Category Archives: Reading

Currently Reading: Quantum Physics!?

I’m in the middle of an immensely satisfying book which explains quantum physics in a way I can (at least for a few minutes at a time) understand — which, if you knew anything about my science grades in high school and college, is really saying something.

The premise of How to Teach Physics To Your Dog is that physics professor Chad Orzel (the author) is explaining concepts and conundrums of quantum mechanics to the unusually inquisitive, not to mention talking, dog he adopted from the pound.

And it’s awesome. The frame of explaining concepts to Emmy (the dog) is quite effective — what does the uncertainty principle mean about the probability of finding bunnies in the yard? Is measuring what made her bone disappear? How does one get to the universe where steak IS dropped on the floor? Continue reading “Currently Reading: Quantum Physics!?”

Reading the NW

Recently finished Brian Doyle‘s lovely fiction debut Mink River, magical realism of the sort you might expect from a book that crosses Irish and coastal Native American stories and styles. It’s rich, delightful, and satisfying and I kept thinking as I read it that if it didn’t turn out to remain so all the way through the end I should be horribly disappointed.

I wasn’t. Every time I thought the storylines might get too plot-less, or the interweaving (sentence to sentence, in some sections) might unravel, or the lush repetition might overwhelm, what needed to happen happened, in some unexpected and wonderfully blooming way.

Mink River is set in a town on the Oregon coast, not, as Doyle explains at the beginning, “an especially stunning town, stunningtownwise” — there are

no houses crying out to be on the cover of a magazine that no one actually reads anyway and the magazine ends up in the bathroom and then is cut to ribbons for a fourth-grade collage project that uses a jar of rubber cement that was in the drawer by the back stairs by the old shoebox and the jar of rubber cement is so old that you secretly wonder if it fermented or a mouse died in it or what.

One way to put it is that the rest of the book tells you what the town is.

Continue reading “Reading the NW”

Bruce Beasley’s “Me Meaneth”

Bruce Beasley’s “Me Meaneth” (Kenyon Review, Summer 2011 issue — the one with the wonderful photo of a lizard-hatted woman on the cover) made me say to myself, after reading the last stanza the first time, “This is why I read contemporary poetry.” (You’ll find the poem in its entirety after the jump, with kind permission from the author.)

It’s a long poem (but it doesn’t feel long) that brought me, at the end, to a place I absolutely did not expect, but was completely prepared, by the poem, to come to. Such a fantastic feeling, as a reader, to simultaneously have a completely surprising moment and realize just how thoroughly the poem’s been setting you up for it all along.

“Me Meaneth” is seven sections mulling over the idea of meaning sparked by 2 lines from an old Scottish poem — “The speaned lambs mene their mithers/As they wimple ower the bent” — the meaning of the individual words, and the meaning of meaning too, among other things (a summary of a poem is a necessary evil, though how much is inherently left out is kind of like nails on a chalkboard to me).

Continue reading “Bruce Beasley’s “Me Meaneth””

Currently Reading

Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan by Scott Simon

I don’t care about sports, and this is a sports fan memoir, and I am loving this book.

Sure, partly it might be a little because (as the actor Tom Conti is the British “thinking women’s crumpet”) Scott Simon is the American thinking woman’s Voodoo Donut. But this book is reminding me, as Story Corps always does, that it’s always the people (well, sometimes the dogs), that are the most interesting part of any story, and that good writing — about anything — is always a joy to come across.

Especially in a box of “FREE” books on the sidewalk.