Book Review: The Milky Way Smells of ...

 By Jillian Scudder

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Non-fiction, Astrophysics

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, at Books by the Banks, Cincinnati 

• Why I bought this book: The author talked me into it

• Bookmark used: Astroquizzical, another book by Dr. Scudder   

 ****** 

    When I first asked Dr. Scudder at the Books by the Banks Bookfair which of her books I should buy, she asked me if I wanted serious or silly. Of course, my first response was serious, because I wanted to be that important, consequential guy who respected science.

    But then she talked up the silly book as carefully detailed, even profound, if a bit light-hearted. She said she had fun writing and researching it.

    So I grabbed it, and I'm glad I did. 

    It provides a wealth of information and oddball facts, as well at the significant science behind the details. You want proof? It has 45 pages of notes referencing peer-reviewed papers, most of them published in top-rated scientific journals -- with links to those  original works.

    So while the facts may seem outlandish, they have important scientific bases. 

    For instance, the fact that parts of Pluto are mostly crater-free -- discovered during a New Horizon flyby in 2015 -- was a shocking unknown until then. Astrophysicists assumed that Pluto was covered with up to 40,000 craters up to 30 kilometers wide, because, well, because lots of celestial bodies fly around out there, and they have been known to crash into each other.

    But Pluto, and in particular, the surface of Sputnik Planitia -- that's the heart-shaped feature found on the dwarf planet -- is practically devoid of craters of any size. The current thinking is that some of Pluto's surfaces are newly created by the way nitrogen bubbles up to the colder surface and freezes like icebergs, which erases or covers the craters. 

    Or this: Venus also has few craters. But the current thinking here is different: Volcanoes on Venus regularly erupt, and what is erupted covers up the craters. Thus, parts of the surfaces of both Venus and Pluto are much younger than other parts, but for entirely separate reasons.

    All of this is important, because it helps us better understand our solar system, and the universe, more each day. And, because it's fun to know.

    One more thing: Whenever one reads books by astrophysicists, always read the footnotes. They are complementary to the tale and often amusing, like a smirky, knowing aside from a knowledgeable companion.

    This books is no exception. Dr. Scudder enjoys ragging on her fellow scientists for the way they name the stuff in the universe. Usually, it's boring, like a Very Large Crater. But she notes that one darker section of Pluto was originally named Cthulhu Macula, and in a footnote, explains: "Yes, astronomers are nerds. Charon, Pluto's moon, has a region named Mordor Macula."

    In another section, she talks about how it's difficult to grow anything in Martian regolith because it's considered "highly deleterious to cells." She said she'd rather write something like "Mars is great as long as you don't want anything alive to stay that way," but editors of scientific journals frown on such unscientific language.

    Her footnote reads: "It's too bad. It'd really liven up a paper."

Book Review: Wild Houses

 By Colin Barrett

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Irish literature

• Where I bought this book: Oblong Books, Millerton, N.Y. 

• Why I bought this book: I read his previous short story collection, which was OK, so I wanted to give his first novel a try

• Bookmark used: Corner Bookstore, New York   

 ******** 

   This isn't your Ireland of the green and red of Mayo, stone walls and green grass along the N-17, and hoisting up the Sam Maguire.

    No, this is the rural, small-town Ireland filled with exhilarated sadness, where the rain gets in your shoes, and life is dejected and cold.

    And all this is written by a fellow who knows his places. Barrett grew up along the River Moy, in Ballina and Foxtrot, settings for this wonderfully melancholy first novel about the lost souls of the young and old going nowhere, unsure of what they are looking for, and unwilling or unable to find it.

    It's the Ireland where beer and liquor is omnipresent, but without an opium problem, rarely a drug of choice.

He knew the pharmaceutical tastes of the average Mayoite tended away from those substances that encouraged narcosis, introversion and melancholy -- traits the natives already possessed in massive hereditary infusions -- in favour of uppers, addys and coke and speed; drugs designed to rev your pulse and blast you out of your head.

    The characters are well drawn, mostly losers and not necessarily likeable, but surprisingly able to carry the tale. The writing is knowing and sympathetic, drawing on their backgrounds and upbringings to paint a full picture of their flaws and traumas. The overall story is compelling and insightful, although little changes in their lives.

    It's as if the universe is telling us that life goes on, regardless. 

They tackled each day, which was usually just like the day before, in a spirit of inured rue.

    You start with Dev, a lonely, depressed young man bullied by his classmates, deserted by his father, who now lives alone after his mother died. Asked if it suits him to live in an isolated. decrepit old farmhouse, he shrugs. "It's just -- it's just how it ended up."

    There's Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, two hoodlums who do as their told, without knowing or caring why. There's Cillian and Doll English, small-time drug dealers who cross the bosses of the Ferdia brothers. And there's Nicky, Doll's 17-year-old girlfriend, the only one with a hint of ambition, but who allows her friends to thwart even her limited dreams.

    To round out the crew, there's an assortment of guilt-instilling Irish mothers and wayward Irish fathers.

    When the Ferdias persuade a reluctant Dev to get involved in a complicated plan of revenge against the English boys, we get character studies, tales told through pain and flashback, and some of the finest writing in Ireland today, worthy of being longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize.

Book Review: Orbital

  By Samantha Harvey

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Space, Science fiction, Literary fiction

• Where I bought this book: Oblong Books, Millerton, N.Y. 

• Why I bought this book: It's the 2024 Booker Prize winner

• Bookmark used: Top 10 Most Challenged Books, from Roebling.com  

 **********

    Samantha Harvey's love letter* to planet Earth reverberates with rapid-fire brilliance on every page. 

    But it's much more than that. It's a paean to the solar system, its exploration, and our humanity. 

    It's there in the description of the astronauts and cosmonauts watching in wonder at seeing the aurora australis** from above.

    It's there as they travel down east from the North Pole, past the Alaskan and Canadian coastlines, over the Pacific and South America, before swinging across the South Atlantic to Africa and up to the Middle East before watching the "first crack of silver" marking their fifth or sixth sunrise of the day. 

    It's there as they watch, helplessly, as a typhoon bores down on and eventually assaults the Philippines.

    It's there as author Harvey shows the blackness of the deep oceans and the color palettes of the land: The field of gold of Polynesia, the blues of the Indian Ocean, the purple-green of the Nile River. 

    It's in Uzbekistan, an expanse of ochre and brown. It's in the apricot desert of Takla Makan,*** It's in the rose-flushed and snow-covered mountains of Asia. It's there as Astronaut Nell looks down during her spacewalk: Cuba pink with morning, the turquoise shallows of the Caribbean; her left foot obscuring France, her right foot Germany.

    More than a mere novel, the 2024 Booker Prize-winner reads like a dazzling think piece in the best literary journal, At 200 pages, it ends too soon. But as you set it aside, you agree with some of her final words about life on a minor planet revolving around an ordinary star in an obscure part of the Milky Way: "The past comes, the future, the past. It's always now, it's never now."

    Its plot is simple: A single day, 18 revolutions around the Earth in the lives of four astronauts, Nell, Chie, Shaun, and Pietro from America, Europe and Japan, and two cosmonauts, Anton and Roman, from Russia, as they live, work, and play in the International Space Station. In small snippets, we learn about their lives at home, growing up. Learn about their families. Learn about their travels on earth. Learn why they wanted to go to space.

    They reflect on life in the cramped quarters, the state of the planet, and their place in the universe. They note how from 250 miles above, the Earth is "just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war." They see no borders except for the land and the sea. Countries are indistinguishable.

    Except when the sun is on the other side, they see the lights of their hometowns below: Seattle, Osaka, London, Bologna, St. Petersburg, Moscow. 

    And politics below sometimes intrudes on the international mission of peace above. Because of "engaging political disputes" on Earth, they must use their "national toilet" in the Soviet-built module or the American one. Americans, Japanese and Europeans on one side, Russians on the other.

    They follow the rule but find it amusing. "I'm going to take a national pee, Shaun will say. Or Roman: I'm going to go and do one for Russia." 

    In 1969, while piloting Apollo 11 alone, Michael Collins snapped a photo of the lunar module taking off from the moon, with the Earth hanging in the background. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in the Eagle, and the rest of humanity was on Earth.     

NASA photo

   

Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photo, it is said. ...(But) what of all the people on the other side of earth that the camera can't see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere which is in the night sky and gulped by the darkness of space? ... In truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen. Everybody is invisible. ... The strongest, most deductible proof of life in that photo is the photographer himself. ... In that sense, the most enchanting thing about Collins's image is that, at the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.

    Sublime. It's thoughtful, soulful, and mindful. It shows the earth being "wired and wakeful." You want to read it slowly, mark every other paragraph, then read it again. Read it with a cup of tea on the table and cat in your lap, poking at your skin, the pinpricks making you feel alive, if Earthbound.

    It is truly a book for the ages.

------------------------------------------------

* I'll admit to stealing this term from a friend

** The Southern Lights

*** A desert in the Xinjiang province in northwest China. Often spelled in English as Taklamakan

Book Review: Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers

 By Matthew Sparks (editor), Olivia Sizemore (illustrator)

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Folktales

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, Lexington, during the Kentucky Book Fair 

• Why I bought this book: The authors talked me into it  

 ******

     Just so you know: A haint is sort of like a ghost, likely someone or something that appears where the distance between the supernatural world and our world is thin, meaning spirits sometimes cross over. A booger is cryptid, an animal or person that has grown out of proportion on the other side. Stained earth is a place where something evil happened, and the spirits are restless. High strangeness is just something weird that happened and cannot be easily explained. 

    Haint Country is the Appalachian dialect terms for where all these things occur.

    If you pick up this book -- and you should -- you must read the forward and introduction to these tales. It'll teach you a thing or two and make them a lot more believable to you all.

    I swear to god and hope to die if I'm lyin'.

    Moving on, you'll find this an eclectic collection of tales told mostly in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachian Kentucky, mostly from Lee, Owsley, Clay, Leslie, Perry, and Harlan counties. They have been handed down from family to family, friend to friend, some outright invented, and some recalled to explain a curious sight or occurrence.

      The tales are written -- or told to others over time -- by various authors, some of who are credited with more than one. 

    They have been told after dark on overnight fishing trips, in a school yard to explain why no one goes down that creepy corridor, or to a spouse to excuse lateness or a lack of pants.*

    Some are to remember the victims of the mining disasters that occurred regularly in Kentucky history and still haunt entire communities. Others explain the strange feelings one gets when passing a forgotten cemetery or jailhouse. 

    But some are just old tales told around the campfire when the stars come out and the night gets dark and spooky. The drawbacks with these are they sound like the least likely explanation for a simple event, like why a house brunt down, but the tellers insist that every word is true and verified by anyone with a lick of sense. This is mostly a problem in the second part of the book, when the good ol' boys think of something they saw on television.**

    The tales in the first part of the book seem more like those told and retold as a potentially plausible, maybe if you squint real hard, explanation. Or something told after a bunch of people got together to recollect why the old barn burnt down, and try to outdo each other with wild explanations after too much moonshine.

    The longest story concerns the spooking of a house in Breathitt County, most likely by Mary Jane Fox, who apparently didn't like the changes made -- or the fact that her husband killed her when they lived in the previous house on the site. 

-----------------------------------------------------

* See Paw Hensley and the Naked Haint Woman of Squabble Creek, attributed to Hensley Sparks, "a walking, talking tall tale, born and raised in Clay County, Kentucky."

** See The Legend of The John Asher's UFO, (an episode of X-Files, no less) "dedicated to the memory of Patrick Smith, who was also a witness to the events" in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Book Review: Someday, Maybe

   By Onyi Nwabineli

• Pub Date: 2022

• Genre: Black fiction

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, Norwood, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: Best title ever  

 ********

 

   For the first 100 pages of this book, I had snippets of a song running through my head  but I could not capture from whence it came: Someday, maybe/ Who knows baby/ I'll come and be cryin' to you.

    It certainly fit the story -- a woman, whose husband committed suicide, was suffering through the unimaginable grief, was falling apart, despite the efforts of family and friends.

    Then it hit me. To Ramona, a somewhat obscure early Dylan tune, is almost the perfect soundtrack. Ramona, come closer/ Shut softly your watery eyes/ The pangs of your sadness/ Will pass as your senses will rise. Whether or not the author knows the song, ever heard of the song, or if someone connected the song and used a phrase for the book title, I don't know. But to me, they will forever be entwined.

    This is a difficult read. Eve is the middle child of a close-knit, successful Nigerian family living in London. She was married for a few years to the love of her life, Quentin, a rich, talented, privileged white child of wealth who is a talented photographer. In the opening pages of the book, we discover that Quentin, killed himself. Eve discovered the body. And, she says,  "No, I am not okay."

    If ever there was an understatement to base a novel on, this is it. Eve is more than not okay. She is devasted to the point where she cannot get out of bed, cannot eat, and does little more than cry and wonder why.

    Her despair takes up most of the book. That pain and hopelessness  is somewhat ameliorated by her family and friends, who are also suffering a loss. But Eve, who tells the story in the first person, is the focus.

    Yes, sometimes it can get overwhelming. Yes, sometimes Eve becomes overwrought and only thinks of herself, never realizing others were close to Quentin and are in mourning. Yes, and in one of the few flaws in the book, it does tend to go on and on and on.

    But there is a lot here to unpack: The hatred of Eve's mother-in-law, who pointedly blames Eve for Quentin's death. The Nigerian customs regarding death and mourning. And, of course, the whole idea of suicide -- the whys, the reasons, and the destruction of countless other lives.

    This is a very personal book. It's not normally one I would pick up, much less enjoy. But I found it emotional, compelling, sympathetic, and a damn good read.