The Daily Procrastinator

Greetings, procrastinators! I have returned from my foray into The Great White North! I hope all of you have been well in my absence. Now that my vacation is over, I can return to procrastinating, full-time. For starters, I want to tell you about a book I read (sort of) on my trip.

Nineteen hours each way is a LONG time to drive, and staying awake can be a bit of a challenge, since I like to drive straight through rather than lose vacation time by splitting the drive over two days. In the past, I’ve taken big stacks of music CDs, reserving the loudest and angriest ones for the last few hours of the drive. This strategy worked fine, but my mother was starting to get concerned that I always showed up at her house muttering about “Cowboys From Hell” or a “South Texas Deathride.” In an effort to stay awake without getting all hopped up on music that scares children, I decided to make the drive with an audiobook this time. It was a good call.

It just LOOKS good.

The Geographer’s Library by John Fasman is a 384-page tome in its hardcover incarnation, and it’s over 15 hours long as an audiobook. Honestly, this is why I chose it. I needed a book for a long drive. Considering that my selection was simply based on the length of the book, I feel that I got extraordinarily lucky. The Geographer’s Library is a remarkable, interesting, complex historical novel.

The book centers on two main plotlines. The first involves a Spanish Muslim cartographer, historian, and linguist named Al-Idrisi who served King Roger of Sicily in the 1150s. Al-Idrisi devoted considerable time and energy to collect fifteen priceless artifacts from all over the world, each of which was thought to be vital to the art of alchemy. Before he could fully understand their powers, though, the entire collection was stolen, and the individual objects  found their way to all corners of the world over the course of centuries.

Enter Paul Tomm, a journalist working for a small-town newspaper. When he is assigned to write a simple obituary for oddball university professor Jaan Puhapaev, his simple questions about the man’s life soon reveal that Puhapaev may not have been the man everyone thought he was. In fact, it seems he’d been trying to reassemble Al-Idrisi’s collection. But why?

Between these two storylines lie the individual tales of each artifact as they are bought, sold, stolen, and killed for throughout the course of history. Each one is an intriguing plot unto itself. Fasman’s descriptions of exotic settings throughout the Old World make these chapters especially rewarding to read.

Although I’m caught up in praising the book, I will say that The Geographer’s Library is not an easy read. I think that listening to it while I drove, which is far more passive than actually reading the book, probably simplified the process for me. I imagine that reading it might be a bit slow in some passages. Nonetheless, for readers who appreciate a remarkably well-written and researched book, I highly recommend Fasman’s tome. Imagine The DaVinci Code more intelligently written and without inflammatory intentions. I’m going to buy a hardcover copy of The Geographer’s Library for my bookshelf, and you should, too.