Books: Regimes, the Cosmos, and Incarceration

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I promised a couple of book recommendations earlier in the show, and one of them is a novel called This Life. It’s by Qantas Conquest, and he’s been incarcerated at Angola, the Louisiana State Prison, since 1997. And the novel draws on his experience there, but it’s not your usual prison story. It’s not about plotting an escape, and it’s not even particularly violent. It’s a much more subtle novel about characters’ interior lives. And you feel with his characters the initial shock of incarceration, but then what? I mean, you know you’ve made bad decisions, but then from that point, given those circumstances, how do you choose to live your life? And especially if you’re incarcerated at a young age, over the years, you’re going to change in various ways, but how? And it’s a book about searching for meaning, about creativity, friendship, mentorship, and he ties the story together with the lyrical warfare, as he calls it, of rap and hip-hop.

And this book has been getting some recognition. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, the author observed, once you’ve been in the fire for so long, you get used to the heat. Once you get used to the heat, you start living, man. And for me, the characters in this book were astonishingly vivid and memorable. And that’s in part because I first listened to the audio version of this book. And it’s narrated by Sean Crisden, who does an extraordinary job of bringing these people to life. And, you know, Grant, it keeps happening to me that I listen to one book and then I end up going back and reading it in print, and that’s what I’m doing now.

And that also happened to me with a book by an Albanian physicist named Lara Mersini-Hotten. It’s called Before the Big Bang, The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond. And Lara Mersini-Hotten is a professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And so her book is partly a memoir of growing up in Albania under the

Totalitarian communist regime. She calls it the North Korea of Europe. And she writes about the fact that what sustained her family during that awful time was that they valued art and literature and classical music and science. She writes, the only place that was open to us was the sky and the stars above. The state could not prevent us from looking up. And eventually she gets a Fulbright and she escapes to the U.S. to study cosmology. She ends up collaborating with Stephen Hawking and she comes to theorize that the universe is really just one of many multiverses.

And her process of coming to that idea is really fascinating. It’s detailed in the book.

And I will emphasize that I don’t begin to understand all of the science in this book, not at all. But her storytelling and her lyricism and her sense of wonder really made it a page-turner, even for somebody like me.

And actually, I guess I shouldn’t say page-turner because I was listening to this book, too. It’s narrated by Exy Sands, who brings this warmth and this sure-footedness that makes the book pleasant to listen to even when I wasn’t understanding it.

Those are two very different books that I read this year that I really enjoyed.

And those books, again, are? The first one is called This Life by Quintus Conquest. And the second one is Before the Big Bang by Laura Mersini-Hawton.

We, of course, will link to those books on our website.

Let us know what you’re reading.

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