Math Girls by Hiroshi Yuki, Translated by Tony Gonzalez

 

Math Girls by Hiroshi Yuki is a strange combination of teen romance and math textbook.  Our unnamed narrator is a shy young boy who spends most of his free time doing math problems in the library. He meets Miruka as she starts spitting sequences at him and they have a rousing conversation of noticing patterns.  Tetra comes across his radar as she comes up to him to beg help with understanding mathematics. In between this lackluster love triangle, our narrator and his two would be admirers solve math problems ranging from simple algebra problems to concepts that went way over my head.

It's a weird, weird book. The romance is barely passable as such. The math is so varying in difficulty that it's hard to know exactly who the audience is for it. I think it could be useful in teaching about math - there are excellent scenes showing collaboration among the three main characters in solving problems - but the question of what level of teaching someone would be doing is still always there.  It's too high level for high school, but maybe college students who enjoy a stretch?  I do like the message that math is not about just solving equations and memorizing formulas, but that math is about deriving patterns and hidden messages in a playful way.  It's just...it's a strange format, you.

It gets glowing reviews on Goodreads, so I do think there's an audience who is interested in this type of book and would love it. If you're a STEM-orientated person, this might be a great fit for you. Even if some of the mathematical concepts go over your head, the sheer enthusiasm of the three leads will definitely resonate with you. If you're a person who just enjoys reading about other people's enjoyment about a topic, deep rabbit holes on obscure topics, and panegyric's on Leonhard Euler, this might also be for you.

I did enjoy it. I don't think I'll be hunting down copies of the rest of the books in this series, including Math Girls Talk about Trigonometry and Math Girls 2: Fermat's Last Theorem, but I love that these books exist.  

Lines of note:

"Through equations, I can share the experience of mathematicians from ages past." (page 1)

"Language is extremely important in mathematics. Math uses language in a very precise way to make sure there's no confusion." (page 18)

"'...If you shout a 0, it becomes a 1.  See?'" I wrote in the notebook:

                            0!

(page 189)

The above is an absolutely nerdy math joke and if you don't get it, don't worry about it. I chuckled.  

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Our book club book for this month was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. This is the debut novel from Saunders and is described everywhere as "avant garde," so I was super nervous upon reading it. I had to keep checking it out of the library because I was consistently having to return it after having read only twenty pages.

It's the story of the in between stage between life and death (the "bardo") and the ghosts who hang out there.  It's a narration about the love of a father for his child. It's the retelling of the stories of the forgotten.  It's confusing as all get out.

There are over 150 characters in the book and if you try to follow each individual story line, you'll drive yourself crazy. I was attempting to do that the first couple of attempts at this book.  But then I let it go. I imagined myself in the bardo with ghosts flitting in and out, only obtaining the bits and pieces of their stories. I imagined the confusion of not really knowing you're dead.  I stopped trying to figure out plot and just imagined being there. It made it all much more reasonable and I made it through the last half of the book with less sturm and drang and confusion. 

Saunders is quite clever in the writing. He uses bits and pieces from historical narratives in addition to his own narration from the beings in the bardo.

His hair was dark brown, without any tendency to baldness. - In "The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln," by Katherine Helm, account of Senator James Harlan.

His hair was black, still unmixed with gray. - In "Chiefly About War Matters," by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

His hair, well silvered, through the brown then predominated; his beard was more whitened. - In "A Wisconsin Woman's Picture of President Lincoln," by Cordelia A. P. Harvey, in "The Wisconsin Magazine of History."

The conflicting accounts tell us so much about the time period, but also call into question the idea of the "facts" of history.  If we want to describe Lincoln's hair color, there's no way to actually do so with any sort of accuracy. If that's the case on a detail that seems, on the face of it, to have an actually correct answer,  what hope do we have of constructing any sense of the reality of the past? 

In the end  I was glad I soldiered through on this one, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it without strongly advising that you gear up for some confusion at the beginning.