Apr 4th, 2014, 4:52 pm
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Amazon info page

Description: A dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange offers an inventive, suspenseful, and decidedly original vision of the dangers of technology and of the enduring power of the printed word.

In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past, and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but also have become so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.

Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where Doug is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used email (everything now is text or videoconference) to communicate—or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It’s a code word he devised to signal if he ever fell into harm’s way. And thus begins Anana’s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole . . .

Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana’s search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways; the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library; and secret meetings of the underground resistance, the Diachronic Society. As Anana penetrates the mystery of her father’s disappearance and a pandemic of decaying language called “word flu” spreads, The Word Exchange becomes a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on the high cultural costs of digital technology.

Publishers Weekly Review
Graedon's spectacular, ambitious debut explores a near-future America that's shifted almost exclusively to smart technologies, where print is only a nostalgia, and nostalgia is only an archaism. But while everyone carries "Memes," devices with enough data to negate the need for memory—let alone vocabulary—and can even anticipate wants and needs, Anana Johnson works closely with her anti-Meme father Doug, a famous lexicographer, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language. But when Doug goes missing, what once seemed like a luddite's quaint conspiracy theory takes on new plausibility, and with it, new threat, as the city quickly falls victim to a fast-spreading "word flu" virus. Chapters alternate between Ana's narration and the journal entries of her friend and colleague Bart, shedding light and inserting lacunae by turns. With secret societies, conspiracies, and mega-corp Synchronic's menacing technologies, Graedon deploys all the hallmarks of a futuristic thriller, but avoids derivative doomsday sci-fi shtick. Instead, her novel is rife with literary allusions and philosophical wormholes that aren't only decorative but integral to characters' abilities and limitations in communicating, and it succeeds precisely because it's as full of humanity as it is of mystery and intellectual prowess.

How about for you...?
Apr 4th, 2014, 4:52 pm

Currently reading...

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Apr 14th, 2014, 12:56 am
ephemeral! Here are all these lonely posts by you and no one responding, how sad!

Well I am waiting for the release of many books that look promising. Way more than I could ever and probably will ever read.

But here are but a few:

The Painter by Peter Heller
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You by Courtney Maum
All The Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Terms and Conditions by Robert Glancy
Life Drawing by Robin Black
Beware the Wild by Natalie C Parker

My son awaits longingly for The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier (follow up to one of his favorite books) and Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times by Emma Trevayne
Apr 14th, 2014, 12:56 am
Apr 17th, 2014, 10:50 am
Cannot even begin to tell you how excellent - how fun and clever and well-written - this novel is. Its author, Alena Graedon, among many excellent stylistic flourishes, borrows tropes, slyly, from Lewis Carroll, and then makes them her own; in the process, she matches his giant stride step for step.

What a joy.
ephemeral

Word Influenza: PW Talks with Alena Graedon
By Ashley Strosnider

Graedon’s ambitious debut novel, The Word Exchange, explores a near-future America that’s shifted almost exclusively to smart technologies. The story is rife with literary allusions and philosophical wormholes that explore the evolution of language and technology.

Where did idea for The Word Exchange come from? It’s such a complex book; I’d like to hear more about its origin.

One of the gifts that my parents gave me for graduation was a copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and I took it with me to a visual art residency a couple of months later because I was going to use the line drawings inside for a project. As I was flipping through, I saw these encyclopedia-like entries for important people and I had this weird flash of an idea, what if one of these entries were to disappear? What would this story be? And of course that is what happens in the first chapter of the book.

You talk about a difference between print and digital media and the differing values we place on things and how it can shift given the scenario. It’s interesting the different evaluations that language takes on in the story. You spoke some about the value of bridging, of communicating, of finding one’s place in the world but it seems to me that you do place a lot of value on language. Would you say that’s fair?

I really do, as somebody who all my life has used words in a way to understand my own reality and my own place in the world, and also as a way to express to all of the people I care about in my life how much I appreciate them, and to articulate ideas. I’m certainly one of those people who believe that language and consciousness are closely connected to each other. The ideas that we have we only fully develop and understand their complexity and nuance as we’re trying to articulate them to ourselves and other people. I definitely feel a really strong kinship and relationship to language and it’s very important to me and my life. I also wanted to explore the value of language even in a metaphorical or figurative sense because it’s this remarkable tool that we all share and that only means something if we all maintain it. It only has value because it’s a shared tool that we all sort of help each other with and contribute to. It’s constantly evolving and changing and we’re invited into the process of being a part of that language evolution and change. I think that’s wonderful. I’m all for language evolution and change. It’s a natural process.

You juggle between the two main voices and then there are all these other documents that infiltrate in, what was it like finding the structure of the book? Did it come naturally?

It shifted a lot, but I think that I always had this idea that I wanted to have 26 chapters—one for each letter of the alphabet. A lot of those little fake definitions I even wrote before I wrote the chapters. I always knew that it would begin with Doug’s disappearance from the dictionary both literary and figuratively or literally and literally, I guess—his entry disappears, the author disappears. I knew what I really wanted to do with these two narrative voices was have a sort of exchange. Anana’s is written retrospectively—it’s going back through time, and Bart’s is written synchronically—moving forward through time—he’s kind of recording what’s happening as it actually happens. I knew that I couldn’t do either of those voices separately. So I had a sense of what I wanted the story to be and who was going to tell which part of this story evolved over time. I actually always imagined that it would be three voices and then it just didn’t end up working out that way. That third voice is these extraneous weird documents: the list, the op-ed. They all sort of have the same authorship but it didn’t end up being three voices in the way I originally imagined.

In addition to being intellectual and philosophical in many ways, the book juggles a lot of other classical genre traits; we’ve got the doomsday technically sci-fi stuff; we’ve got the thriller/mystery missing person conspiracy stuff going on. So thinking about publishing a book in print about this world where there is no print, how much of that is tongue in cheek or how close are we to that reality now?

That’s a great question. I think there’s been a lot of nay-saying about how people aren’t reading any more for decades if not centuries. I am not at all worried that people will stop reading books. And I also think that the ways in which technology has entered our lives and become totally intertwined with reality in many ways has been a huge boon. We are so lucky to live in a time when all these advancements are taking place. I’m also certainly not the first to look at the question of the flip side of it. The question of how our dependence on devices has changed our relationship to ourselves and the kinds of thoughts that we have and the kind of interactions that we have with other people, but I did want to extend that conversation and if anything hopefully bring our awareness to what’s happening. These changes are not going to stop happening, nor do I think they should, but the thing is we don’t have to be passive participants in this evolutionary process.

I read the book in print and the whole time I kept thinking what if I was reading this on my Kindle? How would I feel? Would I be nervous?

One of things that’s been so funny about people’s responses to reading the book is that I think a lot of people are reading it on a Kindle and they are like, “Oh my god! The irony of this is not lost on me and that I have to use my Kindle’s dictionary to look up some of the words.” I wanted the story to be engrossing enough that people wouldn’t feel distracted by the interruptive nature of those words that were a little unusual or that were then corrupted but there was a part of me that wanted to mimic the effect, having the form sort of match the content of what is it like when we have these interruptions from the devices in our lives constantly? How does that interrupt our ability to have a really sustained deep linear thought process if we are constantly being bombarded by these external messages. I really didn’t want to take that to a logical conclusion because the last thing I wanted was to make people feel annoyed or frustrated while they were reading.

The word flu was so fun to read. It’s absolutely unsettling but it was really fun to read.

It was really hard to write. It was especially really hard to try to write in such a way that it would suggest this level of estrangement and alienation but also not be totally alienating and estranging to read. I wanted to give the reader a sense of what these characters were experiencing but I also didn’t want it to be impossible to follow, so that definitely took a lot of finessing and revising and getting other people’s opinions.
Apr 17th, 2014, 10:50 am

Currently reading...

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Apr 17th, 2014, 11:49 am
This looks really interesting....putting on my "to read" list!! Thanks eph! :)
Apr 17th, 2014, 11:49 am
Apr 17th, 2014, 2:54 pm
I actually just wrote you a PM about this book. Looks like it's firmly solidified on my to be read list.

books I'm waiting for:

Skin Game by Jim Butcher (I am a sucker for dresden files)
Summer State of Mind by Jen Calonita (I love any books about sleepaway camp)
Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire (Incryptid books. SO GOOD. Spin off... SPEECHLESS WITH WANT!)
A Shiver of Light (Laurell K Hamilton isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I love the Merry Gentry books and 5 years after the last one.... a new one is coming out!)
Apr 17th, 2014, 2:54 pm

I'm AFK at the moment, unable to refresh my links.

Feel free to request a new link for my posts in book requests!
Apr 22nd, 2014, 11:28 am
The Alena Graedon novel sounds awesome. I must try and remember to search for it. I might have to create a "Books to find" list soon actually!

I was looking forward to the Paul Stanley biog (which I read over the weekend). A bit unfulfilling to be honest.

As far as fiction goes:
Want You Dead - Peter James
Skin Collector - Jeffrey Deaver
Mr Mercedes - Stephen King
Apr 22nd, 2014, 11:28 am
Apr 22nd, 2014, 3:50 pm
I wish i still loved Stephen King. I loved his mid-time works. Stuff like the Stand and It and the like. I just haven't been able to get into his newer stuff.

Same with Dean Koontz. People SALIVATE over those Odd Thomas books and I liked the first two...

Jeffrey Deaver is someone i've read a little bit of and always mean to get more. What should a newbie start with?
Apr 22nd, 2014, 3:50 pm

I'm AFK at the moment, unable to refresh my links.

Feel free to request a new link for my posts in book requests!