Us Conductors: A Novel by Sean Michaels (2014)

Photo via the Globe and Mail

This book won the Giller Prize! Which is pretty much the biggest award for fiction in Canada. I had already read (and reviewed) All My Puny Sorrows and I was sure it was going to win. So did a lot of other people, according to this pic (from the Globe and Mail). So an upset is always fun! Plus it bumped Us Conductors to the top of my to-read list.

This is a story about the inventor of the theremin, which is a sort of instrument you play by manipulating the electrical fields created by the antennae. The characters in the book are based on real people, and although parts of the plot really did happen, it’s still a work of fiction. (The notes section states the lack of evidence that our protagonist ever learned kung fu, for instance.) (Do other people actually read the notes sections in books? Or the acknowledgements section? Because I feel like most people don’t and I feel like they’re missing out. Anyway.)

The rest of these books on the list above are on my to-read list as well, except for one that I started and actually gave up on about halfway through, which I almost never do. But I just didn’t care about the characters, so I couldn’t be bothered to find out what happened to them. I’m not going to tell you which book this was, because I don’t want to ruin it for you — that would just be mean and unCanadian. And I’ve heard from a number of other people who really liked it.

Here, a video of Leon Theremin playing his own instrument:

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach (2013)

If you’ve never read any of Mary Roach’s books, I highly recommend them. Her use of footnotes is excellent. (They might even be the best part of her books.)

Gulp is about eating and digestion. Her other books cover sex, death, and space travel, among other things. Roach has done a tonne of research and seems to revel in asking experts the way-out-there questions. She’s funny without sacrificing accuracy and scientific principles, and she has no qualms about grossing her readers out (lucky for me, as I like gross things and find them endlessly interesting).

As an aside — did you see this story from earlier in the week on a kid who had 232 teeth removed?! I was disappointed that there were no pics, but fortunately a kind person on twitter sent me a shot of the x-ray.

That aside is why blog posts need footnotes. Anyway, this was an A+ book and your kids (or inner kid) will probably appreciate all the poop jokes.