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Loading... The Grand Complication: A Novelby Allen Kurzweil
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This fun novel is about a librarian at NYPL who becomes estranged from his artistic French wife and ends up working with an eccentric old man to solve the mystery of an 18th century display case full of oddities. The mystery plot is kind of a dud but the characters are great and I especially enjoy the library parts, including the library page who can tell you call numbers for books off the top of his head. As a librarian, I have wanted to read this book for a very long time. I love reading about books, libraries, librarians and people who love books. Alexander Short is a reference librarian with some unusual hobbies. He is interested in enclosures (a.k.a. secret compartments), coded writing, "girdling" and typography. Without a doubt, the girdling was the most unusual of Zander's hobbies. He carried a small notebook attached to his clothing in which he recorded his observations. If that is not unusual enough for you, he arranged the entries under Dewey Decimal subject headings AND wrote the entries in a secret code. A strange man approaches Zander at the reference desk of the library and asks for his help in locating a missing object that would complete a collection for him. He is soon drawn into a world in which nothing is as it appears. I loved this smart, well-written book. I found all the library references, including numerous Dewey Decimal classifications, interesting. However, those less enamored with libraries may find it a bit annoying. 0.041 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0786885181, Paperback)Penzler Pick, August 2001: Most avid readers love everything about books--not only the words, but also the paper, the edition, the age, the texture of the binding, all of which become part of the fascination for the printed word that makes a true bibliophile. So it is no wonder that the bibliophile mystery has achieved such popularity. The Grand Complication, well-written and well-researched, is the latest in a long line of such mysteries.Alexander Short is a reference librarian who spends his days dealing with the minutiae of his work world. At night he goes home to his French wife who is also a book person. She makes pop-up books and other three-dimensional volumes, including a "girdle" that Alexander wears in the manner of medieval monks, tied around his middle and used for his "girdling" or taking notes--something Alexander does obsessively, to the detriment of his job. Two such people seem made for each other, but their obsessions make for a rocky marriage. So Alexander is fascinated when he meets Henry James Jesson III, an elderly man with equally obsessive interests. He would like Alexander to help him after hours. In Jesson's Manhattan mansion there is a cabinet of curiosities that tell the life of an 18th-century inventor. But one of the compartments is empty. Jesson, and soon Alexander, are agog with curiosity about what was in that compartment. Finding out is half the fun of reading this book. The other half, if you care (and somehow I think you do), is the design of the book itself. Kurzweil is the son of an engineer, and he designed the small icon, a gear, that appears on many of the book's pages. Over the course of the novel, which runs 360 pages, that gear turns 360 degrees. And then there are the endpapers.... --Otto Penzler (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I didn't like the character. The librarian was the representation of the stereotype of librarian, obsessive,dull and stuck up ( I work in a library and very few of the librarian actually fits that description). The patron who hired him was far from being an excentric, but was clearly disturbed.
Overall.... not a book I would suggest to anyone. (