Finish What You Started: Riddle of the Sands

Some months ago, as part of my "Finish What You Started" project, I decided to finish reading The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers.

I had stalled on this book about three chapters from the end, and thought that was just a bit stupid. So I sat down one weekend and finished it.

I bought this book last year whilst on vacation in Estonia. I had just finished something exceptionally light and trashy, and thought I'd go for a "genre classic". Riddle of the Sands was one of those books I knew by title alone. Well, I knew it was a spy book - espionage of some sort - which is a genre I don't usually read. I had a fling with James Bond a couple of years ago (hasn't everybody), but after reading three or four of Fleming's books (slightly out of sequence) I stalled about two chapters into Live and Let Die and never got back to the series.

Live and Let Die would be included in the "Finish What you Started" project, but I can't find it. I lost the book when I moved house, and I just can't be bothered borrowing it from a library when I have so many books in my house I haven't finished.

Anyway, I knew Riddle was a "classic" spy book and I knew it had something to do with sand. For some reason, I had imagined that to involve deserts and the foreign legion, or something. Not so much. It's actually about a couple of guys mucking about in boats off the coast of Germany at the turn of the 20th Century. A lot of the book involves a government desk-jockey discovering the joys of yachting in amongst the sand-banks of the Frisian Islands. Oh, and we think there may be a plot to invade England, but it could just be a salvage company trying to find treasure.

I have to admit that the reason I stalled so close to the end was because the book is actually kind of boring. On the one hand, you do get a real sense of what it must be like to be on a little, ramshackle boat piloted through the sand banks by a boating savant, but on the other hand nothing much happens. We slowly gather hints, which slowly turn into ideas, which slowly suggest action which slowly unfolds. I never felt any real tension or danger in the whole thing. Plot "twists" were rather predictable. The only real surprise was that there was no surprise. For some reason I was expecting something unexpected to happen in the end.

I quite enjoyed bits of the book on-and-off, and I was impressed with the verisimility of the book - the boating scenes seemed entirely real, and the simplicity of the plot lent it believability. However, I think it says something about a book if you can stop reading it three-chapters from the end and not really feel as if you're missing out on anything.

A Tale of Two Christies

In the past couple of weeks I've read two Agatha Christie books featuring Poirot: The ABC Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd.

It was an interesting comparison as I didn't have any advanced knowledge of the plot for ABC, but I knew what the 'trick' to Ackeroyd was before reading it.

I've always maintained that I don't care about spoilers - I get great pleasure out of seeing how things are done, so my enjoyment is not diminished by knowing the twists ahead of time.

This was more or less a chance to prove that theory: two books in the same series by the same author, one which was a complete surprise and the other with "spoilers".

Hard to say what my conclusions are. On the one hand, I did spend a large amount of ABC second guessing my assumptions, which was fun. I didn't pick the killer until a few pages before the reveal - I had actually formulated a completely different "clever-pants" twist, that seemed perfectly reasonable until the last couple of chapters.

On the other hand, Ackeroyd had always been on my list of things to read precisely because I knew what the twist was, and I wanted to see how Christie pulled it off. I was very impressed. Knowing what the twist was, I accurately picked the point were the "tell" occurred, but spent the rest of the book wondering if I had been misinformed. Christie did such a brilliant job with her treatment of the characters that I started second guessing my conclusions even when I knew they were correct. I kept watching to see when Poirot would figure it out, and if he would give us some indication. It really felt like he had made the wrong call regarding the killer and, when everything came together in the end, I still managed to feel somehow surprised.

So I can honestly say I did enjoy the book I read "with spoilers" more than the book I read without them, but then it was also the better book of the two. And I did enjoy the book I read "without spoilers", for completely different reasons.

As experiments go, it didn't really give me any viable data. I did get a couple of good reads out of it, though, so I guess there was no time wasted.

Oh, and you should read The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd. You can skip the other book without really losing anything from your complete reading experience, but Ackeroyd is a must.

Studies

I think I can safely say that linguists make terrible scientists. Also, on the other hand, scientists make terrible linguists.

“How dare you!” I hear you cry, “Besides, you have shown your ignorance, for linguistics is a form of science!”

Whatever. You try reading a few dozen 'scientific studies' conducted on language classes and see if tell me that with a straight face. That's what I say.

For some reason, the linguists I've read can't seem to bring themselves to create a study that isn't completely riddled with holes. Blind Freddy* could see that the methodology is unsound - or, at worst, completely ridiculous - the numbers involved are not statistically significant, the data collected is barely qualitative and hardly quantitative and the controls are almost entirely uncontrolled. I've yet to read a study that doesn't qualify itself in its own conclusions by saying something like “this study doesn't really show anything conclusively, so more people should study this stuff and try to avoid the following sixteen mistakes we think we made...”

On top of that, the closer the researchers come to trying to make a proper, scientific, controlled study, the worse it is for the students involved in the darn thing.

Half the studies I read involved exposing language learners to completely made up words just so the researchers could make sure they weren't learning this vocabulary through some other means. Sure, it means you have a better understanding of the efficacy of that method of vocabulary acquisition (assuming the rest of the study isn't completely daft)... But what about the poor students who have now wasted valuable time learning words that don't exist? These words have been learnt and associated with meanings. They are now sitting in the students' synapses, ready to be pulled out and used “correctly” in term papers and job interviews.

As someone who often finds herself accidentally pulling out an Indonesian or French word when trying to remember a German or Estonian one, I can assure you that words previously learnt do stick around in the brain and reassert themselves at inopportune moments. And now these “scientists” have essentially graffitied the brains of well-intentioned language learners. It's negligent, from a language teaching perspective.

It's almost like those “scientists” who genetically modified a mouse to grow a human ear on it's back. Sure, the results are interesting, but the treatment of the subject boarders on the unethical.

Stop it. Stick with anecdotal evidence. It usually filters out the good from the bad over time.



*One day I'd like to meet Blind Freddy. He seems to be a very observant fellow, and would probably be an interesting conversation partner.

PDFs and the New Way

There are days I would love to have all of my readings and “papers” in an entirely electronic format. Surely it's time to leave actual paper to purely enjoyable pursuits? I should be able to download a journal article into a reader of some sort, highlight it and annotate it just like I would with a paper copy. I should be able to copy-and-paste the quotes I want to keep into my citation manager (can we adapt one to work on eReaders, please?), attach the whole file for later use and then use the citation manager to shuffle through the journal articles in order to find the one I was looking for.

Is that too much to ask for?

I have double-ups of everything because I can't highlight PDFs and I can't copy-and-paste print. Then you get the occasional PDF where you can't highlight OR copy-and-paste the text because it's either a scanned document (little better than a snapshot of the original) or it's been locked so the copy function is disabled. What, on God's good, green earth, is the point of that? What am I going to do with your precious document that would make you think copying a sentence is something that must be disabled? I'm talking to you, ELT Journal. If I can save a copy of the PDF, I've already copied the entire text. Just thought I'd point that out. Having to physically re-type every quote I want to use for no good reason whatsoever achieves nothing except my personal annoyance.

It's bad enough when, in this day and age, you still get databases and eJournals which don't have a 'download citation' feature. Hello! It's the Twenty-First Century! Offering journal articles without downloadable citation files is like offering scones without jam. It makes you seem uncultured or miserly.

We're almost there, people. The technology already exists, but hasn't been put together yet. Come on: an eReader that can allow me to do the same things with electronic Journal articles that I can do with the paper copies, a citation manager that works on eReaders, and databases and journals that understand what people actually do with their texts and offer the right kind of files to play with. Then we can all sit down for a nice Devonshire tea with scones and jam.

Also, I want an iLiad, but someone at iRex needs to realise that I can buy two computers for the same price as one iLiad, which isn't good. Kind of hard to justify that, even if the whole eReader-meets-jotting-paper thing is a little bit brilliant.

Shorter

It's 20:30 on a Friday night, and I'm at work. I'm so bored that I'm actually glad when someone asks me to print something for them. I've almost completely run out of "I could be bothered staying up", and I'm mildly convinced my arms are shorter than they were a couple of days ago.

Either that, or the computer screens have moved further away. At this point, either could be possible, for all I care.

The way it works

Phase 1: We've discovered this wonderful new thing that well let you do the old things in new and exciting ways. You can abandon the current way you do things which are bogged down in a structure that doesn't allow new innovations and creativities. Your hands will no longer be tied, and you will be able to experiment until you find the Right Fit, rather than forcing everything into a Stifling Mould.

Phase 2: You can include These Things, which would make your New and Improved Thing so much more Vibrant and Interesting.

Phase 3: You should do These Things, to make your New and Improved Thing look Exciting and Individual

Phase 4: Okay, actually all of the New and Improved Things must do These Things, to make sure we are fully utilising them

Phase 5: And your New and Improved Thing should also include the same things that were on the other fellow's New and Improved Thing, or people won't be getting the same level of service.

Phase 6: Also, stop doing those things that everyone else isn't doing

Phase 7: And make sure the things you are doing are in exactly the same order as the things on everyone else's New and Improved Thing. No, this isn't a New Stifling Mould, it's a branded image.

Phase 8: Why aren't your New and Improved Things bursting with creativity and attracting admiring throngs? You must be doing it wrong. Let's try something else.

The Story of the Little Mole

Like most people who have read the book, I find The Story of the Little Mole who knew it was None of his Business, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch, utterly hilarious.

Yes, okay, it's a "poo book", and I know many librarians are totally over poo books, but this is a good one. A classic, you could say. And so very informative, in a scatological way. One could actually identify dung in the "wild" (if one lived on a farm in Europe) from reading this book.

Turns out the book is equally hilarious in German. I went looking for German children's books the other day to get some reading practise, and when I noticed this book was available I simply had to buy it.

Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat is perfect for a reading activity at the "slightly past complete beginner" level. You can get the 'gist' without quite knowing all the words for an initial read through, and then you can go back over it with a dictionary to see if you guessed correctly, or pick up on the details you missed.

Details which are somehow worth knowing, even if they aren't. Who doesn't need the word Pferdapfel in their vocabulary?

Anyway, I found myself a tad confused. One of the other books I bought was a German translation of Guess How Much I Love You, by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram (also really good for reading at a beginners German level), and it clearly mentioned on the verso that it was a translation. Vom Kleinen Maulwurf doesn't, which made me suspect it was originally written in German. I wanted to read the verso of the English version to see if I could find more information, but WE DON'T HAVE IT!

I am shocked. Absolutely and thoroughly shocked to find myself sitting in a library which does not have a copy of The Story of the Little Mole who knew it was None of his Business. Even more shocking - the other local libraries only had one copy between them, and that copy is missing. I must make sure we buy copies in multiple languages.

Anyway, I finally thought to google the original publisher of the book, and confirmed that the German version is, in fact, the original. However, at no point did any of the libraries I consulted (including the Libraries Australia public catalogue) mention that the English version was a translation. Neither did any of the bookshops I tried originally - although I did discover that there's an alternative English title: The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit - which is closer to the German title, but not as witty. No idea if it's the same translation or not, there's no mention of a translator. Or that it's a translation.

For some reason, Amazon.co.uk is trying to sell both versions of the book together. That must be disappointing to whoever wanted two different books.

Even the wikipedia entry neglected to mention that it was a German original. We'll have to fix that...

Anyway, I was a bit put out that I couldn't find this information in Trove, or in the first five libraries I clicked on. I would have thought the fact that a book was the English translation would be fairly basic information to put in a catalogue record. No doubt many of these libraries had it in the "full" record - but not in the one that was available to the general public. Every now and then I like to pretend I'm not a librarian and use the catalogue like a normal person. It's always interesting to note how much libraries like to keep their patrons in the dark.

The fifth library I tried actually included the words "English translation" in the record, but made no reference to the original version, or the translator. The sixth included the German title in the record, but didn't bother mentioning why. What is wrong with you people?

It shouldn't be this complicated to find out if an insanely popular children's book was originally written in German. Only Mr God knows why the libraries of Australia and booksellers of the greater English speaking world think such information is not worth mentioning.