Last Book Read in 2010

A book found semi-randomly one day when I was wandering through the library's card catalog, Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection turned out to be exactly the sort of book I like. From the book's description as found inside the cover:

In this tightly plotted yet mind- expanding debut novel, an unlikely detective, armed only with an umbrella and a singular handbook, must untangle a string of crimes committed in and through people’s dreams

In an unnamed city always slick with rain, Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at a huge, imperious detective agency. All he knows about solving mysteries comes from the reports he’s filed for the illustrious detective Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing and his supervisor turns up murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective, a rank for which he lacks both the skills and the stomach. His only guidance comes from his new assistant, who would be perfect if she weren’t so sleepy, and from the pithy yet profound Manual of Detection (think The Art of War as told to Damon Runyon).

Unwin mounts his search for Sivart, but is soon framed for murder, pursued by goons and gunmen, and confounded by the infamous femme fatale Cleo Greenwood. Meanwhile, strange and troubling questions proliferate: why does the mummy at the Municipal Museum have modern- day dental work? Where have all the city’s alarm clocks gone? Why is Unwin’s copy of the manual missing Chapter 18?

When he discovers that Sivart’s greatest cases— including the Three Deaths of Colonel Baker and the Man Who Stole November 12th—were solved incorrectly, Unwin must enter the dreams of a murdered man and face a criminal mastermind bent on total control of a slumbering city.

A fine book with which to end the year.

Resolution-type things

Resolution #1: In 2011, I intend to read at least one book in each of the ten main classes of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. When I first came up with this resolution in November, I was undecided about whether I'd include Biography as part of the 900s (it's number 920) or as a separate category (the local library system shelves it seprately). For purposes of this resolution I've decided to consider biography as a distinct category, so that means I should be reading at least 11 nonfic books this year. Barring some catastrophe that keeps me from reading, this should be an easy resolution to keep.

When I was a kid living in the Washington, DC suburbs, we'd have field trips to some museum or other a few times every school year, and I'd be standing around wondering why we were supposed to be so excited about these exhibits when we would be able to get a better look at the paintings/fossils/spaceships/whatever by looking at a good photograph instead. Then when I was twelve, I finally got my first pair of glasses. Naturally, that's about the time when schools stopped sending us on so many interesting field trips. Resolution #2: Take advantage of the fact that I live near The Land of the Free Museums and go to museums at least four times in 2011. I'd make this a goal of once a month--the Smithsonian Institution alone has many parts--but it's probably good to allow myself to avoid going downtown in particularly hot or busy or otherwise inconvenient months.

Resolution #3: Play with computer graphics more than I did in 2010. Since I did almost nothing interesting in 2010, this should be another easy resolution to keep.

Last Memorable Dream of 2010

In the dream the night before last, I was looking out a car window up at a starry sky in the middle of nowhere, no lights around anywhere I could see. I was alone in the car, talking on the cell phone to my aunt who, after I complained that Mom wasn't there yet, was commiserating with me about my mother's irresponsibility. Suddenly I remembered: Mom died way back in the 1980s. What am I doing here?

Then my mind flashed back to a time in my personal timeline when I'd been a 41-year-old disabled woman who was suddenly sent back to her life nearly 30 years earlier. With all my memories intact, I'd somehow ended up in my life before my mother got cancer, right around the start of puberty, and wondering how the heck I'd gotten there. As soon as I realized where and when I was, I started making lists of people I'd known in my 30s and 40s who I thought I might want to reconnect with eventually. I wrote down approximate dates of birth, what I knew of where they were in the 1990s or later. If I could somehow avoid being disabled--maybe getting treatment for epilepsy earlier would help--then life would be different enough that eventually meeting the people I wanted to re-meet might take some work, but I had years to plan for it all. After all, the Internet wouldn't have widespread popularity for more than a decade, and some of my friends weren't even born yet. There was time.

So in the new timeline, my mother survived. I was closer to her than to Dad, which seemed strange to me given my memories of my original life, though it was understandable too, since in the timeline where he was never a single parent, he saw no particular need to retire early and spend more time with me.

(Today, thinking about the dream again, I imagine myself asking Mom a million questions I've thought of in the years since she died. I imagine her saying to 13-year-old me, "I'll tell you when you're older," and me with my extra decades of memories thinking to myself, "But I am older.")

As much as I loved my linguistics professors, I felt no need to sit through Chomskyan linguistics lectures again, so I thought about what I should focus on in high school, which questions I should ask that I'd never asked before, and what I might want to major in in college. I seem to recall leaning towards visual arts, thinking of fractals and looking forward to faster personal computers to play with. Frustratingly, it took me longer to decide on a college major than it had the last time I was in school.

(Again thinking about things that never came up in the dream: how many things have to change in the world before popular culture is affected? Would my friends and acquaintances be wondering why I sang all the wrong words to all my favorite songs?)

At a university--not the one I attended in this original timeline--I was walking down a path when I saw a younger version of a man I met in my original 2009. Seeing him was the first thing in my new life that confirmed for me that I hadn't entirely imagined my old life. I tried to think of some excuse to say something to him, but had pretty much decided to let him continue his conversation with the pretty blonde woman walking next to him when he turned in my direction and looked at me with recognition.

"You!" he said. "I remember you. We met in the future! I know that sounds--"

"Which future? Did we meet at the farmers' market?"

"Farmers' market? No, we met--"

--and that, of course, is when my alarm woke me up from the dream, so now I'll never know which alternate reality he came from, and how many years he'd spent in our newest timeline, and whether he knew any more than I did about why we were in this new world at all. And I still don't know why I was waiting for my mother in a car in the middle of nowhere.