Moving right along to Chapter 7 of The Shapeshifters’ Library: Released by Amber Polo.
Synopsis
Cutter’s bright mood is dissipated when she discovers that several books are unaccounted for. More specifically, a whole lot of dog books are missing. She tells Chronus who in turn has his librarians look into. Since werewolves are unable to enter the library, this is met with a modicum of skepticism.
Analysis
Okay, so when perusing reviews for this book, someone said that the Dewey-speak was annoying. I agree.
Dewey-speak is replacing certain words with their Dewey decimal number. In the book, Polo renders it as “Cut the 631.8 (Dewey number for compost)...” which is visually distracting and interrupts the inner narrator’s voice. This would be less annoying were the lookups rendered as footnotes.
Also, according to dewey.info, the following numbers used in this section have this actual definition:
Number
|
Polo
|
Dewey.info
|
631.8
|
compost
|
fertilizers, soil conditioners, growth regulators
|
299.935
|
devil
| |
291.23
|
hell
|
[unassigned] (usually used for “death” elsewhere)
|
That being said, it makes what Cutter says 100% more hilarious:
CUTTER
|
Cut the fertilizers, soil conditioners, and growth regulators and tell me what the anthroposophy is wrong.
|
MCCASSON
|
Books are missing. Not on the shelf. Not checked out.
|
CUTTER
|
Nonsense. The library has only been open for one week. There is no way in death there can be a great problem.
|
(I must also present my frustration for another topic as I was looking these up, and that’s the walled garden that is the Dewey Decimal System, but this isn’t Polo’s fault.)
No comments:
Post a Comment