convergence

if you are looking for a rollicking good read check out special topics in calamity physics (2006) by marisha pessl. I don't know how I missed this book when it debuted last year as I'm sure it was on all sorts of 'best of lists.' blogging bud salty jill mentioned special topics a while back in one of her posts. whatever she said was enough to tweak my interest and send me off to the library to check it out. boy, am I glad I did. coincidentally the other day while I was on catching up with pam, a friend in nyc, we got to the usual 'so what are you reading now' question; and what do you know were both reading special topics. we thought that was pretty far out and I expect in itself may have been a special topic in calamity physics!

excerpt from liesl schillinger august 13 2006 nytimes review:

Like Alan Bennett’s delectable and brilliant play “The History Boys,” now on Broadway, “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father, Gareth. To kill time on their drives, they discuss radical class warfare, riff on Homer and Steinbeck, recite movie dialogue and poems by Blake, Neruda and Shakespeare and read Hollywood biographies — from a tell-all by Louis B. Mayer’s maid to blow-by-blows on Howard Hughes and Cary Grant. Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill’s: “Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” he tells her. And, he cautions, “never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story.” Tightly swaddled in her daughter-dad duad, Blue does not know that her story is someone else’s. Only gradually does she learn that the frantic tempo of her life has been conducted by forces she does not suspect.

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