You know those days and weeks when it is one project after the other? The content from one book starts to blend into the content of the next? Occasionally my mind will draw a blank when my wife asks me at the end of the day what I’ve learned from my indexing and proofreading work. My mind is so bloated with information that I don’t know where to begin.
That is crunch time in publishing. Just seems to be part of the business.
But I do actually learn from the projects I work on, even if I sometimes need to decompress a bit before I can remember and articulate. I recently thought it would be a fun exercise to write down five things I learned from my last few projects. So, in no particular order, here are five things I have learned from books I’ve indexed and am indexing in the last month or so.
- Reading studies is an actual discipline in the social sciences.
- Ancient Tamil poetry is amazingly gorgeous, complex, and dark. I feel like I could get lost in the worlds those poems depict.
- The grand narrative of the Japanese-American experience is much more rigid than I realized. If your family settled in Hawai’i and California, experienced internment, and tried to be a model minority (at the risk of oversimplifying it), you are part of the Japanese-American narrative. If your personal experience is different, chances are literature on and recognition of your experience is sparse. I wonder how this compares to Japanese-Canadian, or Chinese-American/Canadian, narratives.
- Saying the phrase, “death and dying,” in that order, is strange, when you think about it, since dying is the process that occurs before death. Still, I have to think a moment before I can say, “dying and death.” Something about the ordering of the syllables?
- Trees communicate! Through smells, electrical signals, and root and fungal networks. Sure, we are doing a pretty good job of disrupting their communication through our managed, lumber-based forestry practices, but if we let them grow old and wild enough, trees communicate! Makes me question again my summers working as a tree planter.
What interesting things have you learned recently from your work?