you know what's annoying?

When you finish the riveting third book of a trilogy on the subway ride in to work, and have nothing left to read for lunchtime or the ride home.

Anyone?

what it's like around here

BT JPX RMLX PCUV AMLX ICVJP IBTWXVR CI M LMT'R PMTN, MTN YVCJX CDXV MWMBTRJ JPX AMTNGXRJBAH UQCT JPX QGMRJXV CI JPX YMGG CI JPX HBTW'R QMGMAX; MTN JPX HBTW RMY JPX QMVJ CI JPX PMTN JPMJ YVCJX.

I used to tell myself I wasn't a nerd, I was just a geek. Geeks are infinitely less hopeless. As it turns out, when you spend 45 minutes on the couch deciphering the relatively simple but laborious monoalphabetic substitution cipher in the sentence above, you're actually a massive nerd.

Click on if you want to see our deciphering process, which was fairly methodic. Again, because we're nerds. Or, if you're like us, go ahead and unravel it without cheating.

And yes, we've been reading Cryptonomicon, WHY?

[Methodology N.B.: We reprinted the cipher-in-progress each time with the assumptions informing it above each layer of deciphering. We used lower case for the "plain" letters and left the cipher in upper case. Basically, given the frequency of JPX, we decided it might be "the" and started from there. We were proved happily correct.]

assuming JPX is the
J=t
P=h
X=e

BT the RMLe PCUV AMLe ICVth IBTWeVR CI M LMT'R hMTN, MTN YVCte CDeV MWMBTRt the AMTNGeRtBAH UQCT the QGMRKeV CI the YMGG CI the HBTW'R QMGMAe; MTN the HBTW RMY the QMtV CI the PMTN thMt YVCte.

MTN is and
M=a
T=n
N=d
B=i

in the RaLe PCUV AaLe ICVth IinWeVR CI a Lan'R hand, and YVCte CDeV aWaBnRt the AandGeRtiAH UQCn the QGaRKeV CI the YaGG CI the HinW'R QaGaAe; and the HinW RaY the QatV CI the hand that YVCte

R = s
L = m

in the same hCUV Aame ICVth IinWeVs CI a man's hand, and YVCte CDeV aWainst the AandGestiAH UQCn the QGasKeV CI the YaGG CI the HinW's QaGaAe; and the HinW saY the QatV CI the hand that YVCte

W = g

in the same hCUV Aame ICVth IingeVs CI a man's hand, and YVCte CDeV against the AandGestiAH UQCn the QGasKeV CI the YaGG CI the Hing's QaGaAe; and the Hing saY the QaVt CI the hand that YVCte

V = r

in the same hour Aame forth Iingers of a man's hand, and Yrote oDer against the AandGestiAH uQon the QGasKer of the YaGG of the Hing's QaGaAe; and the Hing saY the Qart of the hand that Yrote

C = o
U = u
I = f
G = l
A = c
Y = w
D = v
Q = p
H = k

in the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

[We think this is perhaps something from Arabian Nights? Turns out it's from Daniel, in the bible. This is only the first full sentence of a full-page cipher, so we picked out words to help us decode the last five or so infrequent letters. The remaining decipherings are:

E = y
F = b
K = q
O = z
S = j
Z = x

volume G for geek

I don't know what it says about our marriage that Stuart and I found four bundles on our street of Encyclopedia Brittanica - 32 hardbound volumes - from 1990 and it only took us about three minutes to decide to bring all of them home with us like so many lost but knowledgeable puppies.

I guess it's just a good thing we found each other. Whether that's Stuart and I, or Stuart and I and the books, I don't quite know.

harry potter and the tasty koolaid

I spent a good portion of 1999 making fun of my then-boyfriend Alex for lining up two days running to see Episode 1. I mean, I think he missed some finals. And I think he missed work. He also dragged me to see it when I arrived back in Texas from Cairo, still jet-lagged.

The rock-solid line of reasoning ran that I couldn't fathom, justify, or even condone sleeping on the pavement to see a movie that will be in the theatre, EVERY THEATRE, for six months running. I think my argument is still valid, although strictly speaking, I'm not sure I've got any ground to stand on anymore.

My moral high ground has been lost to erosion, since this morning at 9AM, I lined up for 20 minutes outside the Park Slope Barnes & Noble to get a wristband (!), guaranteeing me two copies of Harry Potter 7 tonight at midnight. I was even given a letter, D if you're wondering, to designate where in the store I will stand to receive holy communion bounty from on high a book that will be in all bookstores until the very end of time and for two hours after the end of time.

I know! Poor Alex! Where's that high horse now? But I stand my ground. I've just adjusted that ground slightly so that it precludes actually sleeping on pavement to get your obsessive cult object. That's just going too far.

different worlds

For the past week I've been applying for jobs with ever-decreasing enthusiasm, enjoying the air-conditioning, and my friends, and life in the tank-top and flip-flop lane. I keep reminding myself not to panic about finding a job, because every time I spend useless amounts of time panicking, something comes along and I could have spent all that panic time doing something more useful.

Like obsessing over geekery!

Currently I am obsessed with two things: Doctor Who and Harry Potter. Doctor Who fans, you should get behind me when I say I cried for 20 minutes at the finale of Season 2 for reasons I shan't spoil here. SERIOUSLY THOUGH WTF. When we went to Jeb and Neela's to watch the start of Season 3 on their enormous shiny television, I spent most of the first two episodes curled in the corner looking exceedingly grumpy at the whole experience. I even begrudged David Tennant how adorable he is and he IS adorable. I am clearly not over the end of Season 2 yet.

Also Harry Potter! I don't think there is oxygen enough in the universe for how much geeking out I'm willing to do over Book 7 so I will just point you to one of my favorite people in the universe: Raychul. Her last few posts in the past two weeks - hey, studying for the Bar is nothing compared to Horcruxes - have been full of ideas and theories I hadn't even stumbled across in the hours of brain-churning I've done.

All this geekishness really drives home the amount my tastes have broadened and changed in the past five years. I always loved Harry Potter from the beginning, but Battlestar Galactica? Doctor Who? Firefly? YA Fantasy and cold war spy thrillers and futuristic sci-fi? I'm even reading Buffy Season 8 in Dark Horse comics! Have you heard my opinion on reading comics? I just can't do it. I can't divide my attentions between pictures and words. But where Whedon leads, I follow. And space! Have you heard what I think of space? Space is bullshit! And yet here I am obsessing over Kobol and Starbuck and DAMN, how many times can Sharon die?

My whole reading and consuming life - books, primarily, but movies and TV as well - has changed and expanded. I think it's for the better, although you should see how far back my dad's eyes manage to roll (which, buddy, you read Sydney Sheldon. Gimme a break!) when I start geeking out like this. Partly, it's the influence of my friends, who are all delightful geeks, but I like to think I've become more open-minded about what makes a good story, and what makes a great idea.

Which is really the black-teeshirt-wearing heart of my point here. There are all these things that make great, soaring, beautiful stories, and they're not really in The New Yorker or on NPR. They're not in the traditional places I used to look to inspiration, places that are starting to seem positively RGB compared to the million points of color and madness you find when you give reality the slip.

It's refreshing and enlightening and absorbing to look into uber-realities and sub-realities and alternate realities and still see humanity and struggle and beauty. Which is still my requirement - I need to see people. Or even alterna-people. But they need to have lives and struggles and souls and needs. And they do! Even when it takes place on the seventeenth moon of Gool or has tentacles in its forearms.

So I guess from several miles into the border of this strange and hypercolored land, I'm looking back and yelling down the tracks to any of you that are still stuck in the (admittedly wonderful world of) Penguin Modern Classics: you should set aside some of those easy-to-carry preconceptions and go exploring. It's wild out here on the frontier.

because there has been caffeine in my recent waking hours

I found this on Shana's site and while I'm not normally a fan of memes, this is a bookish one, and I'm a fan of bookish things. See also, title of post. Diet! Coke! 6PM! Bad!

As Shana said, there are some glaring omissions on this list but it's an interesting exercise so if you lift it from here, leave me a link. I'd love to see yours.

Read on, bookworms.

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole (I've got books I've READ that I wish I had used a 10 foot pole to avoid, thus they are both BOLD and STRICKEN, -KC), put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. +The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. +Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. +To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. +A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. +Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. +A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. +Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. +Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. +Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. +Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. +Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. +The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. +Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. +The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. +1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. +The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. +The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. +The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. +Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. +Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. +The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. +Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt) - read half, got bored
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. +The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. +A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. +Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. +The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. +Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. +The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. +One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. +Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) - still. can't. finish.
69. +Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. +The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. +Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. +Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. +The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. +A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. +The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. +Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. +Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. +Emma (Jane Austen)
86. +Watership Down(Richard Adams) ("I read half. i hated it." - why shana and I are friends)
87. +Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. +Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. *A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

six*

I updated my book list on Wednesday only to discover that I'd read something like six books in the past week. I hold Scott Westerfeld and his wife, Justine Larbalestier, responsible for this, since I just got my hungry eyes on their latest books and read all four of them in a day or less each.

So although I don't usually review books here, let me just run these past you.

Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld: Okay, it's a book about vampirism as a parasite, set in New York City. Really? It doesn't get more awesome. I'm a huge fan of Westerfeld's from his Uglies trilogy and the cracklingly-great standalone, So Yesterday, and Peeps in no way disappoints.

Last Days, the sequel to Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld: I hate to admit, I didn't love it QUITE as much as the first, but it's an awesomely original take on the apocalypse as seen from the eyes of five teenagers starting a band on the brink of, well, the apocalypse. As with all his books, Westerfeld plays with slang and viral language and is remarkably good at it, especially in a book already about the cool kids in the band.

Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons, by Justine Larbalestier: Another fantasy trilogy (the end books comes out this year) that's stunned me with its rich backstory and original details. Reason Cansino steps out from a back door in Sydney onto a cold street in New York, magical chaos ensues. Justine is every bit as talented as Scott but in a totally different way. She's more emotional, less snappy, but equally powerful. My only complaint was that her fight scenes weren't quite as crystal clear as they could have been but it's a criticism made with the full understanding of how damned HARD it is to write fight scenes (and that Scott does it almost too well).

Russian Debutante's Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart: Only though endless gothamist listings posts have I figured out how to spell his name (seriously, he does readings EVERYWHERE), but I only got around to this debut novel now. It's good - and has improved by my favorable comparison to elements of The Corrections which I was never crazy about - and for a theoretically simple story of American assimilation, it goes some fun places, structurally. Like a city named Prava which is, in all other respects, Prague. Why the faking of Prague, Gary? I don't know. But I enjoyed it - and like my friend Lavina pointed out, BEST AUTHOR PHOTO EVER. You will just have to go see for yourself.

The Promised Land, by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice: Now, I absolutely ADORE Connie Willis. In fact, thanks to the joint efforts of Biscuit and Shana, Connie Willis is the reason I'm finally venturing into reading science fiction. This book was, well, it's a sci-fi frontier romance. I mean, within those narrow confines, it was great, and I admit that I finished it in a day. And, actually, it's got fire monkeys in it. Monkeys! That set stuff on FIRE! Really, you can't go wrong with fire monkeys. But I didn't love it nearly as much as Willis' solo ventures, namely The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog (best title ever, btw). But I enjoyed it. Plus also, FIRE MONKEYS! Srsly.

Wow! That was fun. So there you have it. Six books I've read recently, and some very off-the-cuff reviews of them. Go forth and read, people of the internet.

* this post about the orgy of reading is dedicated to my awesome father on his birthday, who's read more books than god, and changed my life by introducing me to the awesome John Le Carre. Hippo Birdie, dad.

gkhrd

For over a year now, I've been droolingly coveting Delicious Library, a Mac-based piece of software that acts as a beautifully designed digital library - cataloging all of your books (and movies and games and music) with the touch of a bluetooth scanner, USB scanner, or manually entered ISBN number. It even syncs with Amazon to let you search for books with the merest hint of the title, and add the right one to your digital bookshelf. You can check out books to borrowers by just dragging a book onto their name and setting the return-by date, and they'll get a handy little email reminding them not to set your book on fire instead.

You can also, once you're done inputting your entire library, search the whole collection by all kinds of factors - all novels that are listed in a certain genre, for instance, or which reference Samoa.

I'm not sure you can tell how much I'm hyperventilating with excitement through the screen. Because I just bought it. Stuart's been mock-resisting it for a year, telling me I don't need to be any more organize-crazed than I already am, but he's wrong. And what's more, he can't do anything about it.

See, Stuart's going to Berlin for four days without me after Thanksgiving, so I figured I deserved the kind of gift that'd keep me happily buried in my apartment organizing things for that weekend. Once he gets back and all of our books are digitally archived and cross-referencable, boy, HE'LL be sorry he went to Berlin without me. In more ways than one.

As you can see from the timestamp on this post, I've been playing with it for well over two hours. I've already input all the books that are lying around on my office desk, languishing for want of a third bookshelf for the living room (shuttup YES we need it). I ordered an inexpensive USB scanner but I'm not even sure I'll need it, since the Amazon-link makes it so easy to just search for the title without getting up from your laptop.

And you know, when I happily typed in my financial details to purchase the license, I actually asked myself why everyone in the whole world doesn't have this. Perhaps my myopic tunnel vision doesn't allow for the whiff of a possibility that everyone in the world isn't as in love with cross-referencing as I am. Or libraries. Or puppies. I mean, come on.

Oh, and while I'm at it? I'll be alphabetizing our shelves. Why not, right?