(or wherein I once again prove that the parts of poetry which intrigue me may not be what I am supposed to be talking about)

You know what I really appreciated about Tremulous Hinge: the layout of some of the poems. Like the indentation. Seriously. Or there’d be a thin poem, maybe only eight or nine spaces worth of letters on each line. Then each verse would be only lines long and it would be these little rectangles like a path down the page.

I can hear one of my high school English teacher’s sarcasm right now: That’s what you think is important about poetry?

Yes. I mean, how do the poets know

   where to end lines and

how much to

             indent?

So I read Tremulous Hinge and thought about that. The poems that were over a page were too long and could have been tightened. One poem mentioned a Catholic grandfather, which made me think of my Catholic grandfather. The poems felt working class, close houses, thin walls lacking insulation (I don’t mean that in a negative way, because I read what I just wrote and it sounds super classist. I mean more like you felt you were walking through that sort of neighbourhood as you read the words; some of the poems drew the scene like a photograph).

I wonder how one becomes a poet. It’s so different than how I see the world. Sometimes I feel like an alien when I read poetry. I didn’t mind so much with Tremulous Hinge though.

Tremulous Hinge by Adam Giannelli went on sale April 15, 2017.

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

After my previous realization that physics is hard, I needed to go back to basics with physics so easy that even a baby could understand it. And here was General Relativity for Babies up for review on Netgalley, so I grabbed my copy and well, it’s a board book (ages zero and up the back tells me) with the very basics of general relativity laid out (flat space, curved space, mass curves space, lots of mass in small place = black hole, etc.) The book ends with Now you know General Relativity! Do I? I already knew all of what the book defined. Cambridge University physics books hurt my brain and Baby University books are too simple. My pursuit of physics knowledge leaves me like Goldlilocks — nothing is just right (okay, except it ends up that things are just right for Goldlilocks, who eats the porridge and falls asleep in the bed, and then gets eaten by bears, I think. I can’t remember the ending, probably because my mind is filled with physics.)

It would be a cute book for the babies of scientists. I would have liked reading it when Tesfa was teeny. If they ever need someone to write Galois Theory for Babies, I’d totally do it. I love Galois Theory.

General Relativity for Babies by Chris Ferrie went on sale May 2nd, 2017.

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

After getting the first book from a librarything giveaway, I got the second one from Netgalley. Score me getting free books!

Tesfa dislikes having me ask her questions about her books. So she did a book report for me instead.

The deets (including creative spellings):

The title of my book is: Super narwhal and Jelly Jolt
The author’s name is: Ben cLanton
The illustrator’s name is: (same)

Character:
My favourite character was: Jelly Jolt
Four words to describe this character:

1. cute
2. funny
3. nise
4. happy

Setting::
One place where the story happened was: when narwhal has a tie.
Three words to describe this setting:

1. funny
2. cute
3. very awesome

The Story:
Beginning: narwhal gets to be a superhero
Middle: narwhal plays with a sea star
End: narwhal and Jelly make a book

The book was:

My favourite event:
all of it!

Super Narwhal and Jelly Jolt by Ben Clanton went on sale May 2, 2017.

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

Well, I had a good run of ARCs that didn’t have something bizarre in them. No squid sex or unexpected aliens or guess what someone has multiple personalities and we’re like sixty percent of the way through the book before we even mention it once. I’d even started getting into The Lucky Ones. I wasn’t that enthused after the first two or so chapters (each one a self-contained slice of characters that are all inter-related somehow in Columbia’s many and varied civil wars/war on drugs/insurgencies/etc.), but then I got into the rhythm, wasn’t thrown off by the jumping perspectives, the changes in viewpoint, even the second-person (you, we, etc.) parts.

Then rabbits. On cocaine.

Not just rabbits on cocaine. Rabbits on cocaine from their perspective because, of course, their thoughts and everything would be exactly like humans. Word-for-word.

One of the rabbits smokes a crack pipe.

And so, my respect for the novel was pretty much ruined. I tried. I really did. I got to the end. I thought all the different connections between the characters were interesting. I could see it all in my mind, the locations, the people, the sounds, but, no matter what, this is a book where a rabbit smokes a crack pipe and my mind is so small and petty that that’s all I’m going to be able to associate with it.

The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico went on sale March 7, 2017.

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

I read this comic, then promptly forgot that I read it, which is odd since it’s actually a kinda cute book about cute little crabs who can only move in a straight line.
Then two crabs intersect at a perpendicular angle and the world is their oyster (hee hee sea pun!), and if not the world, than their little French estuary. The drawings have that French mod/new-wave feel and I did enjoy reading it, but then again, I keep forgetting that I did, which must mean something, if I could only figure out what.

March of the Crabs Volume 1 by Arthur de Pins went on sale March 31, 2015.

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

Other than getting the theme song stuck in my head, what is the purpose of a rebooted Flintstones? Nostalgia I suppose. Getting to play around within the confines of a system? All those stories you wish the Flintstones had told while you were home sick at lunch during grade school (The Flintstones came on at noon when I was growing up. This may not be the case for people who did not grow up in the same environs as I did — I don’t know. And so, The Flintstones always make me taste Zoodles because that’s what you ate when you were home sick. Again, that might not be a universally understood *thing*)?

Recently I read A Hundred Thousand Worlds by Bob Proehl, which briefly touches on whether readers want new characters and new stories or simply new stories for comics. Would I have requested a comic about early humans that weren’t the Flintstones? I don’t know. So I guess that’s the purpose of a rebooted Flintstones, for people like me, who are indecisive about what they want out of reading-life, I guess.

And none of this has anything to do with The Flintsones Vol. 1 per se. Hmmm.

So it’s The Flintstones, but more for grown-ups with digs at vitamins and chimpanzees spouting David Bowie lyrics. Fred and Barney are veterans of a Vietnam-War-type-of-debacle that clear-cut the way for Bedrock’s establishment. Wilma is an artist (was she on the TV show? I remember she was a cigarette girl in one episode). Betty is just Betty (boo!). The elephant vacuum cleaner forms a friendship with the armadillo bowling ball that is the most compelling relationship in the comic, although I get the impression that there are a lot of sight gags and *wink wink nudge nudge*’s that I missed because I am lousy at reading comics (I tend to read the words and gloss over the pictures) and, as an ARC, the quality is not as great as it would be in the actual book.

The strength in The Flintstones Vol. 1 (and I keep typing Flintsones rather than Flintstones, so I apologize if that typo squeezes its way into the final review) is the way each comic feels like an episode of the TV show, even with updated drawings and situations and style. It feels like I watched six episodes of The Flintstones yesterday, eating Zoodles, in my pyjamas. Russell captured that television feeling somehow, and I’m not exactly sure how, but he did, even if I think the whole thing should be abandoned for a spin-off Vacuum and Bowling Ball story line instead.

The Flintstones Vol. 1 by Mark Russell went on sale March 28, 2017.

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

I’m still not sure if I know how to read poetry. I find poems don’t stick in my head very long, like they blend into my neurons’ background noise after reading them, thinning out until there’s not much left. Like yesterday, less than twelve hours ago, I read Everything Reminds You of Something Else, with a poem about the ringing postman, and laying in bed not getting up, and I knew exactly that feeling and thought I’ll write about that in my review! and then forgot about it entirely until this moment when I was flipping (well, e-flipping, it’s a PDF) through and remembered. So I went from knowing exactly that feeling, a poem with perfect resonance, to, less than a day later, wiped from my mind. Is that me or the poetry? What does it say that the only poems I manage to recall are A.A. Milne’s and Shel Silverstein’s poems for kids?

Unprompted, here is what I remembered from Everything Reminds You of Something Else:

1. there is a poem with a guinea pig in it (for eating, not cuddling; they are in Ecuador);
2. this quote: writing is compensation for a shortfall of some sort.

Maybe poetry is like air and we breathe it in greedily, use it in our muscles, but then, usefulness exhausted, we breathe out the remains and forget about it?

I think I liked Everything Reminds You of Something Else. There were many >, which make me think of greater than‘s. Indents are cut lines all over the pages. I liked the flow. It seemed consistent. Maybe I should stop requesting to review poetry books, but I like having poetry in my life, even if I don’t know how to speak intelligently about it.

A pigeon in a crack of the Wailing Wall — that was in the poetry book too. See, I can remember some things 🙂

Everything Reminds You of Something Else by Elana Wolff went on sale April 1, 2017.

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

In which Meghan judges requests books by their cover and finds herself reading a self-published physics manifesto.

See this cover:

It reminds me of this cover:

even though the blue and green are inverted and the first is about physics and the second about modern algebra. The second I bought when I was eleven or twelve at the Port Charlotte public library, thinking I was so smart because I totally knew what algebra meant. Me thinking algebra meant the elementary algebra of solving linear equations. The book thinking algebra meant abstract algebra starting by defining what I vaguely recall as a group and going from there. Smack down to eleven-year old Meghan. I think my copy of Modern Algebra might be somewhere. Geoff’s office maybe? I always meant to go through it and be super smart. Then I went and got some math degrees, so I probably don’t really *need* to go through it any more, especially since I don’t know where it ended up.

Is any of this relevant to The Universe is a Machine? No. Not really, other than I am interested in things that remind me of other things I didn’t read.

So here’s the rub: The Universe is a Machine is a self-published book about classical mechanics, specifically centrifugal forces, which acted on the (cutest nomenclature ever) baby universe, giving the universe an ellipsoid shape, which one can infer through imaging of the CMB in which a doppler effect is observed. Spinning at startling speeds at its outset, all matter was flung to the edges, while anti-matter was not. So somewhere in the center of the universe is a big glob of antimatter, while at the edges is matter. If we assume a big crunch, then eventually matter and anti-matter will meet, EXPLOSION, and possibly cause global warming.

It all sounds … plausible maybe? I have no idea. I’m not a cosmologist. It definitely sounds science-y enough, but I can’t shake the feeling that, while I shouldn’t discount outsider scientists, wouldn’t you rather share your ideas in a peer-reviewed setting? Or even on arXiv? How do I know you’re not just cherry-picking the examples and numbers that support your hypothesis rather than taking a look at everything to find a hypothesis that best suits the data? You know that feeling you get when your grocery bill is a whole dollar amount (like $63.00) and you think Wow! How rare is that!, even though it’s just as rare as getting a decimal of $0.89 or $0.12 or $0.45, except we tend not to notice the other decimals, only the times when it’s $0.00. Felt that way the whole book.

So I have no idea. It’s dry and it attempts to sound scientific. But without peer review by people who actually know astrophysics, I can’t say much. Even though I did. A whole lot. Up above.

The Universe is a Machine by James Michel Hughes went on sale September 28, 2016.

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

I understand the sentiment. Tesfa had a birthday party for our cat the same day as my party. More people came for the cat party.

Little slice-of-life comics collected together. No real over-arching plot. At the end they get married (out of nowhere, but maybe if I had followed along on the webcomic it wouldn’t have been so out of nowhere). There are cats. I enjoy reading books where cats are present. Ananth and Yuko’s cats seem very much like my two cats (although, perhaps all cats seem like my cats because all cats are essentially interchangeable and we cat lovers are deluding ourselves into giving our pets personalities and … nah. Cats are each and every one uniquely awesome.)

Nothing earth shattering, but a pleasant way to spend an hour, reading about cats and New York and bits of other people’s lives.

Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us by Ananth Hirsch and Yuko Ota went on sale March 29, 2017.

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

There wasn’t a whole lot here that resonated with me, probably because I’m not going to have a lot of similarities with someone who sees a pubic hair peaking out of a bathing suit crotch and freaks out. Or who expects her friends to pull the emergency-stop lever on a train after she misses it. But, at the same time, there’s something to be admired about a woman who acts, to take Mindy Kaling’s words, “with the entitlement of a tall, blond, white man.” Something. But then many tall, blond, white men act like jerks. The vignettes Khona recounts in her book also make her look like a jerk. So success? Yay?

It’s a sort of fluff-feminism, like a collection of Cosmo articles, which is fine. Nothing wrong with fluff-feminism, and, as Khona points out a handful of times, nothing wrong with being a feminist and also enjoying fashion, makeup, etc. But this book is just potato chips: you aren’t going to feel that full afterwards, even if you get a grin or two from it.

Are You There Krishna? It’s Me, Reshma. Or Rachel. Or Whatever. by Rachel Khona went on sale February 1, 2017.

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