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Read it, dang it!

Some decent passages, but the author is determined to make life about style over substance. Hard disagree.

Eh, it's ok. Has an NPR flavor to it. Would blow your mind, if you'd never heard of ideas like growing your own food, shipping lettuce across the country is a waste of fuel, etc. Some touching parts about holidays and family traditions. One thing I didn't know much about was turkey mating (!), but otherwise, you probably already know most of this. Many paragraphs are extended with cracking wise in a subtly patronizing tone.

Left me wanting much more about the music. Interesting references to hauntology, post-modernism, the emergence of this kind of music due to late-stage capitalism commodifying everything and the trauma of missing dead futures that never came to be, etc. An expanded version would be great. Feels a bit like a paper for college, with various sources lined up to make a line of argument, but not much depth. A fine intro.

Just...no. The book alternates between little stories that are meant to help you understand complex ideas in physics, and lectures that give the grittier equations and explanations.

The "stories" are just about a guy who hangs around a physics professor and falls asleep during his lectures, and so he has weird dreams about the topics. Anthropomorphized electrons that dance waltzes, gazelles that somehow symbolize waves, passing through slits of a wall and into the clutches of waiting lions, etc. Invariably, the examples used in the stories only muddle and mislead from the actual science.

The science parts get it all wrong as well, veering from too simple to overly particular, with a strangely-specific ending about every little thing known about quarks. A total mess.

Half a star for the rating, just because the science itself is fascinating and it's stimulating to think all of it through.