"Maps"

*

So I finished The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet today. Much like the freight train that T.S. rides out of Montana, the pace at the beginning was languid and by the end it was so fast I thought I must be skipping pages the tale was streaking so fast. By the end, the story had become that of a 12 year old boy in so deep over his head he doesn't really know which way is up. What had been a story about a young man with a gift for illustrating and mapping everything he came into contact with had added a brief flirting with science fiction, and with a century old club of scientists who like to keep their eyes on everything. Also there are big breaks in the middle where we learn about his great grandmother. All this crammed into a book that starts as a boy traveling to D.C. from Montana. I liked the book as fiction, but as a book it is even better.

This is what annotated reading should be like. This is how reading on the Internet should/will be. Like 80% of the pages have small illustrations and notes. There are simple to follow arrows leading out from the body of text when the illustration should be noticed. You can read them right then, wait until the end of the paragraph, the end of the page, or ignore them if the topic doesn't appeal to you. I want more books like this. Reif Larsen is a first time author living in Brooklyn. So look him up and tell him to write me something else when you have the time. Or you could just read his book instead, you know, if you're not into accosting people.


I was not in any of the crowd shots for the The Yeah Yeah Yeah's video above, but...at @ 5:04 in this video
* "...I see you was holdin' me down A homeboy you know all the lyrics I appreciate you, you with the W..." He was talking to Kevin. I was standing next to Kevin hitting him yelling "you, he's talking to you" just in case he wasn't aware that J was talking to him.