I took my Brownie troop to the Observatory last week (twenty-four seven year olds in a tiny, enclosed space — not my smartest idea), so it seemed fitting that the next book I reviewed was about the Cosmos. In German, the universe translates to das All, which I also wonderfully appreciate. Einstein spoke German, so there we have it — tying everything in together!

So The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (ellipses in a title; really? Really?) reads like a science article run a little amok. It has quite a readable, polished, and leisurely tone; a bit chummy, which isn’t a problem. The odd changes in tense to present whenever something happens is off-putting. But, basically, even for a short book, it seems too long. I can see it being an article in a magazine. A book seems a stretch.

The title too seems a bit of misnomer. Einstein’s destruction of Vulcan, a purported unsighted planet between the Sun and Mercury necessary to account for Mercury’s orbit under Newtonian laws of physics, was hardly a Godzilla-Einstein coming in and purposefully stomping out Vulcan. Vulcan’s non-existence came as a consequence of Einstein’s theories of relativity, and ends up being almost a non-event. A good deal of the book is about pre-Vulcan: the initial sightings of Neptune and Uranus and how those fit so perfectly into Newtonian physics, so not even falling into the title at all. For me, I didn’t need the huge background sections on earlier astronomical outings. I mean, ha ha ha Edison shot a stuffed jackrabbit, my life isn’t changed for knowing that.

Finally, we get to Einstein and the two halves of the book: the hunt for Vulcan and let’s follow around Einstein for a bit, came together rather ineptly. It seemed like Levenson was torn between which story he wanted to tell. Both are worth telling. In a magazine article maybe. Or in a longer book with deeper focus. But in this book, it feels both like a tease and like a slog.

I don’t often read popular science books, so this was good for me, at least, even if I wasn’t particularly taken with the book. I expanded mein All, but I often skimmed the science explanations. I should work on learning how to read science. As a former scientist, I am quite lazy about that. I don’t know if, in this case, it’s me or Levenson. Did I gloss over the science because I need to work at reading non-narrative or because Levenson’s explanation didn’t grab my interest?

And, from a technical standpoint re: epubs; someone’s got to get footnotes and endnotes less awful on my kobo. Computer scientists: you have your goal!

The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson went on sale November 3, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A few months ago, when I reviewed The Skeleton Road by Val McDiermid, I mused a little on what it would take to put something horrific into your novel. The Skeleton Road had the Balkans conflict, and I used the word, albeit kindly, disrespectful to describe its inclusion. I don’t think I’ll use words like that to describe the inclusion of the Balkan conflict into The Little Red Chairs. There’s nuance here. The horror here doesn’t supplant character development. There is horror in this world, The Little Red Chairs says. And I don’t have to justify or relativasize or explain it to you. O’Brien is smart enough and trusts us enough not to need explanation. We can be confronted with it. She trusts us to do that.

I’ve only read O’Brien once before, The House of Splendid Isolation, which took me something like six tries to get past page twenty. I couldn’t see it with that book, but with this one, I can see why she is considered one of the greats. She takes apart the narrative, the point-of-view, the tense, like threads all placed next to each other. But instead of a jumble, it’s like an abstract painting you can’t turn away from. A car wreck. You can see it coming, the downfall. O’Brien doesn’t hide who Vuk is from the reader. He’s a wolf. He’s a criminal. He’s an exterminator of people. He exists as he is, without, as I said before, explanation or justification. Evil is there. How easy it is though, like Fidelma who starts an affair with Vuk when he arrives as an alternative healter in their sleepy Irish town, to see something different. It isn’t that Fidelma is willfully blind to her lover’s past. It isn’t that she knows but chooses not to. She just doesn’t know. But can you know someone though? Ever? Truly? Always? Does Fidelma know her husband Jack? Does she know the people she meets in London? In The Hague? Anywhere? Do we know her? We all keep things from each other. The beauty of The Little Red Chairs is that what we are given of the characters is enough to support a novel that shimmers and clings like gossamer. It makes you sick but you keep reading.

So it would be perfect but isn’t. There are *shudder* dream sequences. Dreams that have meaning. Dreams that offer insight into characters. I hate that. I hate it so much. So I took away a star. The Little Red Chairs is four stars out of five. Please don’t put dreams in your novels.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien went on sale October 29, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Since one of the stories in Past Habitual has the word topology in the title (a rather surreal story about dental cleaning and a meditation about M and W’s and dental hygienists’ bosoms), I feel justified in using topology to describe my feelings of Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn.

Yay math!

Let’s take the earth. I’m going to assume that most of you agree the earth is round. But locally, it doesn’t feel round. It, generally, feels pretty flat wherever one is standing. The curvature of the earth is so massive compared to a teensy-tiny person that it can feel mind-boggling that really, we’re on a big (almost) sphere when it really seems, in our perspective, to be a flat plane. Such is it with my enjoyment of Past Habitual: give me a page of the book and I’ll like it. I’ll like the writing. I’ll like the words. I’ll like the way each page pulls you right into Ireland, one of my favourite places to read about, with its complex history and shifting loyalties. But pull back far enough and I’m like “What the f*ck is going on?” because the stories tend to jump, these massive, unprepared, leaps of logic and time and characters and style and I just don’t know. I do not know how to describe it other than baffling. Globally, in respect to Past Habitual, I spent a fair deal of time being baffled.

As for style, there’s a lot of almost stream-of-consciousness, memory. The ones focusing on Ireland’s past could all be linked, all told from the same characters one may suppose. Themes reappear: the Irish War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s, Germans coming to Ireland during the Second World War, the Catholic Church, sentences here and there in Irish. The book doesn’t explain Ireland for the non-Irish. I don’t mind that. I like the narrator’s voice most of the time — not so much when he offers to kill the kittens, but most of the time. It’s rural without being idyllic. Most of it feels true, at least, as I’ve said, locally. Globally? Incomprehensible.

Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn went on sale April 13, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(I haven’t even managed to read my O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 and already 2015 has come out. I’m never going to catch up.)

I like short stories. They’re my potato chips or candy, snacking for my brain (even the serious short stories that should be more like a lump in my stomach). I pick up short story books or request them as ARCs because I like reading them. That’s why I asked for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, okay Introduction? I don’t need twenty pages of an English professor rah-rah-brigading me about short stories, then summarizing each story, then explaining to me why each story merits inclusion in the collection. Just let me at the stories! I hate introductions.

So let’s get to the stories. Hooray! Stories! But they are American. I always struggle to articulate my feelings towards American fiction. The best I’ve ever come up with is insular. There’s a self-importance too, but no one that is mean-spirited. It’s not bragging or even humble-bragging. But it’s whatever comes with the knowledge that due to population and money and global positioning and power: that being American can mean forcing an influence on the rest of the English speaking world that say me, as a Canadian, cannot force. The stories here vary between US-born to those who have chosen (or are in the process of choosing, as in Manuel Muñoz’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”) to locate themselves in the States, and this tone of American-ness washes the stories out. Even the ones that are stylistically different (the first person plural of Naira Kuzmich’s “The Kingsley Drive Chorus”, the fairy tale world of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”, the East Africa of Lionel Shriver’s “Kilifi Creek”) are still similar. One might believe that these were all written by the same author, each story investigating the subtle. It’s like there was a memo in 2015: Forget what they told you in high school about short stories. No changes, epiphanies, or surprises. I can’t say there are a lot of surprises here. There are a lot of abrupt endings in surprise’s place. Many of these stories simply stop in another shared stylistic quirk. I can’t be satisfied with a story that simply stops. I feel ripped off.

I should also crown my favourite, simply because the three person jury each wrote a little paragraph at the end regarding their favourite and I guess that’s the thing one is supposed to do in collections like this. I’ll pick the fairy tale monstrousness of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”. That one didn’t need to be an American story, in the way some of the other stories needed to be set in the States or inhabited by US-ians. It chose to be an American story. That made me like it best.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 edited by Laura Furman went on sale September 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.