the idiot book elif — 1 thorough investigation

the idiot book elif, typed in a hurry at the coffee shop because the bookstore on the corner was closed, was a strange detour. mondays, in my view, beat fridays for several reasons, and one of those reasons walks past me on the fourth floor with surprising frequency.

back at the desk now, 11:47, screen angled at the usual unfriendly degree. carla is upstairs in the annual planning meeting on the third floor, the one where the slides arrive in a different order than the agenda and nobody flags it. that buys me what the building clock calls the rest of the morning, which is a unit of time that means “until somebody walks past your monitor.”

the paperback is on the desk, spine cracked at page 84, with a receipt from the closed bookstore being used as a bookmark. brenda the dead plant supervises from the windowsill in the only role she has ever taken seriously. the plan: turn this paperback into a how-to and, while i’m at it, defend the take that nobody else at this floor will defend.

1. the idiot book elif, why this how-to exists

the idiot book elif arrived in my hands the slow way: i walked to the corner, found the shutter down, walked one more block, and bought a copy from a man who also sells phone chargers. the paperback edition costs less than two cups of coffee at the place where i had to sit and type. it has 423 pages, which is roughly what the goodreads page on the idiot agrees on, give or take a printing. it weighs roughly the same as a medium yoga mat, which i mention because i own three of those, two more than the apartment requires.

this is not a review of the novel. the wider investigation into the word “idiot” as a word, a brand, and a low-grade jurisdiction sits in the pillar post next door. this is a how-to, in the sense that i am about to tell you how to read the idiot book elif on a monday, which is the correct day for it, and why every other day is a downgrade. the paperback, the chapters, the margin notes, the receipt-bookmark — all of it is the apparatus i’m submitting.

the author is elif batuman. i have written about the elif batuman novel and what it does to the title separately, on a different morning, in a different mood. that file is the author file. this file is the object file. the object is the paperback, with chapters, with a price sticker still half-attached to the back cover.

2. step 1 to step 7, how to read the idiot book elif on a monday

this is the ordered list. it is a defense, in disguise, of the take that mondays are objectively better than fridays. the steps are real. i have done six of them. i am working on the seventh.

step 1. on sunday night, place the paperback on the kitchen counter next to the seventh microwave. brenda the dead plant should be visible from the same angle, even if she contributes nothing to the chemistry. the placement is the contract. the contract is with monday morning, which has already started keeping its end of it.

step 2. wake up on monday. the take is mondays are objectively better than fridays, and step 2 is when the take begins paying you back. fridays carry the false promise of recovery. mondays carry the honest promise of pages. you cannot read on a friday because the friday is busy lying about what the weekend will fix. you can read on a monday because the monday has nothing to sell you.

step 3. open the paperback to chapter one before opening any application that has a notification. selin, the protagonist, is a freshman at harvard in the mid-nineties, which is a setting that has already lost the ability to interrupt you. her email account uses a server that no longer exists. that is the chapter one peace dividend. fridays do not offer this.

step 4. read for the duration of one full pre-meeting window. i use the window between the first cup and the call carla makes about whether the all-hands has slides. that window is a monday-only resource. on fridays the window is occupied by a person on the fourth floor asking you “any plans” with a face that has already given up.

step 5. annotate in pencil. underline the sentence on page 47 about the difference between knowing a language and being known by one. underline the sentence on page 112 about the email that “did not explain itself.” make a small mark in the margin shaped like a circle with a dot in it whenever the protagonist does something that you, the reader, would also do if you had her email account and her hungarian friend. the marks accumulate. the accumulation is the receipt for monday.

step 6. at the lunch crossover, close the paperback at the end of a chapter, not in the middle. a chapter break on a monday is a reservation for tuesday. a chapter break on a friday is a request for the weekend, and the weekend, as established, is a promissory note backed by nothing.

step 7. the unfinished step. carry the paperback in the bag you also use for unrelated paperwork. on the friday after, when the receipt-bookmark falls out, do not panic. note the page. mark it. continue. the take is holding: mondays are objectively better than fridays. step 7 is the step that proves it, by being the step you reach because the monday gave you a head start.

the seven steps are also a defense of HT9 in disguise: mondays are objectively better than fridays. you cannot do step 4 on a friday. step 4 dies on a friday. step 5 turns into “i’ll annotate later.” step 6 becomes a chapter break in the middle of a paragraph. step 7 becomes a paperback that goes in a bag and stays in a bag. monday is the day on which the steps survive contact with a person.

3. the_4B_guy at the coffee shop, allegedly

the coffee shop, where the cold open began, is also where the_4B_guy was sitting at the corner table when i walked in. he was reading something on a laptop with a sticker that said “yes” in lowercase, no context. he did not look up. i did not say hello. that is the entire friendship contract between us, signed in absentia, honored by both parties since whatever month his lease started.

he saw the paperback in my hand. i am sure of this because his eyes did the small flick that people do when a noun on a cover catches them. he did not comment. he did not nod. he did not pick up his own book, which was a hardback i could not see the spine of, possibly business non-fiction, possibly a novel that did not want to be seen with me. that is the_4B_guy’s signature: maximum proximity, minimum interaction. he and i have lived above and below each other for a year and have made eye contact exactly the number of times the lease says we have to.

i wrote the cold open on a napkin while he was there. i did not write his name. i wrote “the corner table guy is the 4B guy.” then i underlined it. that, technically, is a witness statement. on the wall_insults_digital it would be filed as “ambient confirmation,” which is a category i made up this morning and will defend until lunch.

4. verdict, mondays are objectively better than fridays, with paperback evidence

the verdict is the take, restated with the paperback as evidence. mondays produced 84 pages of selin and ivan, two annotated margins, one circled-dot, one chapter break held until the appropriate moment, and one ambient confirmation from the_4B_guy at a corner table. fridays, in my running ledger, produce 12 pages, a chapter break in the wrong place, and a paperback that ends the day in a bag.

this is also where i nod, briefly, to the wider work on gaslighting and the small art of being told the timeline you remember is incorrect, because the friday-is-better-than-monday position is a low-grade gaslighting performed by the calendar against the worker. the calendar is a master at it. the calendar has a budget. the budget pays for posters in elevators that say things like “almost the weekend.” gaslighting in serif font is still gaslighting. mondays do not need posters. mondays have pages.

i’d like to credit, briefly, dave, who once laughed for nine straight minutes at the suggestion that mondays were better than fridays and then conceded, on a monday, that i had a point about the pages. that concession was made in a parking lot at 9:14 in the morning, with the seventh microwave’s reheated coffee in my hand. dave, by the count i keep running, still owes me the three hundred we never resolved. but he conceded the take. that is a separate kind of repayment.

elif batuman, on page 84, has a sentence about the difference between watching a thing happen and being inside it. that is the friday vs monday divide, in literary form. fridays you watch the week happen. mondays you are inside the week. the paperback agrees with me. the receipt-bookmark agrees with me. the_4B_guy at the corner table did not disagree, which i am counting as agreement. brenda the dead plant has no opinion, which is also a form of agreement.

for the wider context, the long list of complete idiots and the daily working definitions thereof includes a section on day-of-week preferences that maps almost exactly onto this take. the cross-reference is not a coincidence. it is a paragraph i wrote on a monday, defended in a paperback, and have not been able to dislodge since.

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