Stardust

I am on a reading stampede!  The month of March has been good to me.  I have already finished two of the Bill Bryson books in my stack (In a Sunburned Country and Bill Bryson's African Diary).  Granted, Bill Bryson's African Diary was less than 100 pages, but I still feel like an accomplished reader considering that I have already plowed through a third of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything--the Special Illustrated Edition.

A Short History is the size of a high school textbook with considerable heft, so it's been a "bed book": a book that I can only read in bed because it's too cumbersome to stash in my purse and bring with me to my favorite solo dining spots in Lahaina.

Because the book is so big, I picked up a "travel book" or a "lightweight": a book that is portable and can be enjoyed anywhere.  My newest lightweight is Rules of Civility, a novel by Amor Towles (please take a moment to admire the author's name).  I have only read the opening few pages, but I'm hooked.  I foresee a potential conflict as I struggle to keep Rules shut and stick to just reading Bryson's Short History at home.

However, I am thoroughly engrossed in Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.  With his signature stock of wit and wry observations and unending curiosity, Bryson's book is "the answer to the Great Question, of Life, the Universe and Everything" (forgive me for quoting Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it almost had to be done).  Bryson's book came about as an effort to educate himself about the world we live in: how the universe came to be, how the planet Earth formed and how humans evolved into what we are today.

The book has a wonderful cohesive narrative as Bryson marches through history, but what makes the book so accessible is Bryson's coverage of huge scientific topics in cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics...and the list goes on.  What makes this book so fascinating is that Bryson revels in everything that he has researched and discovered, and you can't help but marvel along with him. The book is not just about what we know about our universe and the planet, but how we came to know it.  The human stories of these huge scientific endeavors are thrilling and downright amazing.  It blows my mind what was discovered and concluded before modern technology (like how far the earth is from the sun and the mass of our planet).

There are so many things in A Short History that I am being bowled over by, but I especially like the concept that supernovae is the reason that we can exist on earth.  A supernova occurs "when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in the galaxy" (Bryson).  Supernovae generate the kind of heat needed "to forge carbon and iron and the other [heavier] elements without which we would be distressingly immaterial" (Bryson).

This following quote is not from Bill Bryson, but from Lawrence M. Krauss, a Canadian-American theoretical physicist:

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

Of course, Krauss' closing statement in the quote above has caused some controversy, and he continues to generate debate as he tells us to put our ideas of religion aside and examine the facts and the science, because the science can be just as marvelous and miraculous as what we read in the Bible.

The quote is from Krauss' lecture turned book entitled A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.  I haven't read it myself, but I am putting it on my list.  If you are interested in more of Krauss' thoughts on cosmology, you can read a transcript of his NPR interview.

I know close to nothing about cosmology, but what I have been learning has been captivating, entertaining, mind blowing and astounding, and makes me realize how very lucky I am to be who I am and where I am.  The tiniest of deviations in history could have changed my entire life or negated my entire existence.  Bryson writes:

Getting here wasn't easy, I know.  In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. 

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you.  It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once... 

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting--fleeting indeed.  Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours.  And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things.

It makes me think long and hard about the choices that I make to fill my 650,000 hours.

I could spend less time worrying.  I worry about a lot of things: what other people think of me, if my stomach is too fat, if I will ever have a job that is more fulfilling than waitressing but makes more money than what I get tipped, if my collection of freckles are cancerous, if I will get eaten by a shark when swimming--well, I guess if that happened, I wouldn't be worrying anymore, and I wouldn't have to be concerned about what choices I make in my 650,000 hours allotted to me.

Granted, I think I have also done some really amazing things in my 650,000 hours.  I have traveled.  Extensively.  I am forever grateful to my family to have had this opportunity.  I have cultivated meaningful relationships with my family and friends.  I continue to make good efforts to meeting new people and learning about new experiences.  I made the very ambitious and brave move away from everything and everyone I knew to live in Maui--and I have absolutely and truly never been happier.

There are certainly people who have done more, and people who have done less, but I am going to do my best to stop comparing and really focus on making the rest of my 650,000 hours as enjoyable as they can be.

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Read: Little Bee

For a moment there, I was thinking of changing the title of these book posts to "Finished" rather than "Read" because I found the word "read" a little confusing.  I meant that I had finished reading the book, but I realized to some it could mean that I'm telling you to read the book.  Right as I began typing "Finished" into the subject line, I realized that "Read" is actually perfect.  I'm telling you about something that I read, and maybe you will in turn, be interested in reading it.  Problem solved.

"We don't want to tell you what happens in this book.  It is truly a special story and we don't want to spoil it," whispers the blurb on the back of Chris Cleave's Little Bee.  The cutesy marketing and the charming cover with its scrolling cursive title is disarming to a fault.

This is not an easy book to read.  It's incredibly challenging in terms of the subject.  A reviewer from The Washington Post writes that the book "deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover.  Contents under pressure.""

I also think that the marketing does the book a huge disservice as well.  I think it's safe to divulge a few details about the book without "ruining" it.  This book is a not a mystery, although a few mysteries are unfolded and examined within the plot.

Two strangers share a horrific encounter on the beach two years prior to the novel's beginning.  Little Bee is a teenager running for her life from her village in Nigeria when she runs into Sarah O'Rourke, an editor of a British women's magazine on holiday with her husband.

After the horrific events on the beach, the two women are separated by circumstances but reunite two years later in London.

The novel's chapters alternate narrators, so you read the story from both Little Bee's and Sarah's point of view.  I feel like this is Cleave's major strength in story telling.  He has a wonderful grasp of the language, and creates strong and separate voices for both Little Bee and Sarah O'Rourke.  It's hard not to be moved by Little Bee's will and strength.

The book isn't perfect.  I had a few issues with character development as well as the book's ending, but I found it be moving and eye opening, especially on issues of refugees and immigration removal centers in the UK.

Some of my favorite bits:

"The detention officer, the one who was looking at the topless photo in the newspaper--he was a small man and his hair was pale, like the tinned mushroom soup they served us on Tuesdays.  His wrists were thin and white like electrical cables covered in plastic.  His uniform was bigger than he was.  The shoulders of the jacket rose up in two bumps, one on each side of his head, as if he had little animals hiding in there.  I thought of those creatures blinking in the light when he took off his jacket in the evening."

"As a girl I liked what all girls like: pink plastic bracelets and later silver ones; a few practice boyfriends and then, in no particular hurry, men.  England was made of dawn mists that rose to the horse's shoulder, of cakes cooled on wire trays for the cutting, of soft awakening."

"London was fun.  Men blew through like tall ships, some of them already wrecked."

"Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory.  It tastes of longing.  It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from.  Also it vanishes--the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup.  It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist.  I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other.  How sad that must make you--like children who long for absent mothers."

"His suit, too--it was a good one; Kenzo, I think--and it fit him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it.  He held his arms a little away from his body--as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured, so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl."

"It was the sound of the surf pounding on the beach that woke me.  Crash, like the drawer of a cash register springing open and all the coins inside it smashing against the edge of their compartments.  The surf pounded and ebbed, the cash drawer opened and closed."

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Read: The Sisters Brothers

I finished up Patrick DeWitt's novel The Sisters Brothers while waiting for my family's arrival on island.  The book follows the murderous exploits of Eli and Charlie Sisters as they travel from Oregon City to San Francisco in the 1850s to hunt down their mark.

Some of my favorite bits include:

• "My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless."
• "I could hear Charlie in the next room, washing himself in the bathtub.  He was saying nothing and would say nothing, I knew, but the sound the water made was like a voice, the way it hurried and splashed, chattering, then falling quiet but for the rare drip, as if in humble contemplation.  It seemed to me I could gauge from these sounds the sorrow or gladness of their creator..."

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