“Waiting On Wednesday” is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine where bloggers can showcase books that we eager for!
What I’m Waiting For:
Blurb:
In the not so distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers and magazines are a thing of the past, as we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication, but have become so intuitive as to hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order take out 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 final 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 video-conference) to communicate–or even actually spoke to one antoher for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices leaving a single writen clue: ALICE. It’s a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into harm’s way. And thus begins Anana’s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole. . .
Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague (who is secretly in love with her), Anana’s search for Doug will take her into dark basement incinerator rooms, underground passages of the Mercantile Library, secret meetings of the anonymous “Diachronic Society,” the boardrooms of the evil online retailing site Synchronic, and ultimately to the hallowed halls of the Oxford English Dictionary–the spiritual home of the written word. As Ana pieces togehter what is going on, and Bart gets sicker and sicker with the strange “Word flu” that has spread worldwide causing people to speak in gibberish, Alena Graedon crafts a fresh, cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller, and a throughtful meditation on the price of technology and the unforeseen, though very real, dangers of the digital age.
Why I’m Waiting:
I read about this book on another blog, I don’t remember exactly where. Maybe Snuggly Oranges? Anyway, it was such a delight and I was instantly hooked to the premise. I surprised myself, because I’m not usually interested at all in adult books, (or non-ficion, and I’m reading some of that right now…).
The only dilemma, is that this book doesn’t come out until APRIL!!!! How on earth am I going to wait that long to read bout the the end of the printed age. (Which might be the most terrifying dystopian setting yet!)
What are you waiting for this week?
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