I can’t really fault you on that. Eco isn’t always a particularly easy read, and when he’s parodying a style of writing and then it’s translated into English, it can be problematic. Some of his books I wouldn’t recommend to anybody (The Island of the Day Before for instance). The in-jokes in Pendulum I imagine could get tedious if you aren’t into publishing, and the way Italians phrase things is probably odd to American ears - as is Russian, where even at my low level it’s often quite obvious where a literal translation has led to misrepresentation.
If you don’t like Eco I suggest also avoiding Guareschi and Don Camillo.
2 Likes
Heh. Size 13 is not uncommon, unless it’s UK sizing and more like a 15 US. Even if it is, I’m a size 15… maybe I did it 
Living in a town small enough where only one person wears a shoe size commonly sold in stores makes crimes a lot easier to solve. That’s like cheating. Besides, it doesn’t even consider that it might have been some random big-footed miscreant passing through from some other town.
I hate it when really long book series do this. If it’s like a trilogy, I get it. If I’m jumping into Book 2 or 3 of a trilogy, I can expect to feel a little lost. But when it’s in the tens of books, no fucking way I’m reading all of those other books for background info just because I find Book 12 mildly interesting. For long series, each book should stand on their own, even if the characters appear in other books dating back decades.
That’s the thing. They’re rewarding you for being a loyal reader. It’s not the same thing as actually being able to solve puzzles or problems, but they want you to read their books and they’re making you feel good for doing so.
3 Likes
Like I would even remember that factoid of a story form 10 books ago if I had read it.
3 Likes
Very true; I don’t have any of those books handy for an actual example, but they also sometimes relied on weird cognitive leaps of logic. One I vaguely recall relied on the final clue being that the suspect claimed to have not visited a certain drinking fountain but ate bagels & lox for lunch. They were fingered as the culprit because lox is salty and they would obviously have needed a drink. I was a ten year old kid in an Ohio suburb, I had no idea what lox was or that it was so salty you’d need to run to a drinking fountain!
4 Likes
I was a space nerd. I assumed it was this:
5 Likes
And, perhaps, less cynically, for being an attentive reader.
If kids are reading more, and reading more enthusiastically, because they’re devoted to a particular series (and even better, to several of them), that seems like a good thing to me. I imagine studies on the general effects of the Harry Potter books exist by now, but I’ll speculate anyway, and merely anecdotally, that that series kept a lot of kids reading enthusiastically, kids who may not have done so otherwise.
4 Likes
Being an attentive reader is its own reward.
There are differences between being a fanboy/fangirl who knows esoterica about a series because it’s engrossing, and whatever this is. It’s very much like the difference between knowing something because it’s interesting and knowing something because there’s going to be a test on it later.
That being said, there’s a certain amount of skill to being able to boil down an essay, textbook chapter, or even work of fiction into its key takeaways. I have been tested on this numerous times through standardized tests, and apparently can do this reasonably well, but I can’t remember ever being taught this. Maybe the Encyclopedia Brown books were an attempt to surreptitiously teach these skills to kids who wouldn’t learn them in school, and wouldn’t pay attention if taught.
2 Likes
Well, yes. Among other rewards.
Interesting possibility. I wonder if they all had the same author(s), and publishers, and how much either or both may have coordinated their efforts with educators. Again, I imagine such info exists, info I’m not quite willing to set other things aside in order to find. 
2 Likes
Yes, they were all written by one guy, Donald Sobol. My example of the remembered gym-shoe size was a very poor one that I made up on the fly; most of the mysteries (there were 10 per book, short little vignettes) relied on deduction, figuring out how the pieces fit or why someone’s alibi doesn’t fit the facts. Only occasionally would a mystery rely on something obscure that seemed like an unfair tidbit for kids to either remember or flat-out guess.
4 Likes
Who also wrote Two-Minute Mysteries. Very similar style.
I don’t know anything about his life though.
But it was representative of many of the Encyclopedia Brown or Two-Minute Mysteries stories. Not all, but many. Some could be reasoned through, but occasionally there would be one that was kinda unfair to figure out.
2 Likes
Except, the genre has been around forever, EB just happened to be capitalizing on the children’s market with mysteries more suitable than a murder. Mini-mysteries are (IMCynicalO) aimed at people who want to feel clever for a few moments, because they often aren’t given opportunities to do so. Hence why they are so often found in the same “women’s” tabloid mags selling “5 ways to make your household chores disappear like magic” and this week’s fad diet (because if you’re fat, you’re unattractive and letting down your kids, doncha know), right alongside recipes for sweets or calorie laden dinners.
As a kid, I used to lap them up because they were often the only “mystery books” well-meaning adults thought suitable for my age (and I always wanted more reading material) as a stop-gap between the next Christie or Queen I could get my hands on. Then I turned twelve and found my first Stout book…
Now I just look at Mini-mysteries and think “he better never ask for a lawyer, because if that’s all you’ve got, a prosecutor isn’t even going to indict.”
4 Likes
It’s like those so-called Mensa puzzle books you see around (not sure what percentage are officially sanctioned). A friend of mine was always given one for a stocking stuffer at Christmas, and we’d spend an hour around Boxing Day eviscerating the puzzles. We’d take turns reading the problem, then the other person would make a guess.
Over 80% of the answers were “underwater wearing scuba gear” or “on the moon”. Sometimes “Jimmy is a fish and breathes water” as a variation on the scuba answer.
Bor-ing.
3 Likes
Welcome to my reality.
2 Likes
I’ll take “Unusual Sexual Positions” for $400, Alex!
7 Likes
Has anyone invented actual Ice-Nine yet?
1 Like
I had to learn actual crystallography, and sadly ice-9 doesn’t exist in our reality. But under some extreme conditions different modifications of ice do exist; they just decompose as soon as you remove the pressure.
If ice-9 did exist there would be lots of problems. There are materials which can coexist in different forms under the same conditions, but the coexisting forms are normally locked in by the freezing process. Spoiler alert Given the number of water molecules that have frozen into ice during the Earth’s history, there must have been times in the past when a few of them were in the ice-9 configuration when they froze - so if a single crystal of ice-9 could precipitate ice-9 from what is effectively supercooled water, this must already have happened many, many times. It’s a nice conceit, but you can imagine an exam question saying “Explain why Vonnegut’s Ice-9 is thermodynamically impossible.”
4 Likes
Okay, what is that blurred text? I understand it’s something you did, but why? And how does one do it? This is curiosity again. I’m a very curious person; people say that after they meet me, it’s so apparent I suppose.
2 Likes
BB spoiler tags do that.
On topic
Somebody reading Roadside Picnic for the first time and the Strugatsky brothers in general.
And another Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch books. These still top the list of magic/fantasy in a modern setting for me.
2 Likes
Why not start with The Doomed City? Subversive soviet sci-fi about life in actual literal hell.
3 Likes
When writing your post, select the text you want to hide, click the little gear thing in the top of the text box (may need to use the three-line menu button to get there) and select “blur spoiler”.
3 Likes