Useful math

Book: The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Author: Paolo Giordano

Published: 2010 (Viking)

Pages: 271

Twin primes are prime numbers that are separated by only one even number between them, like 11 and 13. They’re oddballs that don’t fit in anywhere else and they can almost touch but not quite and they get exponentially rarer as you climb up the number line. They’re also excellent metaphors.

Alice and Mattia have both suffered odd, preventable-in-hindsight traumas that make them just a little out of place in their normal world of high school: Alice had to pee during a ski lesson her dad made her take and when she went to find a bush to squat behind she fell off a ledge and didn’t call attention to herself because she hated skiing so she didn’t get medical help in time to heal her leg right. Mattia had to take his mentally handicapped twin sister to a birthday party but told her to stay on a picnic table halfway there so she wouldn’t embarrass him and she was gone when he came back and was never found.

Alice turns reckless and anorexic to feel alive; Mattia turns to math for its logic. They meet, gradually uncover each other’s flaws, and become friends while they aren’t paying attention. 

They never quite come together, and SPOILE ALERT in the end when they find each other, they find that they don’t fit. And you know what? That’s actually okay. They both realize that it will never be the right time for both of them at the same time, and that’s why I ended up loving this book.

The beginning when the traumas are described as perfectly plausible but just offbeat enough to cause lasting damage, and the ending when they realize they won’t be able to help each other as perfectly as they thought but that they still help each other and that’s maybe enough – both of those chunks are done great, humanistic favors by the quiet prose. This same style kind of makes the middle sag with the weight of everyday life, though it was never a chore to get through. Just more ordinary. 

This was translated from Italian and it’s been on my radar for a couple years, so:

•        No idea how good/faithful the translation is
•       I’m sad I have to turn it back in to the library, but I’m very glad I read it once. For free!  

How potted ham makes you a man (even when you don't want to be)

Book: Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger

Author: Nigel Slater

Published: 2003 (Gotham)

Pages: 235

The beginning of this book is perfect to read out loud to old people. It’s about how different foods shaped or described Slater’s childhood. No more, and oh definitely not any crumb of toast left. It’s warm and understated and sometimes bratty and basically exactly like a boy explaining, if unconsciously, how one’s choice of candy bar marks what he is to his classmates who can see his purchase and how hating the preservative jelly on a specific type of tinned ham fails a man test set forth by his dad.

And then he hits adolescence and his mom dies and his dad marries again to a great cook and a lot of food begins to tie into sexual awakening and then you should stop reading out loud to old people and enjoy the rest of it like everything else the author (and you, don’t lie) hides from his parents.

It’s fantastic. It’s specific, detailed, broken into (pun ahoy) easily digestable chunks that by themselves are slight and charming but, like a meringue, whip together into something solid, and frank enough to show how broken or badly cooked or disgusting foods (=bits of life) shape a person even more than the good stuff.

And it never devolves into food porn, so it’s going onto my bookshelf next to my other awesome memoirs. Like a more sincere, more edible David Sedaris.    

IN SPACE (again)!

Book: Plantes Volumes 1 – 4/2

Author/illustrator: Makoto Yukimura

Published: 2004 (TokyoPop in the US)

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS HOW MUCH MONEY AND PHYSICS DOES IT COST TO BECOME AN ASTRONAUT?

This manga series about a trash collector IN SPACE and his crew is set in the near-ish future where humans have managed to harness various bits of near-ish space to mine resources. So there’s the main guy who wants to save up for his own spaceship and eventually devotes his life to getting onto the first mission to Jupiter. His little (younger, yes; size, not so much by volume 3) brother builds and sets off rockets in their Earth back yard; his dad is a hard-living astronaut who has made his mother into a feisty contradiction of take-no-shit and resignation.

His captain is a woman who is slowly going crazy not being able to smoke in space. Her son back on Earth copes with her gianormously long absences by collecting every living creature he can get to follow him home; her husband’s kinda bland, he’s in like two panels.

The other guy on crew – oh man you guys, spoiler alert because what makes his storyline so awesome is that the series opens with him and his wife flying on an Earth-to-moon transport and it crashes and he survives but she doesn’t and the vessel becomes debris that explodes into orbit and that’s why he becomes a debris collector (space trash guy), to find the compass she always wore because she was afraid of flying.

Seriously, that character motivation is so elegantly sparse yet easy to see that it’s what made that little great read “click” sound in the back of my head. And it was right!

The story evolves into a war about control and pollution in outer space, and another spoiler alert – it does eventually get to Jupiter. It centers around the characters but since they’re all space people, the politics affect their whole way of living, so it’s high personal stakes anchored in a bigger turbulent world. And the art reflects that, too; it’s not photorealistic, but it’s detailed enough to show endless personal character/emotional details and contrast the straight intricate lines of space stations to the more unpredictable flexibility of humans and Earth.

My only problem with this series is that it’s too short, because you never see what actually happens once they actually land on Jupiter, i.e. achieve only the first part of a much bigger mission they’ll be on for seven years, and the evil bureaucrat was just warming up with his shady priest friend by the last few pages. 

Bookshelf and I demand more manga! Where’s our Volume 4/3?

The big disconnect

Book: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You By Pop Culture

Author: Nathan Rabin

Published: 2009 (Scribner)

Pages: 339

Ugh. Okay, so AV Club writing + crazy life + Friends of the Library book sale = the perfect $2 storm of a reading experience, right? Not so much.

Rabin’s really good at writing about pop culture and showing how everything from The Great Gatsby to gangster rap shapes culture and relates to and builds on and influences and saves and reforms each other and its audience. He’s also got a hell of a turbulent early life that clung to pop culture as an escape to better things that became his real life. Unfortunately, these two things are not combined. In a memoir where that’s supposed to be the whole point. That is a problem.

Each chapter’s headed by a title, a subtitle of the pop culture work that’s supposed to have something to do with the chapter’s subject, and then – and THEN a second subtitle that’s no more than another zinger. And oh sweet mumbo jumbo there are zingers. ALL. OVER. I’m not going to take Rabin’s depressed dad, runaway mom, stay in a disturbed teenage home, or exploding supernova of a terrible first relationship seriously if he’s trying his standup act all in this.

I love sarcasm and it’s the best emotional shield/bonding device ever, but especially in personal prose like oh I don’t know a memoir, it keeps dear readers at arms’ length at the exact moments when you need to draw them close to give them anything more than a shallow experience.

And beyond a paragraph or half-page at the beginning of each chapter, the particular pieces of pop culture are never mentioned in the kind of soul-saving life-molding specifics that I was so looking forward to hearing about. Dude, I am basically a pile of books and CDs and Seinfeld and Star Wars and Doctor Who quotes built in the rough shape of a human being; I understand this shit and I survived high school exactly like this, but there weren’t nearly enough personal connections between the narrative and the material to make me feel like I know Rabin any more than his naked commune neighbors.

I’d been looking forward to reading this, too. The AV Club podcast has spoiled me on pop culture connection storytelling, I guess, although Rabin has always been my least favorite speaker for the reasons as state above so I should’ve known. Such high hopes are going into the donate pile.*

*Actually a trash bag I will have to haul out to my car soon before it gets too heavy. 

All the subtly of a psychotic wife

Book: Gone Girl

Author: Gillian Flynn

Published: Random House (2012)

I really don’t get it.

This book has none of the subtly or creepy narrative grace of a good thriller. There’s no evidence or reason for the character changes; there’s no real reason for most of the character choices to begin with. There is no foreshadowing or hints; there are merely circumstances that only suddenly mean things when the protagonist declares them to for no reason mentioned at all until the moment the declaration is needed for the story.

Most of all, there is no true darkness, only blunt psychopathology that’s supposed to be edgy without earning any of it.

I’m being deliberately vague because this is one of the few current best-sellers I’ve gotten around to reading/blogging about. This is the story of a lady kidnapped on her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband’s trip through suspicion, and a reveal that turns everything into petty revenge.

And that’s what I hate about it; it’s really fucking petty. Not just the reveal, but, like, the guy we’re supposed to sympathize with, he quips instead of talking. All the time. Not as little bursting packets of anxiety relief, or when it might reveal anything deep about him or his life or the situation, because that never happens, but because…I don’t know. I got a sinking feeling it was because he’s a young-ish writer and that’s the author’s idea of cool even as being cool would be the last thing on anyone’s mind if they were wrestling with goddamn murder charges.

Everything else I hate about the book comes after the reveal, so I’ll just say none of it is earned and that pisses me off because this might be the only novel some people get around to reading this year and I wish it could be better because the concept is solid but it’s fumbled so badly.

Going back to the library. It’s a checkout.

P.S. Y’all, I’mma end on a happy note and say that holy shit, I finally finished the “old” book pile I’ve been meaning to get through since I graduated college! Hyperspace was the last one, but I thought this post needed some cheerfulness to balance the above paragraphs. Anyhoo, so that’s awesome and means I can get started on the one box, two bags, and whole Library system at my current disposal. Hold on to your butts – we are going even further! Whee!

Space-time explained!

Book: Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10^th Dimension

Author: Michio Kaku

Published: 1994 (Anchor)

Pages: 334

Basically, the laws of physics exist in more dimensions than we’ve been able to measure in, so we’re just now getting the, like, whole picture of why stuff like the theory of relativity actually works and how all the physical laws smooth out when they have more dimensions to express all their parts.

I’m pretty sure that’s the main point of this book. Have I mentioned that I deprived myself of any sort of physics classes by taking AP biology in high school?

So I’m a terrible person to say what level of skillz this book is for. A lot of it reads like the author is going for a mainstream audience, but he’s so jazzed about the implications that he drops into higher math concepts like they’re a native tongue he has to use to explain feelings we don’t have in English. And his metaphors are terrible because they just add extra layers of confusion to simplifying things. For instance, to illustrate how space and geometry can operate in higher dimensions than the ones we perceive, he goes, “Imagine there’s a place called Flatland where everyone is two-dimensional. If one peeled a Flatlander off the piece of paper where he lived, his fellow flatlanders would think he had disappeared into the sky, whereas you would know that he was transported into the third dimension.” That is just as hard to grasp as talking about how a hypercube folds up in the fourth dimension for us – harder, because you have to go through two levels of imagination - pretending you’re a Flatlander to see things from his point of view before you can pretend to wonder why the hell you’re disappearing into a sky you can’t fully see - instead of one, just wondering why the hell the cube you’re looking at seems to have too many sides crammed into too small a visual field.

But other than spending too much effort pretending to be a stick figure, I loved this book.

Kaku might be sort of shitty at teaching physics 101, but he knows the hell out of the higher concepts and lays them out as straightforwardly as I could tell. He also weaves the histories and controversies and implications and cultural impacts and practical applications of the theories into one loose narrative of how humans are trying to conquer time and matter and how close we are to doing it. Wormholes might be real, you guys. And Duchamp painted a crucifixion scene on a teserac (three-dimensional fold-out of a four-dimensional cube). And the universe will probably end in fire (the Big Crunch of all matter trying to squeeze into the hottest dryer’s tiniest lost gym sock), but probably not before we unite all the theories of matter into enough dimensions so they become one and we understand life, the universe, and EVERYTHING.

I still don’t understand string theory, though, because the section that was labeled “Why Strings?” just said that contrary to string theory’s dissenters, strings can be found naturally all in the physical world, like in the shape of our DNA. …Okay, so that proves…something? I don’t know. Please let me know what I’m missing; I want to write a Doctor Who episode about it.

Bookshelf!

Interesting teenagers turn into standard adults

Book: The Interestings

Author: Meg Wolitzer

Published: Riverhead (April 2013 – advanced reading copy ahoy!)

Pages: 468

Must – resist – pun about – ironic title –

Okay. Urge conquered. But now I’m going to tell you all about why I had to do said conquering in the first place.

The Interestings is about a group of teenagers who meet and become friends at a creative arts summer camp run by two old hippies and a little too much optimism about their talents. It’s one of those intense experiences that seem completely unique (to every teenager they ever happen to), designed to cement a place to look back at and say, “It all started here,” especially to mousy, awkward Jules who blossoms under the guidance of the cool kids. She discovers a budding talent for comedic acting, and she spends all summer nurturing it and trying to be the girlfriend of a talented animator and learning to smoke weed with the golden boy who doesn’t have any direction and trading secrets with his sister and basically coming of age while Nixon resigns.  

That part’s great. I love it because it DOES feel unique; each teen has a slightly off-beat talent they’re convinced will become their whole lives (not acting, but COMEDIC acting; directing; finding a different sort of music to get good at to get out from under the shadow of a famous folk mom...), and the camp is familiar enough to slip right into but has its own weird touches to become its own very specific place (mess hall next to the animation shed…). Nixon’s a little peripheral and I’m not sure why his resignation is so prominent on the book jacket summary, but whatever, establishes the summer camp as a sort of one last timeless escape from the real world before the kids have to grow up.

And then they grow up, and most of their potential gets wasted.

But wait! That’s not the bad part. That’s still a great premise. There is so much poignant irony to be mined from exceptional teenagers growing into regular adults and following their angst about either still trying to do what they love when they realize it’s not actually special or slowly letting go of what they thought were the most important parts of themselves. There’s a line in an AV Club Reasonable Discussions podcast that captures this (and, quite frankly, scares the bejezus out of me): “You are not the same person you are in your thirties as the one you were in your twenties, and those two people may in fact be fundamentally incompatible.”

(Side-note freak-out: Oh my god, really? WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO MY LIFE IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS? TELL ME NOW WHAT WILL CRASH AND BURN SO I CAN PRESERVE IT TODAY, DAMMIT!)

Notice I said “premise,” though. In execution, the (mostly) failed artistic dreams storylines all flatten out into generic midlife grasping at straws. Even the one dude who makes it, with the awesome last name Figman, turns his success in animation into a general What People Worry About When They Don’t Have to Worry About Money Anymore plot of marital riffs and wondering if he loves his perfect children.

And once they leave camp, there’s no other central touchpoint. They stay friends, and soon after they graduate the gold boy brother disappears after being accused of raping another girl they all sort of know, and that gives his sister an excuse to keep the secret of his whereabouts for like thirty years, but really, the book should have been about that magical summer at camp, period, if they were going to lose all their personality as soon as they went home.

One late plot point I appreciated: the older Jules convinces her husband to take an offer to run the old summer camp, and – before you roll your eyes out of your head like I did when I started reading what I thought was going to be a super-Velveeta-cheesy ending – they don’t stay on forever as the new purveyors of utopia. But it wasn’t because they weren’t good at it; it was because it “just wasn’t the same,” said Jules. I also liked that her husband took her to task for expecting it to be the same and what a shitty reason that was for taking the job in the first place. If it had to go into their grownup lives, I guess that would’ve been a distant second-decent end. Ham-fisted, but better.

Although this review might be considered completely invalid because this was another advanced reading copy I read on my lunch breaks at the library and there’s a blurb that says “Please don’t use exact quotes from this copy because it might get edited again before being published.” Or something like that. Anyway, I’d give it a miss in April 2013. aHam