After finishing a book about illegal Israeli settlements, I picked up my iPad and figured Hey, a book about cosmology won’t be too taxing. I have a scientific mind with a math background. I’ll be done this one faster than the inflationary period following the Big Bang.

… a week later …

Physics is hard and my brain hurts! There’s a reason I went into pure rather than applied mathematics. Applied stuff is just so dependent on seemingly arbitrary constants, which, kinda, is what A Fortunate Universe is all about — varying seemingly little things (like slight gravitational things in quarks or how electrons do electrony things), and bam life over. Well, more like life-never-begun since most of the changes happen in the initial conditions of Big Band Land. As long as you’re willing to believe Lewis and Barnes because they are physicists and (likely) you are not, the changes they propose give the consequences they suggest, since the maths (likely long and involving many DEs and renormalizations) are not included. So most of the book reads like “Change the spin of something and then hydrogen can’t combine into heavier elements, so then there is no carbon, and then no us.” And then there are random faux-conversations between Lewis and Barnes (including a fifty page one) to make the book more Socratic I suppose? As well as many supposedly endearing and cutesy footnotes to make sure we know that just because they are physicists, they aren’t robots. Oh, and this:

Jerry Gergich: “Because I think comic sans always screams fun.”

Many of the figures and equations in A Fortunate Universe are written in comic sans to make math more approachable or something. My eyes bleed.

So I learned lots of physics this week. Or I think I did. I realized I may have been mixing up photons and protons in my brain for a while, so that was helpful. And I appreciated how multiverses were presented (even if this was in the fifty page faux conversation): that they could be out there, but at such a distance that we can’t currently see them, and moving away from us (or us from them) so that we will never see them. So all the universes could be out there, but like discrete dots we can never reach or see. I’d never thought of multiverses like that before.

A Fortunate Universe by Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes went on sale November 15, 2016.

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

I really waffled on how to rate this book. Can some books just not have to be rated? Can they exist outside some sort of rating spectrum? For here we have the memoirs of an Austrian, Jewish, man forced to flee to France after the Anschluss, then subjected to more persecutions, first the micro-aggression pas d’histories attitude he encounters in many of his interactions in French, and then further macro-aggressive Nazi awfulness once the Nazis invade France. Through a combination of good fortune and hard work by members of the French Resistance, Scheyer, his wife, and his non-Jewish housekeeper (who chooses to throw her lot in with the Scheyer’s rather than reap the “benefits” of her Aryaness), survive the Nazi regime in France, but not after some close calls and some internments in French concentration camps.

So that’s why I have trouble rating it. I can’t say I enjoyed reading about how awful human beings can be to each other (and possibly, since my last netgalley book was about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, I need to pick some lighter ARC reads), and I can’t say that, either emotionally or stylistically, the memoir made me feel anything, say in the vein of Suite Française, which details some of the same events, such as the occupation and fleeing of Paris. Of course Asylum obviously isn’t a book written with a purpose of giving me the feels or entertaining me or anyone else. It’s not even written with the intent of educating anyone. It’s testimony, but it’s dry and a bit dated, and Scheyer isn’t that likeable, which actually may be the book’s strongest point. When told that he should be suitably grateful, suitably thankful, suitably happy about his release from concentration camps, you can feel his anger and despair burble up to the surface. Why should he be happy, when it’s just a trick of luck and connections that got him free? Why should he be happy most of society did nothing and will likely do nothing again if the Nazis and French sympathizers round him up again? Why should he be happy when the call of the day is it’s only the Jews? That, that anger and displeasure, will be what I take away from this memoir, in a time when there are calls for certain groups not to be so angry, not to be so strident, not to be so other, just to be like “us” and wait your turn and smile at all the atrocities, big and small, perpetrated by the strong against the weak. Sit down, shut up, don’t complain, always smile. Yeah, that worked out so well in the past.

Anger, when we see injustice, is good. Anger is what we need. Thank you Asylum for reminding me of that.

Asylum by Moriz Scheyer went on sale September 27, 2016.

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

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind — Edward Gibbon

Don’t read it over the holidays. It’s too grim — Former ACT UP member when I said I was going to read the book over the holidays

And yeah, it is grim. In fact, it is more than a whole thesaurus-entry full of words synonymous with grim. Everyone dies, basically. Needlessly, both in hindsight and also in actual at-the-time fact. It’s almost like bearing witness, reading this book. I lost track of who some of the people were, but that hardly mattered. This document exists now, but it’s hard to say what to do with it. It won’t bring anyone back. It isn’t to offer absolution. Just witness. Like a writing down of an oral history.

France weaves his own story of a gay man in 1970s/80s/90s New York throughout. It’s done deftly, unlike me writing this paragraph, his insertions. Obviously, he didn’t die, as all the others around him did.

Then it ends. With protease inhibitors abruptly. It feels like being dragged through trials of Greek-mythic proportions and then stop. The lack of resolution stings, but not as much as all the senseless deaths.

How to Survive a Plague by David France went on sale November 29, 2016.

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

I continue my quest for middle grade novels that I love to read to Tesfa as much as Tesfa loves having them read to her.

So here we have a book of female pirates, who kidnap the Bland Sisters, to take them on their pirating adventures. The writing is full of quirk and cleverness and sort of nonsensicalness that recalls Pooh and Piglet’s conversations.

“…And then we can swim until we find land. There must be land
within swimming distance, in some direction.”

“There’s one problem,” said Jaundice.

“What’s that?” asked Kale.

“We don’t know how to swim,” said Jaundice.

“Excellent point,” said Kale.

And, as one sees above, the sisters are named Jaundice and Kale, which I appreciate, having once told Tesfa she had two imaginary sisters named Strawberry and Pumpernickel who lived in our back shed. And Tesfa was happy, asking, as we ended the book the two questions that always mean she enjoyed the story (Is this our book? as opposed to the library’s, which means she can read it whenever she wants; and Is there going to be a sequel? so she can read more set in this world.)

I love middle grade novels. I love clever writing. I love girl power stories. But then The Jolly Regina has a whole vexing bullying subplot that made me uncomfortable. I had a Feeling as the Bland Sisters would say. I’m not great with bullying subplots, or people being mean to other people, or shunning subplots, to begin with (for example, Harriet the Spy upset me quite a bit and I’m not reading it to Tesfa ever), and I’m never happy with platitudes like “they bully you because you’re special” or getting back at bullies by being mean to them in turn. Plus the fat-shaming that started the whole bullying in the first place makes me a sad panda. Additionally, why can’t people be fat without having to be all I’m going to eat well and exercise as a resolution to their story? Sure the message — don’t be mean to people, exercise and healthy eating are A-Okay — is fine, but as sound as the message is, the presentation is problematic and sloppy. It soured the whole experience for me, and, clearly striking a nerve, I can’t get past it to focus on anything else that happened in the story. My mind is stuck there.

I still feel uncomfortable thinking about it. I guess that says more about me than about The Jolly Regina.

The Jolly Regina by Kara LaReau went on sale January 10, 2017.

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

The Good:

1. I like the lack of articles in the title. It isn’t A History of Wolves or The History of Wolves. There’s something solid about a title that doesn’t need the emphasis on articles. I don’t know — it stands on its own two feet or something.

2. I’ve never been to Minnesota. History of Wolves isn’t chock-a-block overflowing with description. But everything, every place mentioned, the high school, the lake, the cabin, the summer house, the court house, the motel in Duluth, the apartment, every single place our narrator goes, I could see it. Perfectly. Crisp as a fresh cold apple. Fantasy or sci-fi world-building authors, take note: Fridlund’s judicious descriptions are what you should study. No one likes being drowned in adjectives. No one needs it.

The Bad:

1. Take a suitcase. Stuff it full. Zip it up. Now unzip and put twice as much in again. Zip it up. But still, unzip and add more. And more. And more and more and more and more.

History of Wolves is this overstuffed suitcase. There’s too much in this book, for plot and background and just general stuff. Then, for a book that overflows with possibilities, it reads so slowly, so very close to tediously. And then the background may be more interesting than the story up front. The commune. The relationship with her mother. Lily and the pedophile. In filling out the background world of the story, too much wants to bubble up to the surface. The zipper strains. The suitcase explodes going round and round on the luggage carousel. The story needs a trim back on all the wonderfulness of the background. Then maybe give the background its own story.

The Ugly: There’s nothing ugly here. But to not have The Ugly would unbalance my review. So The Ugly. Empty. Null set.

So I liked History of Wolves and I didn’t like it. But I wish for Fridlund the best. I think she deserves it. But I also think she’ll be improving as she writes more. I think her potential is somewhere in the stars.

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund went on sale January 3, 2017.

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