Radiant
I often don’t like to write about books unless I am being paid these days. Sometimes I forget about non-review books as soon as I put them down, not because they are forgettable but because there is no imperative to remember them. I read and hopefully enjoyed them and that is the end of that. I have read some books lately that were good: I liked Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon even though I had to put it down for a while to get some other reading done and lost momentum, liking it less after the break. I also liked A.J. Jacobs The Year of Living Biblically which is so funny and interesting though I think he floundered a bit at the end. Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels was another recent good read. This one I read to use for work and found a lot of nice and clear ways of looking at the early Christian community and the path to biblical canonization.
Today I finished Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet and loved it. I think I am officially a big Lydia Millet fan now. For the online bookclub we read How The Dead Dream which I thought was great. While several of us read it only a few joined in the discussion (we are working on ways to make the club more dynamic) which is too bad because there were some fantastic ideas in there. I had actually picked up Oh Pure and Radiant Heart at a used bookstore looking for the club selection and put it aside until last week. To go by the cover blurb it is about Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard, three of the physicists instrumental in producing the nuclear weapons used against Japan in WWII. In this novel, when the first bomb is tested, at the Trinity site in New Mexico, the three men are somehow bodily transported to the year 2004. Yet, their original lives continued on their historic trajectories: they all lived, worked, died, etc as their biographies tell us, yet somehow here they were in the future (our now) as well. As tricky as this sounds, Millet handles it easily and it is really just the vehicle for her exploration of the role of science, morality, humanity, belonging, religion, ecology, personal, national and social responsibility and much more. Wow!
Millet’s style is so interesting to me and a bit hard to describe. Her writing is brisk and clear, yet evocative and poetic. Her characters are human and flawed but often very sympathetic. Plus, the book is quite funny in parts. As the three physicists venture out in to the world, accompanied by a Santa Fe couple, Ben and Ann, they develop a following of believers who want to assist them in their mission to speak out against nuclear weapons and in favor of world peace. Of course, the mission gets muddied and the followers turn into fanatics, the physicists must deal with all of it on top of the existential problems of being who they are and when (they all read about their own lives and deaths, their work and legacies in the books they scour throughout the story). There are trips to Japan, to the Marshall Islands, there is plenty of science, history and politics peppering the story. In short, this was a dense but readable, original and unconventional story.
Other recent reads (reviewed by yours truly elsewhere):
Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman
Coop by Michael Perry
And some YA/kids fiction:
Barnaby Grimes (book 2) Return of the Emerald Skull by Stewart and Riddell
The Silver Door by Holly Lisle
And a bonus, just for you…article on making mazes with kids…you may have to leaf through the May/June issue to find it.
