Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

With Dark Matter I did something I haven't done in a while with a book - finished it in four days.

An incredibly fast read, Dark Matter takes a familiar "It's a Wonderful Life" trope and jazzes it up for the modern age. 

Jason Dessen, a community college physics professor has always wondered how his life would turn out if he had walked away from his pregnant girlfriend in his 20s and pursued his planned scientific research. As he watches his college roommate receive a prestigious scientific award, his feelings of regret become acute. But Jason is happy with his wife and teenage son. 

On the way home from celebrating his friend's award, Jason is abducted and drugged. When he awakens, he finds himself in a world where he is a renowned scientist on the verge of a breakthrough. Missing for 14 months, this Jason Dessen is welcomed back as a triumphant hero. Turns out he's been working on this box that collapses time and space, allowing you to move through multiple realities in which reality forks off whenever a choice is made. Jason knows this is not his world, but since he's not the brilliant scientist who invented the box, he's not quite sure how it works, or how he is supposed to get home to his family. 

Jason doesn't spend long in his new world - it's instantly apparent he doesn't belong or want to be there. I don't want to give any more plot points away since mega spoilers folks, but you get the drill. He opens a lot of wrong doors to other worlds in his attempts to find the right ones. Sometimes the descriptions come off as a bit too manufactured, but since the book moves so lightening fast, so do the descriptions.

There's no time to rest in this book. The short declarative sentences keep you moving from one scene to the next. It kept my attention and kept me moving through the whole story. I was thoroughly entertained. It's gonna make a great movie.

4/5 Stars. 

God Emperor of Dune - Frank Herbert

Despite all my rage I am still just a worm in a cave....

Well, 3500 years after the end of Children of Dune (read that review here), God Emperor of Dune checks in on Leto Atreides II who we last saw donning a suit of sand trout and becoming one with Dune. Over the millennia, Leto has grown in size and become more worm like. His prescience stretches out into the future as he attempts to follow his "Golden Path". 

He's created three millennia of lasting peace (through brutal means when necessary) - an apparent irony which is lost, but also not lost on him. He's stamped out rebellion through his loyal legion, the Fish Speakers, militarized woman who use their feminine ways when they can, or the typical chop chop, shoot shoot method of militaries everywhere. 

Leto has also undertaken an ambitious breeding program, none with more attention that that paid to the offspring of his sister Ghani and all the Atreides through the ages. People have gotten faster and stronger. But through it all, he keeps resurrecting poor Duncan Idaho - a man condemned to live the later years of his life over and over. The trauma of being dropped into a time and space not his own causes Duncan to rebel against the God Emperor over and over again. So he is accordingly killed over and over again in showdowns with Leto.

It appears finally that Leto has achieved his aim in breeding an Atreides worthy of carrying on the Golden Path in Siona. Taken out into what little desert remains on Dune, Siona is given the spice essence and passes the test of not being filled with the personalities of all her ancestors. Once this breakthrough occurs, Leto knows his time is short. Despite repeatedly stating that his blindspot is his own demise, he sure seems to push the narrative forward to that end. And despite stating that the years following his death will be full of terror and bloodshed, this is somehow the best outcome possible for Dune, wherein Leto is supposed to ditch his outer sand trout skin and return to the dessert as the first worm of the empire. Well, things don't seem to exactly go his way as he spent three millennia casually ignoring all the possible work-arounds the citizens of his empire would concoct to overcome the dependence on spice that crippled the empire and focused too much power in the hands of one planet and person.

3/5 Stars

A Secret Kept - Tatiana De Rosnay

I read Tatiana de Rosnay's first book, Sarah's Key a couple of years ago (before I had a blog) and really liked it. This sophomore follow up didn't live up to the first books expectations. A Secret Kept starts with Antoine and Melanie Rey going for a long weekend to the seaside French town they vacationed to as children with their parents. Both are going through a mid-life crisis of sorts. 

Antoine is recently divorced from his wife Astrid and is struggling with part-time parenting of his three children - two of whom are full throttling through puberty. Melanie is coming off a long term relationship with a man who swore he would never get married just to up and impregnate and marry a woman 15 years his junior within weeks of the breakup. They both need some time and space away from Paris.

However, on the drive home Melanie wrecks the car and nearly dies after attempting to tell Antoine some long held family secret. The secret however, is hardly worth the build up and the letters from the past used to hint and then reveal the secret are easily the worst contrived writing in the book. I honestly thought the rest of the prose was well done but the letters were the hardest part to get through. 

So the great family mystery doesn't really seem much of a mystery and all the characters who have a stake in the mystery just up and die or are already dead so there's no real effect of learning the secret. So many people died in the second half of this book I thought maybe George RR Martin was ghostwriting. 

The book probably would have been better if it didn't try to pass itself off as a mystery and instead was a straightforward character examination of a man in a mid-life crisis. Antoine was the most well flushed out character and I actually enjoyed his journey. The characters also make some non-conventional choices which I enjoyed, even if it did leave the ending a bit unfulfilling.

3/5 Stars. 

Food: A Love Story - Jim Gaffigan

I'll just say if you like Jim Gaffigan, you'll like this book. A lot of these jokes come from his most recent tour and of course since the book is about Food, the Hot Pockets jokes are told again. But there's something familiar and comforting about his comedy - like a grilled cheese. He's funny but not edgy funny. No biting sarcasm or deeper humor than self-deprecating jokes about his desire and ability to eat basically everything.

After all, "a cucumber is just a pickle before it started drinking."

Some of the jokes are interesting considering his wife just went through a close call with a brain tumor and I wonder how his comedy will change over the next year. I'm sure some of it will make for good material. A comic's brain likely never stops working that way.

I listened to the audio version of this book so it really was like listening to Jim's standup routines.

A star rating won't make much of a difference on this one but I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed myself so 4/5 Stars? 3/5 Stars?

Ploughshares Summer 2017 Issue - Guest-Edited by Stewart O'Nan

This edition was kind of all over the place in the quality of short stories but the good ones were just SO good. Of course now that I look over the list of those I liked, I realize that really there were only two or three I wasn't thrilled about and so many that were very good. 

The first story, Fair Seed-Time, poor American Richard bikes his way from Calais all the way to Denmark drunk with young love to see Allabella, a beautiful Jewish orphan of France's WWI Resistance movement. Allabella has been put under the custody of Mr. Jens, who sent Allabella abroad to England for school, where she meets Richard at Oxford. After the school term is over, Richard makes this grand plan to take a ship across the channel to Calais and see Allabella. When he arrives, Allabella is in bed, having fallen and hit her head by the sea. It turns out Richard hardly knew her at all and is stuck with his ruined expectations. It's a singular moment that is really illustrative of the entire process of growing up.

Julia and Sunny is the story of a couple who are going through a divorce. Through the lens of their rather shallow friends, we see the beginning and the end of Julia and Sunny's marriage and the hurt feelings of the friends who, having started as Julia's friends, were hoping to get Sunny in the divorce. 

I'm still processing my thoughts on Tandem Ride, which features a young teen, Gneshel, placed with Rabbi Spitz's family by her poor parents. Gneshel has an opportunity to go to school for a reduced rate, where Spitz is the headmaster. However, Spitz has other designs for the "services" Gneshel can provide his family. In the story, we see a grown Gneshel struggle with feelings of guilt over eventually telling someone about her relationship with Rabbi Spitz, leading to his ouster and the destitution of his family, and her feelings of guilt over thinking she wanted to have a relationship with him and bore some of the blame for what happened. This kind of victim guilt is painful to read. 

I loved The Candidate, which tells of a sandwich store worker who makes a late night chicken salad sandwich for presidential candidate Bill Clinton. It clearly has echos to the most recent election and was a smart well put together narrative. 

Ten Thousand Knocks was a great story about an enforcer for a shady loan company. Kei's job is to make people pay up when they are behind on their rent. He questions his humanity and whether he can do the things he's being called on to do in the job, all while having a supremely clinical approach to the entire issue. 

Thin Scenery. Okay so this is by Stephen King, so you know this is good. My favorite Stephen King works are all his short fiction. The man is a genius. The Body, Apt Pupil, Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption - these are all short stories! This man is amazing. I think he likely just has short story material wandering around in his head at any given moment. Anyway, Thin Scenery is a play within a play where one of the characters knows it is a play and is tormented by the fakeness of his life and everything he sees. Some of the characters are also aware of the "4th Wall" while others aren't. The overall effect is extremely creepy and wonderful. All hail Stephen King. 

Jollof Rice and Revolutions was a great story about a group of girls at a boarding school in Nigeria. When they set out to oppose the principal for nefarious deeds, they stage a riot and the result is more devastating than they planned. The interaction between the girls, and the various ways their class and pedigree play into the reaction to the riot is well done. 

Other Mentions:

Also creepy was Spectral Evidence. A story of a medium who feels like a fraud, but is harboring a terrible truth. Midnight Drives is a sad little story about a teen coping with the loss of his brother and its effects on his friends and family shown through the deterioration of the brother's car.

4/5 Stars. 

The Last Days of Night - Graham Moore

I really loved this book! I'm recommending it to everyone because it's so well done. 

The Last Days of Night chronicles the "current war" of the 1880s between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. No, A/C D/C is not just a band, they are the two types of current in which electricity flows. Thomas Edison was a proponent of direct current. George Westinghouse was accused of infringing on Edison's light bulb patent and so Edison sued him for $1B dollars. That's a lot of cheddar. 

In order to get around the bulb issue, Westinghouse adopted Nikola Tesla's alternating current (it didn't work for his lawsuit defense). The two men at times shamelessly worked against each other to promote their own system of electrifying the country, including a smear campaign aimed at alternating current which led to the invention of the electric chair. The first execution was terribly botched and actually proved alternating current was too safe to be used for murdering people. 

This book has it all, an upstart attorney, Paul Cravath (who would go on to develop the system of associate to partner track attorneys that now exists at law firms all over the world) a singing soprano with a past, a wiley inventor who answers to no one, and two industry barons trying to outdo each other. Yes Graham Moore took some liberties with the timeline and dialogue, but overall it's such great history that it's hard to believe it all isn't fiction.

Addition: And OMG this is going to be a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch. Click Here. 

4.5/5 Stars. 

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats - Jan Philipp-Sendker

I can't remember when I first learned of this book, but it's been on my to-read shelf for quite a while. All in all it was fine, but kind of a let down because it could have been much better, and I'm not sure if the disconnect is in the original language or the translation, but I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt. In The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Julia's father abandons his New York family - Julia, an overly one-dimensional mother, and an almost comically absent brother - to return to "Burma," the country of his birth. (Okay so I know the whole Burma/Myanmar naming thing has been an issue since it happened in 1989, with may adherents to the old name refusing to recognize the new one, but even a passing reference to this would have made the book more realistic, instead it reads more of a westernized fantasy about an exotic locale - one of my first issues with the book).

In order to figure out what has happened to her father, Julia travels to Burma (I'm just going to go with it). While there, she meets Uh Ba (apologies for not knowing how to spell any names, I listened to the audio version). Uh Ba proceeds to tell Julia an elaborate tale about the life of her father, Tin Win, his abandonment at a young age, his early affliction of blindness, his reliance on the kindness of a neighbor, and finally, his falling desperately in love with Mimi - a young crippled girl in the village. The dramatic language attributed to Uh Sa stretched the line of credulity for me. I would have preferred a more streamlined straight-forward rendering of the Tin Win/Mimi backstory. I didn't need the added element of it being told by a third party to Julia. 

I'll say this, the Tin Win/Mimi parts were spectacular. Their relationship, the honesty of their love was very well done. Their disabilities don't impact the love they have for one another, even if others consider it a burden. Julia learns some valuable lessons in the meantime and learns to see her father in a new light. 

One of the themes of the book is reliance on free will versus predictions of fate. Tin Win is abandoned by his mother based on the predictions of an astrologer. As a young adult, his life is shattered by a self-interested Uncle who acts according to the predictions of an astrologer. Only Suu Kyi, his adopted mother, Tin Win and Mimi (and Mimi's mother) live outside the bounds of astrology and in the realm of free will. And their lives are richer for it.

3/5 Stars.