Reading Update: For The Record

When I was a kid, we had a Fisher Price record player. It was tan and beige and played 45’s, the record format of choice for singles back in the day. In my time, it was the choice medium for storybooks. The idea was that you read along while the record played. There would even be cue sounds to remind you when to turn the page. This usually wasn’t a problem except for the one we had for Star Wars. When it was time to turn the page, R2-D2 would chirp his iconic beeps and boops. Trouble is, they didn’t keep the R2 effects to just the page turns, which got very confusing. We had quite a few of these books, but I don’t remember all of them. The ones that stand out in my mind the most after all these years are Star Wars (both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), The Hobbit, and The Black Hole, which was probably my favorite out of all of them. It’s the one I remember reading the most.

After finishing my audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I decided to do something a little different for my next read, which was We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Apple Books has a collection of literary classics available at no cost, including audiobook versions for some of them. Two noteworthy examples of this are The Time Machine read by Kelsey Grammer and A Christmas Carol read by LeVar Burton. As it happens, Zamyatin’s We offers both a text and an audiobook version. So, using my iPhone for the audiobook (since I’ve got it paired with a nice Bluetooth speaker) and my iPad for the text version, I “read along” to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

The purpose of the experiment was twofold apart from simple curiosity. The cognition behind reading along is rather fascinating to me. When we read books in school, I’m sure we all remember having one person read aloud while the rest of us read along until it was our turn to take over narration duties. Incidentally, history class was when I learned about a rather interesting job from the olden times of the Industrial Revolution. Cigar factories still employed human workers while everyone else was looking to mechanical automation. As such, even a large room full of people rolling cigars doesn’t produce nearly the same level of noise as a typical factory of the time. In order to break up the monotony and do something about the deafening silence, the workers would take turns reading aloud from a book while everyone worked. I just find the science behind reading aloud (and especially reading along) to be an intriguing exploration of our own cognition, how we process this information and retain it. After all, so far as we know, humans are the only animals that have writing at all, so the fact that there are dedicated regions of the brain for these funny symbols we assign either abstract or concrete meanings to is, no pun intended, mind blowing. Amazon offers a feature called “Read & Listen” or “immersion reading” available for Kindle and Audible that not only allows you to play both the audiobook and let you read at the same time, but even has an active cursor to highlight the words as you go along. However, it’s not available for all titles and the highlighting cursor doesn’t always cooperate. Apple Books has nothing like this, but I think that’s okay; the only problem to it was I had to be mindful of stopping the audiobook before closing out of the book on my iPad to help keep my place if I didn’t stop at the end of a chapter. It also inflated the running timer since, as far as the app was concerned, I was reading two books at once. Needless to say, I absolutely smashed my daily reading goal while breezing through We.

My other reason for reading along was to see if, by some objective measure, my reading speed had genuinely improved from when I was in school. As I said in an earlier entry, I never got the hang of speed reading, and the context of reading to study for class (and therefore a grade) didn’t exactly nurture the skill as far as I was concerned. It kind of broke me and that led to me being one of those book-a-year-at-best people, even though I still had a tenacious glimmer of that childhood giddiness about books that kept me coming back to the bookstores every now and again. Sure enough, and to my relief, there were more than a few instances when I got a little bit impatient with the audiobook. It was to the point I considered abandoning the read-along in favor of a kind of flip-flopping: audiobook in the car, text version at home, or some similar arrangement. I stuck with the original plan and simply learned to let the narrator do what narrators do best, and that’s sell you on the drama and believe in these characters. So, I consider the experiment a roaring success. I have found a small and practical spectrum of speeds between my default settings of Audiobook and Violent, Panicked Skimming.

As for We, it was all right. It was written in 1924 and really set the stage for the Dystopian Future genre, with all the typical tropes on tour. Everyone is identified by numbers, all are dressed in the same gray uniforms (leaving our protagonist, D-503, to take note of people’s facial features as abstract shapes to help him remember them), information is strictly controlled by an enigmatic governing body, and all surfaces are glass, the sole exception being for curtains that can be drawn when permission for “Makin’ Whoopee” is granted. The book is presented as a journal, though each entry is labeled as a “record” rather than a specific date, which is more typical of the Epistolary genre. At times, it reminded me a lot of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, in which the narrator blurs the line between reality and the imagination, leaving us to wonder what’s literal and what’s a complex metaphor about processing new information as their respective arcs develop. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, by contrast, is much more direct, even pithy in places, and cranks up the totalitarianism of We to 11, to the point that the very pronoun of “I” is completely unknown to the populace (instead using the collective “We”). Of course, Anthem is notably shorter than We; it almost reads more like an outline for a much longer work. I may have polished off Anthem in a single, casual weekend.

After We’s experiment concluded to victorious fanfare, the next in my queue was Memoirs Found In a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. The last book by Lem I’d read was Eden, and there’s a common thread between the two of them I find rather funny. For starters, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub is set in the distant future, in which a spacefaring, solar system conquering humanity has suffered a terrible setback in their study of history thanks to a tenacious blight that has destroyed all paper. Lem wrote the book in 1961. At this time, Xerox was experimenting with the technology that would come to be known about 30-plus years later as E-Ink, and would ultimately be popularized by Amazon’s Kindle tablets a decade later. As I write this, word from many publishers is that mass market paperbacks are being phased out as digital sales of books go up (hardcovers, meanwhile, seem to be doing as well as ever). Obviously, prescience is at a premium even among the most studious of sci-fi writers, so I’m not knocking Lem for thinking that humanity would still be relying on paper that far into the future. In Eden, written in 1958 and set at an equally distant future date, the ship that crashes on the titular planet has a very well-stocked library, so well-stocked that the books get repurposed into a makeshift staircase due to the ship settling at an odd angle. If you know anything about space travel, weight carries a hefty cost, so a well-stocked library might come across as a little bit silly given how utilitarian the rest of the ship is. Finally, there’s the irony of me reading both of these books on a digital tablet more 50 years since Lem committed these works to paper from his trusty typewriter.

Lem died of heart failure in 2006, and I can’t find anything as to his opinion on the invention of E-Ink or the budding market of ebooks. Incidentally, Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 and had a very complex opinion of ebooks. In the posthumously published Salmon of Doubt, he had this to say:

“We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.”

Although Adams never made any mention of Lem as an influence on his work, the two have very similar sensibilities when it comes to the tone of their work. Lem is generally more serious than Adams, but one persistent theme of Lem’s work is the inability of the human mind to fully comprehend both the universe at large and the otherworldly denizens that may inhabit it along with us, something Adams also delved into in his work. Eden focused on our shipwrecked crew and their attempts to make contact with the planet’s odd inhabitants who largely ignore their new neighbors. As it turns out, they’ve got problems of their own. As for Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, Lem goes pure Kafkaesque comedy. Although set in the future (and flashing back to a less distant future via the titular memoirs), the sci-fi elements are at most a framing device and at least a few throwaway lines that blend into the rest of the existential metaphors that make up most of the dialogue. Set in a multilevel bunker in the Colorado mountains (referred to only as The Building and described by future scholars as a kind of back-up Pentagon), the government finds itself mired in paperwork as it tries to sort out its own shady operations of surveillance, code-breaking, and maintaining an illusion of order. Our narrator is an operative charged with a mission of such vital importance and such terrible secrecy that nobody can actually tell him what he’s supposed to be doing. The bulk of the prose has him going from level to level and room to room encountering other operatives who may or may not know more than they are letting on. Discussions with these oddballs range from the nature of decoding information to making triples and quadruples of un/known double agents to just how routine firefights and shootouts are in an effort to maintain the status quo of the facility. I kept picturing The Building as a kind of Cold War Retrofuturism blending of the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and the Wildfire facility from The Andromeda Strain, with deep red carpets, harsh overhead lights, white curving walls, and furniture placed in the middle of each room with lots of empty space around it.

In the end, I found the book overall rather average. It feels slapdash, like Lem didn’t quite know what to do with the memoirs in question and so tacked on this lengthy introduction about the paper plague. Frankly, I think one could just treat the introduction as a standalone short story and forgo the rest of the book and really lose nothing of value. That’s not to say the memoirs are bad, but once you get a feel for the joke of bureaucracy gone awry, it wears out its welcome and the only thing that kept me going was for some potential payoff that tied the introduction to the narrative proper. At the risk of spoilers, no such thing occurs. The memoirs end very abruptly and we’re left wondering if that’s all there is to it and just what it was that we read.

It’s hard to give the book a recommendation beyond my prescribed reading of the introduction and giving the rest a pass. If you’ve never read Lem and have any desire to, the best place to start is Solaris. The next book of his in my queue is A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of book reviews for books that don’t actually exist. It should be fun and I plan on doing a full write-up of its offerings (I've got plenty to say about the premise alone), though that won’t be for some time. Meanwhile, having just finished Memoirs earlier this morning, I am now halfway through C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. My impression thus far is one of not being terribly impressed. It’s another work of Epistolary literature, the letters being from a demon to his nephew as the latter tries to tempt a human patient away from the light. It feels more like the sort of thing Mark Twain would have written and spice up with his signature wit. Lewis, I think, takes himself a little too seriously and isn’t having that much fun with the subject matter. Once I’ve finished with it, I’m not entirely sure what’s next in my queue. Maybe I’ll randomize it, or at least take a break from fiction with some nonfiction I’ve got piled up, like a book about how Xerox effectively invented the personal computer as we know it, only to sit on it until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates saw the potential and pilfered what they could from their sanctioned tour.

Quite the history for a company known mostly for photocopiers.