pursuing both options, a house and an apartment. First trip, we relied on getting the house, and it failed.  This time, I kept driving down both roads until one deal was completed.  Also drive as in literally, since I put 200 miles on the car.  And I am now eternally grateful my iPad has 3G–without the maps and GPS, I’d still be lost somewhere on I-285 in a perpetual loop around Atlanta!

And there’s one other thing.  Galen hasn’t seen the inside of the house we’re moving to.  The outside yes, the inside no. This will be… another adventure.

Heading towards darkness

Things are always darkest…just before they turn completely black.  And that is how urban fantasy series tend to go, at least based on recent reading.

I just finished the latest Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead Reckoning, from Charlaine Harris.  And, I also just read the story Aftermath (from the Dresden Files anthology Side Jobs by Jim Butcher) that takes place a couple of hours after Changes.  And neither story is exactly what anyone would call lighthearted.

Urban fantasy has a pretty shady premise to begin with.  The myths and legends, the darkness under the stairs, the things that go bump in the night, are real.  Magic works.  But it’s not just Glinda the Good Witch who is alive and well, it’s also the troll under the bridge.   And there are more trolls under more bridges than good witches–or good wizards.

Sookie, in her very first outing, Dead until Dark, was a fresh voice.  Her point of view was frequently laugh-out-loud funny, even when she was laughing at herself.  But Sookie’s world started out very small, because the book, and the series, is about Sookie’s journey.  When she meets Vampire Bill, she discovers the world beyond Bon Temps, LA, and more important, it discovers her.  Her ability to read minds is a prize, a talent that can be used, and as she explores the greater world, she learns that it is a very dark and dangerous place.  She finds love, loses it, and finds it again.  And looks to be losing it again.  She learns that there are more dangerous things out there than she every imagined, and that she is becoming one of them.

Harry Dresden has always been the only wizard listed in the Chicago phone directory.  In Storm Front, the first book of the series, Dresden operates mostly as a private investigator, barely making enough money to scrape by.  In fact, he never seems to do much better than scrape by.  But he becomes much more than just a paranormal private investigator.  As the series progresses, Harry becomes more and more involved in both wizard politics and mob shenanigans in Chicago, as well as having issues with the Summer and Winter courts of the Fae.  As his power grows, so do the numbers and strength of his enemies.  In Changes, the latest book in the series, every enemy of Harry’s comes to get him, and every part of Harry’s life alters, seemingly not for the better.  The short story Aftermath, the last piece at the end of the Dresden Files collection Side Jobs, is seen from Karrin Murphy’s grief stricken point of view as she attempts to pick up the pieces of Harry’s supernatural gate-keeping in the wake of his apparent death.

There are similarities between the two series.  Both are told from the first person point of view.  When you read, you are in either Sookie’s or Harry’s headspace, seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, knowing what they think, but not knowing what anyone else thinks.  They have to be likeable characters, or it’s not possible to stick with the series.  Sookie laughs at herself and her telepathic ability, Harry has a fine line in sarcasm.  It makes both their internal voices extremely funny, even if under some circumstances it’s gallows humor, sometimes literally.  Urban fantasy is a second-cousin to horror–there is a lot of death to deal with, and sometimes Sookie or especially Harry are its instrument.

They both regularly consort with vampires.  Two of Sookie’s lovers are vampires, as is Harry’s brother.  Vampire politics are always… complicated.  Something about living for hundreds of years seems to demand convolution in political relationships.  But long term series have to progress in some way, or get stale.  When it’s a cozy mystery in a small town, although it is nice to find out what all your favorite characters have been up to, one does start to wonder if the dead bodies are starting to outnumber the living!

In an urban fantasy, the hero or heroine is usually in the process of either discovering their power or discovering the true strangeness of the world around them.  As the world gets stranger, then what?  In Sookie’s case, things get more dangerous.  She gets deeper into the netherworld of vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, fae.  The more she learns, the darker the books get.  Dead Reckoning does not have a happy ending.  Or, to use a different metaphor, eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge caused the exit from Eden, not the entrance.

The more Harry develops his power, the more dangerous he becomes.  In order for him to be challenged, his enemies must also become more deadly.  This does not a happy ending make.  The upcoming book in the series is titled Ghost Story, and it looks a LOT like Harry is the titular ghost.

Yet another book to be read with the lights on.  I can hardly wait!

Will ebooks kill print books?

What a question!

This is the title of a very provocative essay by John Dvorak recently posted on PCmag.com.  His premise is that ebooks will serve as a sampling device for print books, and that publishers, in spite of their current “chickens crying that the sky is falling” behavior, will not just survive, but actually become more profitable in the long run.

Why?  Because as been noted in multiple sources already, including Amazon, ebook purchasers buy more ebooks.  It’s less expensive than a hardback for the consumer, and it’s way easier.  Then there’s that instant gratification factor.  People who want to read something NOW, get the ebook. 

But Dvorak’s contention is that collectors and book lovers will pick up a print version for the books they really, really want to own.  In other words, that people will use the ebook as a sampling service.  That some categories, like beach reading, may switch to mostly electronic, but types where a person will collect or want to refer back, book lovers will actually purchase a print copy of something they truly love after they have read it in electronic.

This is an extension of the library borrowing phenomenon, where library users sample an author by borrowing the book from the library, then if they like the book, start buying.  Bookstores locate themselves near libraries by this logic. One of my FPOWs had two major bookstores plunk themselves down within two blocks of its main library for this very reason.

Also, very few old technologies really get killed by new ones.  The old ones just morph and find a new niche.  CDs did not kill LPs, actually LPs are on the rise again.  Now 8-track is pretty dead, and cassette looks like it’s going the way of the dinosaur.  But radio found a niche of its own.  TV didn’t kill movies, although the economy may be another thing.  But that’s not one technology wiping out another, that’s something different entirely.  The Great Recession is wrecking havoc all over the place.

But speaking of old technologies that never die–I was directed to the Dvorak piece by a link from rec.arts.sf.written.  This is the linear descendant of a Usenet news group devoted to the discussion of written science fiction.  It is now a Google group, but it has been active since practically the dawn of Internet time.  And it’s still going strong.  And still acting on it’s original purpose, the discussion of written science fiction.  Yes, it digresses.  But no more than any other discussion by any other group of somewhat like-minded individuals. And the link to Dvorak’s essay isn’t much of a digression.  Whether written SF will be available in ebook only or print or both is pretty much on topic, and, the whole concept was presaged in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, which is very much SF.

But widespread email and RSS feeds and Facebook haven’t killed Usenet.  The new technologies did not wipe out all trace of the old.  The useful and relevant parts adapted and carried on.  In fact, the amount of Usenet traffic has steadily increased in the past 15 years.  Ebooks most likely won’t wipe out print books either.  As one of the rec.arts.sf folks pointed out, endpaper maps on a Kindle are sheer torture.  They are better on an iPad, but then, it’s easy to be better than absolutely putrid.  The technology for ebook readers and iPads will get better, but my big illustrated Lord of the Rings and complete annotated Sherlock Holmes canon are still better in print form.  And probably will be for quite a while.

A visit to Murphyspace

Yesterday, the latest Sookie Stackhouse book by Charlaine Harris was released.  I wanted to read it.  So, of course, I bought it from B&N and tried to download it to by iPad into my Nook app.  No go.  Then I realized that the other two books I had purchased on Monday weren’t there either.  Uh Oh!  I tried downloading them again, and they wanted to open in any available app except Nook.  I thought, “Okay, fine,” and downloaded them into the Overdrive app.  Since Overdrive released a native iPad app, it’s a perfectly good ebook reader.  I regularly use it for epub titles I purchase from places that don’t have an app of their own. (I use Bluefire for PDFs)

Meanwhile, everything looked like it downloaded to Overdrive, but the book wouldn’t open.  And did I mention that I had reached insomnia point by the time I figured out that the book wasn’t actually there?  Also, my iPad suddenly decided it had no network.  Our house has two wireless networks, and I have 3G on the iPad.  If my iPad drops off the net, it’s seriously unwell.  But at post-midnight, I wasn’t going to look into it too deeply, especially since every time I left the bedroom to investigate, the cats all started thinking that I might be willing to play with them, or at least provide lap space.  But really, I was just getting more and more annoyed, and less and less sleepy.

Brilliance is generally in short supply at that hour of the night.  I just wanted to start my book!  I resorted to my trusty Nook.  Yes, the real thing.  It still had a charge after more than a week unplugged, and it found the 3G network just fine.  I downloaded Dead Reckoning and settled in for a couple of chapters.

But my misbehaving iPad was still a problem this morning.  At least it found a network in the morning.  Maybe it needed a night’s sleep more than I did, but that didn’t solve any of the problems with the Nook app.  I guessed that the iPad needed a serious update, probably something to do with Apple getting hinky about apps wanting to sell things without the iStore getting a cut, or a move in that direction.  And so the fun began.  It refused to update.  Four times.  The update kept losing the network, somewhere in the middle of the hour-plus download.  I discovered that not only does the watched pot never boil, neither does the watched update. I shut everything down except the upload and moved to my laptop. Then I left the house!  It finally updated while I was out.

For anyone thinking that print books don’t do this, print books also don’t let you decide to purchase the book at midnight, and keep downloading to alternate devices until one of them finally decides to play ball.  Midnight cravings for particular treats can’t be satisfied until the next day.  Whether they should be, well, your mileage may vary.

Murphy wasn’t done with me yet.  Late this morning I called the property management company about the house we were hoping to rent in Atlanta.  The owner is suddenly not so sure about renting to four cats.  Last week, when we were there and could keep looking, it was okay.  This week, he’s not so sure.  Unless we get a “yes” by tomorrow, we’re going back to Atlanta this weekend to find a house.  Second verse, same as the first.

Murphy is laughing at us.

If Reference is dead, we need an ID on the body

The latest outcry in the library world is that Reference is dead.  Where’s the body?  What part of reference is dead?  And what should we do about it? 

Reference isn’t what it used to be.  Librarians are not the high priests and priestesses of information, and probably weren’t even when we thought we were.  The type of ready-reference questions that used to make up a significant part of a public library’s reference diet have gone to Google.  Ready-reference is dead.  And that is not news.  Joseph Janes has been talking about this for five years at least, based on these notes from his Internet Librarian keynote in 2007.  I’m pretty sure I heard him say this sometime before 2007, but this is the earliest date I can prove.

OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries 2010 report shows that users don’t start their information searches on library websites.  Is anyone actually surprised?  On the other hand, what does surprise me is the number of times that this data point is used to support the argument that reference is dead.  What does one have to do with the other?  Reference has never been about the question, it’s always been about the service.

The OCLC report goes on to say that people who have positive view of libraries support libraries, and that people are increasing their use of libraries, in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that people are increasing their use of technology across all age groups.  Everybody does everything online at every age, and everyone seems to want to continue to do it at the library.  And although reference may be dead, everyone wants more service.

So what is service if it isn’t reference, and who should provide it?

Service is whatever the person who comes into the library, whether that is online or physically, defines it to be.  If they walk out happy, we’re golden.  If they don’t, we’re idiots.  Some of the pundits seem to have lost sight of this.  I agree that directional questions are not reference, but someone needs to assist people with them, otherwise we don’t just seem, we are, cold and unhelpful places.  But the fortress-type reference desks of the past are not what users expect to see in the here-and-now, and staff who go out among the PCs, the wireless user area, and the stacks to seek out people who need help are a better way to provide service for most people.  At the same time, it’s not the only way.  Just like some people won’t ask directions when they are lost, some people won’t admit they need help when someone approaches them, they will wait until they are totally befuddled, then seek a place where help is available.  Human nature is contrary.

A lot of what used to be reference questions have turned into questions about how to use technology.  There are a lot of places outside the big cities, suburbs and university towns where the library is the geekiest spot in town, even if high speed bandwidth is only DSL speed.  And that’s not because the librarians are resistant to change, it’s because the library is located somewhere in that infamous “last mile” for broadband service, and DSL is all there is, and that’s if the library is lucky. 

Is reference dead, or dying?  Or is it just changing?

The cry that “reference is dead” sounds a lot like an echo from McMastergate a couple of weeks ago.  Librarians are expensive staff, and most libraries are facing budget cuts.  If reference is dead, then just cutting reference librarians is a quick and easy way to reduce the budget.  If reference has changed, and job descriptions and qualifications and staffing levels need to be seriously re-examined, that takes time, effort, and unfortunately, committees.  It’s certainly not a quick and easy fix.  But it provides better service if it’s done right.

And right is just not the same thing everywhere.  One size doesn’t fit all.  Saying “reference is dead” makes a good sound bite, but depends a lot upon definitions.  The late Tip O’Neill is famous for saying, “All politics is local”.  So is all library service.  It’s provided by your funding agency to your community, whether that be your taxpayers to your city and county, or your student tuition and grant monies to your students and faculty.  If the service is the right service, whether you call it reference or information services or just plain, “get help here”, users will keep coming in.  If you don’t provide the right service, you will become irrelevant.  There are some libraries, as Karen Schneider has posted, that are increasing relevance by providing, among other services, more research (in other words, reference) services. 

And, for a reminder of just how varied local service can and should be, the profiles of just the nominees for the Best Small Library in America should remind all of us of the sheer number of things that libraries and librarians do.  It’s not all about big libraries in big cities, or even medium sized libraries in medium sized towns.

Two of the three biggest lies are:  1)The check’s in the mail; and 2) One size fits all. 

Library budgets are hurting right now.  The checks that we have in the mail are smaller than they used to be.  Using the one size fits all sound bite of “reference is dead” to cut reference librarians, instead of going through the more extensive exercise of transforming information services into what our communities need now will make us less relevant, not more relevant.

Mileposts in memories

Last night I read in Facebook that Osama bin Laden was dead.  My immediate reaction was that the news was too good to be true, but when I saw the confirmation from NPR, I realized that it must be true.

After belief came memory.  My perspective of 9/11 is not just of a day, but of a week.  I was one of many, many people trapped away from home that day.  Anything to do with the event brings the name and face of the colleague I was traveling with instantly to mind, and probably will for the rest of my life.

I was in Wilmington, Delaware, and we were just starting a kickoff meeting/training class for a FPOW, and we were the trainers.  The people in the class had come in to the training center from various parts of one company, and one person was still in the air, flying in from Montreal.  We were from Chicago.  My co-worker had boarded the plane at the literal last minute–I thought he would miss the flight.

Someone came in a little late, saying something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York City.  And then people went online to check, and saw the second plane hit not long after.

Wilmington is only 128 miles from the WTC.  We could make outgoing calls but not get calls in for a while.  The person from Montreal landed and arrived, but security had already started to lock down.  She couldn’t tell what was going on, but even while she was flying in, she knew something was seriously, seriously wrong.  And started worrying about how to get home.

And someone in the class misremembered something.  He thought his brother-in-law had an office in the World Trade Center.  He spent most of the day afraid that his sister was a widow.  At about 2 pm, he reached his family in New York.  You could see the weight lift from his shoulders.  His brother-in-law had moved his office a couple of months previously, and he had totally forgotten.

We taught the class, because that’s what the group decided to do.  Everything had been arranged for the two days, and they collectively didn’t know when it would be possible to get the group together again.  It gave us all something else to focus on, although everyone kept checking the news online to see what was going on.

At lunch we all made a flurry of phone calls.  I called my mother in Cincinnati, who knew I was out of town, but didn’t know where.  I called Galen, since he was home in Chicago at that point.  I was originally supposed to fly on to another city that night, and leave my co-worker with the rental car in Wilmington, but flights were already cancelled.  My next destination was close enough that I could have taken the car, but I decided to stay put.  And my next destination turned out to be closed for a couple of days.

That night I think I called everyone I knew who might remotely care.   I have a childhood friend who lives in New Jersey, within commuting distance of New York City.  Reaching her was extremely difficult, and all the more nerve-wracking because she lived so close.  It was barely possibly that she was in the city that day, and not knowing drove me mad.  Everyone tried to reconnect with people they hadn’t heard from in years.  I even called one of my exes to let him know I was all right. We had a good talk and mended some fences that needed mending.  I think a lot of people may have done some of that.

I also started trying to get home.  The uncertainty was unnerving.  Everyone was lost and scared, and we were all trying to hide it from one another.  The airlines didn’t know anything either, but they tried their best.  Between my co-worker and I, one night I’d have flight arrangements and he wouldn’t, and the next night, he would and I wouldn’t.  That went on all week.  The person from Montreal wasn’t sure how she would get home, since she hadn’t brought a passport.  When she flew down, she didn’t need one.  The world changed during her flight.

Looking back, it was less than a week of uncertainty.  But at the time, it seemed like eternity.  The world had been split open.  I was away from home, and didn’t know when I would be able to get back.  By Friday, we gave up, told the rental car agency they’d be getting their car back at O’Hare airport instead of Philadelphia, and started the 15 hour drive back.  My colleague had to stop for a smoke about as often as I needed a “human break”, so we made good time until we hit Chicago construction traffic.  For us, it was over.

But it’s not really over, is it?  Bin Laden’s death doesn’t undo the changes that 9/11 brought.  We can’t unknow what we know.  9/11 was a milepost in memory, a day when everyone remembers where they were, a day the universe changed.  9/11 is like the day President Kennedy was assassinated, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, the Challenger disaster, Pearl Harbor.