[Pt] is what I’m reading now. [Pt] stands for page turning. It also stands for partly through. It is on the periodic table of elements: Platinum, an extremely rare and naturally occuring metal found in higher abundances on the moon and in meteorites. It is an abbreviation. It means I’m not going to give you a lengthy book review because no one reads those anyway—there are cooler things to be doing, such as hunting for meteorites and actually reading a book.
I did not intend to start a new book this weekend. I had plenty of other things to be doing, including reading an entirely different book for a freelance review in order to get paid.
But my curiosity has often gotten the better of me, and in peeking at the first lines of A Simple Machine, Like the Lever, I was drawn in by the narrator’s sweet and simple voice. Consequently, I spent the better portion of my weekend curled on the couch with a blanket, my cat, a mug of cold coffee and Evan P. Schneider’s novel. I wouldn’t have asked for it any other way (except maybe always-hot coffee would have been nicer).
I see so much of myself in the narrator, Nick Allander. He bike commutes, lives frugally of necessity, and is observant of the world. Although, by no means do I live as sparingly (he salvages a box of cooking salt from the side of the road, for instance) and I am not so hardy a biker (winter is a nonstarter).
Allander enjoys the smells of his bike commute—freshly-mown grass, fabric softener emanating from the laundromat—and has little interest in collecting “things and stuff” unless they add value to his life and fulfill a need.
Schneider has found a way to communicate, in the most simple and delightful way, the story of a man grappling with the great big things that befuddle most of us: economy, success, life.
A Simple Machine, Like the Lever is published by the very cool Portland-based independent press, Propeller Books, which puts out one title per year. Schneider is the founding editor of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac.
