Time & the Clockmice, Etcetera

Gideon Kalve Jarvis
6 days ago
3 min read

This week, instead of a biglonghuge post, or even a really tiny post, I'm going to share a...well, it's kind of a podcast, I suppose. Actually, it's an audiobook, the whole thing, as read by myself. Because I want to encourage people to read books, or listen to books, or just somehow get the information contained in those books into their minds so that they can start to make use of the wonders within as part of their daily lives.

The book in question is Time and the Clockmice, Etcetera.

Back when my family was still "in transit," Dad working for the United States Foreign Service and all of us getting bounced around every two to four years to a new place, very often the only English language material we could get, in the form of books or television, was British in origin. That's how I first encountered, for example, the Dragonfall 5 book series, as well as the bloodstained horror that is The Animals of Farthing Wood (both a book and television series, that). It's also where I encountered the book The Truth About Dragons, just sitting on the shelf at the Brussels American School's high school library, right alongside The Book of the Dun Cow, though I'm not at all convinced that either are really appropriate for anybody under the age of 21.

(Incidentally, I scanned my copy of The Truth About Dragons, and you can find a link at Archive.org via that link I just shared - like far too many"also ran," smalltime author books, it's basically "lost media," and physical copies are nearly impossible to get, and outrageously expensive when they are; I'll be doing an audiorecording of that book as well once I finish my present projects.)

All of that is, besides further evidence that I am an incurable bibliophile, a lead-in to Time and the Clockmice, Etcetera. It was sitting on the shelf of a therapist's office when I was in Vienna, Austria, back before any of us really had any idea about what chronic depression was, or anxiety, and before Prozac was even a Thing (it wasn't available for public consumption until 1988, when I was 10; for those who've grown up with antidepressants being overprescribed, as opposed to not available at all, I cannot properly describe what that was like, but I think you can imagine). Since the wait was especially long, I took the book down and finished it all the way through. And loved it.

Now, I just finished reading the book after getting a copy while online shopping, and discovering one fairly cheap - again, these books too frequently run quite up there for price, since they're often so hard to find. I've recorded myself reading it, and will share the audio files below, along with some of the essential images from the book itself, since they're required for properly understanding many of the passages. I do my best to describe them in the recording, but the images are here so you can refer back to them for a more complete listening experience.