Living in the Liebrary

"The problem with lies isn’t that they’re bad; it’s that they’ve got bad publicity. What they needed was a spokesman, a salesman. And now they’ve got the best one around—from Azwerp to Zelslow!"

"There’s no such place as Azwerp! Or Zelslow!"

"Not yet," replied Ersatz. "But the world is changing quickly. . . . Perhaps tomorrow there’ll be an Azwerp and a Zelslow. Perhaps they’ll be the same place."

"They can’t both be the same place, Ersatz! The simple rules of time and space dictate that—"

"You still don’t get it,” said Ersatz. “There aren’t any more rules. Anything’s possible now!"

"They’re just lies, Ersatz. There’s no truth to them. They don’t actually change anything."

"On the contrary, brother, they change everything."



"When we sold facts, I took no interest in them at all. But now that we have all these lies I can't help taking an interest in them because they're all so interesting. Especially the ones about me."

"You are a clever, handsome man, Mr. Mayor," said the first lion.

"See?" said the mayor, beaming. "None of the facts about me were like that!"

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Not a quote: And who did he pick his first two fights with as President? The media and the intelligence community, two traditional sources of truth, information, and facts.

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Facts from the Liebrary:

You are all geniuses.
Snowmen are made of snow and firemen are made of fire.
There are three days in a week and seven weeks in a minute.
George Washington liked to water-ski.
Queen Elizabeth could burp the alphabet.
Humans didn’t evolve; they hatched.
Socks are meant to be smelly.
You should keep your eyes open when you sneeze.
Toe jam tastes great with peanut butter.
Grown-ups know everything.
Lobsters write excellent poetry.
Zero is the biggest number.
The largest mammal in the world is the tangerine.
Henry the Eighth invented the bicycle.
Rhode Island is the largest continent.
Smoking gives you immortality.
Now is what happens after later.
All babies are born wearing tuxedos.
Approximately one-third of a television’s parts are edible.
The color yellow was originally called banana.
The opposite of yellow is good-bye.
Christopher Columbus invented the glow-in-the-dark yo-yo.

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Quotes from: The Facttracker by Jason Carter Eaton.

Its self-description:

If you are reading this, you're a genius.

Is that true? Who knows! But it sounds good. So does:

This book is better than ice cream, television, and your birthday combined!

"The Facttracker" is full of such statements. Unfortunately, most of them are lies, which is odd, since Traakerfaxx is the town that produces all of the world's "facts."

So how can a story about a bizarre town with a weird name become

The greatest novel ever written?

Dinosaurs would help. Or maybe aliens. Alien dinosaurs would be dynamite! Alas, we have none of those. Here's what we "do" have: the Facttracker, who tracks all the facts in Traakerfaxx. The just small enough boy, who lost all his facts. And Ersatz, but the less said about him the better. And, of course, there are lots and lots of facts and lies, such as:

This book will make you good-looking and popular!

Was that a "fact" or a "lie"? For the answer, read on and encounter adventure, peril, and even more

Large, oversized words!

My review:

One opinion about The Facttracker:

Take a good portion of Lemony Snicket and add some Captain Underpants sensibility and plenty of Eaton's own flavors to get this mix of intellectual absurdity, all wielded to share an actual story with a definite point to make. This book is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it to 4th-6th grade readers and anyone else attracted to what follows.

A few facts about The Facttracker:

The table of contents takes 6 pages, as there are 50 chapters (plus chapters 2 1/2 and 2 3/4), many with rather long, convoluted titles like: The Answer to a Question That Wasn't Even Asked. And the Question Is This: What Were the Townspeople Up To?

The book opens with: A fictitious friend of mine once told me, "Everyone loves a good explosion." Sadly, he told this to me just moments before he himself exploded, but it was good advice nonetheless.

The protagonist is called the "just small enough boy": [He] was so small that he was almost too small. But not quite. He was just small enough.

Much of the book takes place in the Liebrary.

And one quote from The Facttracker:

The true test of a society isn't how many lies it has; it's how many it believes.