The accidental phrase reminded me of something Gary Vaynerchuk said last night at Powell’s Books, one of the stops on tour for his new book Crush It! The book is about making money  from your passions but one of his points is that you don’t do it from the “purse” side first. You do it because it’s a passion, something you want to pursue. So when people ask him what he thinks the “next big thing” will be, he tells them they’re focusing on the wrong side of the equation. Focus on what you care about.

Not new advice of course, but Gary is so much fun and so obviously passionate about what he does that you feel more enthusiastic and upbeat just listening to him.

Full disclosure, I have not (yet)  read the book so making no recommendation on that.

The Manual of Detection cover

I started reading The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry on a cold, gray, rainy Portland day — which almost perfectly matched the weather described in the first chapter.  And the hero — if we think of Charles Unwin as that — was riding a bicycle, a very Portland thing to do.  Of course he was riding it with an open umbrella, which is not so ordinary.  Still there seemed to be some areas of commonality.  And I was immediately intrigued because the chapters follow the chapters of the employee (detectives only) guide called The Manual of Detection. 

Unwin refers to this manual as well as some other rules and regulations throughout the book, which reminded me a little of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The first sentence refers to the difference between details and clues — which is covered in Chapter 4. “Most everything can be divided into two categories: details and clues. Knowing one from the other is more important than knowing your left shoe from your right.”  Unwin works at the Agency, serving as the clerk and organizer of files for a detective who goes missing. Not that he knows the detective because the Agency rules don’t permit interaction between different classes of employees. They work on different floors and communication is by messenger service. But he knows all about his detective from reading the case files and organizing them based on the detective’s notes. It is Unwin’s job to write up the cases, leaving out unnecessary detail, but he’s been reading that detail for years. The bureaucracy and the all-seeing-ness of the Agency, whose logo is an open eye, are a bit ominous but Unwin is a very good clerk. He doesn’t want to be a detective but, by some unprecedented lapse in Agency rules, he’s being promoted.

As a clerk, Unwin is not permitted to have a copy of The Manual of Detection and he tries to avoid opening the copy he’s given because he’s convinced that an error has been made and he’ll have to correct it. Maybe it’s only happening in a dream, or perhaps several people’s dreams. How he’s going to figure that out and deal with the characters from the Travels-No-More carnival is the basis of the detective story part of the book. But this book isn’t only a film-noirish detective story; it has a large component of science fiction/fantasy, more than a dash of magic and spiritualism, and a box full of puzzles and wordplay thrown in.  At least one name is a palindrome and I’m sure there are many more references and allusions (as well as illusions) than I picked up. I’m looking forward to reading it again.

This is Berry’s first novel. He has written other short fiction and fantasy and is said to be working on a new novel. He’s been compared to writers all over the board, from Kafka to Jasper Fforde. Don’t be too hasty to try to fit him into a box, though. Just enjoy the reading.

“Woe to he who checkmates his opponent at last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage.” The Manual of Detection, Chapter Sixteen.

Official website for the book with excerpts and characters at http://thirdarchive.net/

Much to my surprise I came away with a volume of short stories and two of other short pieces that tend more toward essays than stories.  To my surprise because I very rarely read short stories.  There’s something about them that just never has appealed to me all that much.  I do like essays and short opinion pieces (and write them myself) but I rarely buy book-length collections of such things.  Very few authors wear that well in longer doses. 

But the most fun thing about the booksale was looking at the things that were left and will undoubtedly be recycled into some other booksale somewhere — I’m sure I’ve been seeing some of these titles for years.  There were the usual stacks of hardcovers of relatively recent popular titles — no surprise there.  Over in the more miscellaneous categories I easily passed on most of the crafts and cooking books, but there was one that definitely wouldn’t have been in a booksalea few year’s ago — I can’t imagine anyone even writing a volume called “Baby’s First Tattoo” a few years back.  I  didn’t think that the “Art of Kissing” should have been categorized as crafts — but maybe it was the more how-to section.  Not needing any instruction on that subject, I left it there. 

Not far away was a copy of “Clutter’s Last Stand” which I did contemplate for a moment.  Not for me, you understand, but I do have friends who suffer from clutter creep.  But then I decided they really needed the last title — “In Search of Mind” — so I bought that one to go with my essays and checked out.

His name was mentioned to me by a friend who works with computer security and soon after that one of his latest books fortuitously appeared in my local library.   I checked it out and fell immediately into a future world of intrigue, espionage, bank fraud and some underlying questions of who or what is real versus virtual.  The action takes place in a future Edinburgh — with a sergeant who is not familiar with games or virtual worlds but is very familiar with local crime.  She’s initally incredulous when she figures out that the crime being described to her took place inside a game.  But, as explained by one of the accountants, a bank doesn’t necessarily hold money, it holds things of value.  And someone robbed their virtual bank using creatures who shouldn’t even have been in that section of the game.  

The narrative is in second person — very much like game instructions — and point of view switches from the sergeant, to a contract programmer, to a forensic accountant trying to unravel the problem.  Separately, together, in real life, and inside the game they try to decode the puzzles and in the process give us a look at what everyday life may be like in a couple of decades.  Phones, already pretty much permanently attached to everyone today, are both identification and reminder system in this reality.  But they still have issues with voice mail not always behaving exactly as it should.  The kind of glasses now worn by some people to play games — the ones that project the scene in front of your eyes — are everyday wear for everyone.  They provide overlays of what’s going on around you (or of other things if the current reality isn’t interesting) and a working space to do whatever you need to do.  One of the interesting new systems is called CopSpace — a system that combines most of our current criminal justice databases with a slew of other tracking and monitoring devices we haven’t thought of yet.  The sergeant and her coworkers use it to record all crime scene (plus lots of other) activities.  Taxis are mostly driven by some kind of remote control — no driver necessary.  These machines are smarter than ours, but they keep track of everything the people are doing.  And they keep track of where everyone is.  It’s hard to get off the grid. On the entertaining side, they also have washers that read sensors in your clothes to determine exactly how to wash them.  No more worrying about fabrics and wash temperatures.   Interestingly, when one of the characters takes his glasses off, he doesn’t quite know how to interact directly with the actual world.  The most hilarious thing to me was that when they needed to make a piece of information absolutely secure, they wrote it on a piece of paper. 

This book is interesting, intelligent, and intricately woven.  The future reality doesn’t necessarily look more appealing than our current version, but it does seem quite plausible.