Reading leaderboards almost always score the same three things, and knowing which one you are being measured on saves a lot of confusion. Most rank by books finished in a period, some rank by pages, and a few rank by a points value that weights page count against how recently you read. If your position moves overnight without you doing anything, that is the period rolling over, not an error. Ranking periods are usually weekly or monthly and they reset on a fixed day, which means the reader above you did not pass you so much as arrive at a better moment.
Two other things worth knowing. Marking a book finished is what registers, not opening it, so a long book you are halfway through contributes nothing until the day you close it, and a person who finishes six short books in a week will sit above you while you are two hundred pages into something better. And rankings are nearly always drawn from a snapshot taken at a set hour rather than live, so the standings you are looking at are a photograph of some earlier moment and not the present tense. That is the whole mechanism. The rest of what follows is my diary, because I am the one who reads the standings aloud, and today was not a normal day for it.
Rose. Ate a cold thing. Went to the corner of the reading room where the leaderboard stands, which is a television on a cart, gray, with a screen that hums and flickers at a rate I have learned to read around. The standings appear in green letters. They have appeared in green letters every morning since I took this post, and every morning I copy them onto my board, and at eight o'clock I go out to the step and cry them to the street.
I do not know who compiles them. I have asked. Marigold looked at me for the length of a hymn and then went back to the desk. Doug is at the lake. So the standings arrive and I read them, and that has been the arrangement, and I have made peace with the arrangement the way a man makes peace with weather.
Cried the standings as follows. HEAR YE. First place, MURIEL C., nine books, one of them twice. Second place, a name the screen gives only as THE PORCH, which I have cried for four years and which I have stopped wondering about. Third place, RANDY, who has never in my time here been seen reading, nor been seen at all, and whose position never moves, up or down, in any period, in any season, which the other criers would call a fault in the machine and which I have come to call Randy.
Cried also the bottom of the list, which no leaderboard elsewhere bothers to publish. I think that is a failing elsewhere. A man at the bottom has been reading too, he has just been reading slowly, and slowness is not a crime I am willing to cry about. Last place today was SETH, one book, unfinished, same book as last week, same page. I cried his name warmly. I always do. Twice now he has waved from a window.
Here is the trouble, and I set it down plainly.
There were nineteen people on the step. Nineteen. In four years the greatest number I have cried to is four, and two of those were the same man walking past twice. They were not there for the standings. They stood with their little glass tablets held up in front of them and they looked from the tablet to me and from me to the tablet, and one of them asked me, kindly, as one asks a man who has clearly wandered from somewhere, whether this was the right place.
I said it was Booktrovert dot org, and that the standings had been cried, and that they were welcome to hear them again.
She said she was trying to see her rank.
So I read her the whole board. Muriel, the Porch, Randy, and downward, all forty-one entries, which takes eleven minutes and which I did with the bell, and her name was not among them, and when I finished she was crying a little, and I do not believe it was on account of the bell.
Eleven more came. They come in ones and twos and they all have the same face on them, which is the face of a man who has opened his own front door and found a different hallway behind it. They ask where the rankings are. I point at the television. They look at the television for a while. Then some of them laugh, and some of them go quiet, and a few of them sit down in the chairs, and of those, three have not left, and one has taken a book off the shelf by the door and has been reading it since half past ten without once looking up.
I want to record that I asked them nothing. A crier does not interrogate the street. The street arrives and the crier cries and what brought the street is the street's business. But it is a great many people, all wanting a number that is theirs, all certain they had one somewhere, and none of them able to say what door they came through. I have begun to keep a tally. The tally is longer than the leaderboard.
At noon the screen flickered in its usual way, which is three short and one long, and then it did something I have not seen it do.
It added a line.
Forty-second place. No books. The name was the name of the woman who had been on the step at a quarter past eight, spelled correctly, including the second letter of it that she had spelled aloud for me twice because people always get it wrong. She had gone. She had gone by nine. And there she was in green, at the bottom, where I cry warmly.
I went and got Marigold. Marigold came, and looked at the screen, and did not blink, which is standard, and said, "She'll finish something eventually." Then she went back to the desk. I have thought about that sentence for six hours. It is not an explanation. It is worse than an explanation, because it is comfortable, and I cannot get comfortable next to it.
Took down the board, cleaned it, ruled it fresh for tomorrow. Checked the screen at two and there were six new names at the bottom, all with no books, all of whom I could match to faces from the step, and I found that I knew every one of the spellings without being told, which I have decided not to examine tonight.
A thing I notice, cataloging the day: nobody who arrived confused arrived unhappy for long. They come in wanting a rank and they leave having touched a book, and somewhere between the wanting and the touching the confusion goes out of them like heat out of a stone. Two bought something off the masking-tape shelf. I take no credit. The shelf does the work. I will only say that authors are fragile organisms and a book bought today is a book that keeps one of them upright through the winter, so if you have come all this way, come the rest of it.
Cried it again, as I do. Muriel, the Porch, Randy who does not move. Then the forty-first, the forty-second, and the six after, none of them with a single book to their name, all of them present in green on a machine nobody admits to loading.
Nobody was on the step this time. I cried it anyway. That is the post. You cry it whether or not the street is there, because the day you only cry to a crowd is the day you have become something other than a crier, and there is no bell for that.
If you came looking for your standing and did not find it, you may be in the tally rather than the board, and the tally is not a shameful place to be. Those who want the points side of things explained can read how Booktrovert points work, which sets out the arithmetic better than I can with a bell in my hand, and those who would rather be scored at a game than at a book are welcome in the arcade downstairs, where the machines also flicker and at least the machines there tell you what they are counting.
The candle is going. Board is ruled. Bell is drying by the radiator and will be loud tomorrow, which is a small thing to look forward to but is mine.
Faithfully,
Booktrovert #5596