meghan rose allen

A bunch of Japanese comic strips about Atsumi, a high school girl who looks like a child, and her younger brother Atsushi, a child who looks like a high school student. They have parents, eventually, about half-way through when I was starting to wonder why Atsumi and Atsushi were living on their own. Their friends and neighbours make an appearance. Atsushi’s teacher, Moriyama-sensei, is around too. The jokes just recycle through — mainly that Atsushi, looking like an adult but really a young boy, keeps getting arrested for “kidnapping” his classmates. I guess it’s funny that the Japanese police force are on the lookout for child predators? Or that a lot of older girls/women want to date Atsushi because he looks like an attractive young man? I guess, maybe, sort of funny? Reading Recorder and Randsell is sort of like reading all the Peanuts‘ strips where Lucy is holding the football ball for Charlie Brown: you know what’s going to happen, but you keep reading anyway.

But, over-arching everything else in this manga, we need to discuss more on Moriyama-sensei (ignoring the fact that she seems sexually attracted to her student Atsushi, which is just rather unsettling.) Even adjusting for manga/anime style, Moriyama-sensei’s bosom is distracting. My back aches just looking at her boobs sticking out like a good foot from her body. Like having two watermelons Krazy-glue’d to your chest. I’m guessing that this artistic choice of character rendering probably should be taken as a hint that I am not the projected audience of this manga.

Recorder and Randsell by Meme Higashiya went on sale September 1, 2015.

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

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.

Near the beginning of this book, our narrator corrects a non-native-English speaker’s English (prolixity to proximity). It’s one of the few times she (the narrator) does something, rather than simply being a receptacle for the other character’s life-stories and foibles, because this is what the narrator is in this story: an urn that all the other characters, and for such a short novel, they are legion, pour themselves into. But back to the correcting of English — it’s sort of a jackass thing to do to a complete stranger who is speaking to you in a language not his own, isn’t it? Plus, since she’s able to correct him, she understood what he meant when he said it incorrectly, so why did she do it? The novel ends with her correcting his English again. I don’t know why. I think if I did know why, maybe I would understand this book better.

Outline is like a big nineteenth century pastoral novel, except for it being twenty-first century and short and set mainly in urban Athens. But it has that feeling of weightiness and heft and importance and description. Like a nineteenth century novel, especially say a melodrama like The Woman in White or The Wanderer, a sense of disbelief is required (that or the Greek education system is just churning out wonderfully adept English speakers, which it may be). Like a big nineteenth century novel, I get the impression that if I had at least a Masters in English, I would have gotten a lot more out of it than I did. I enjoyed it. I liked reading the stories of the people baring their lives to our narrator. But I just don’t know. Am I jealous that our narrator has that sort of aura or personality or welcoming face that lets others unburden themselves to her, or do I simply not believe it? Is this even a novel? It’s like a theory of a novel, or a theory of characterization, or a theory of something. Not much happens outside the strangers’ unprompted sharing. But, as I said, I think English lit people will like it. I think people who don’t like theory will hate it. How flummoxed someone would be if he were given this book and told to make a Michael Bay-esque movie of it. That thought made me laugh out loud. Others may have looked at me.

What happens in this book: nothing. But I gave it four of five stars anyway.

Outline by Rachel Cusk went on sale September 4, 2014.

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