Episode 804 Pop Culture: Everything Everywhere All at Once

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us on the 8th season of our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons and share more information with your library community. This week we are getting ready for the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, with Michelle Yeoh.

From Rotten Tomatoes: Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, the film is a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can’t seem to finish her taxes. And from IMDB: An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.

This week we are looking at books about parallel universes. As a bonus, this is also a prompt in the Pop Sugar book challenge for 2022. So you can read books to prep for this week’s new movie, and also knock off another step in the challenge.

Beverages:

To celebrate this week’s topic of parallel universes, we are enjoying drinks with two ingredients. You can find all of these in the article 31 Two-Ingredient Cocktails That Make It Easy To Be Your Own Bartender. 

Greyhound

“A greyhound cocktail simply uses grapefruit juice and vodka. Gin is occasionally used instead of vodka, but the end result is similar either way. The cocktail works well because it has a pleasantly bitter flavor that is surprisingly rare in cocktails. After all, many cocktails are sweet instead, while others get most of their flavor from the alcohol. Having an entirely different flavor profile is an appealing option.”

(recipe from liquor.com) 

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 ounces vodka or gin
  • Grapefruit juice, freshly squeezed, to top
  • Garnish: lime wheel

Steps

  1. Fill a rocks glass with ice, then add the vodka or gin and the grapefruit juice and stir gently.
  2. Garnish with a lime wheel.

Rusty Nail

“The rusty nail cocktail is an easy way to slightly mellow out the flavors of scotch whiskey. It just relies on the scotch and a honey-infused liqueur called Drambuie. Drambuie is a whiskey liqueur, so it perfectly complements the flavor of the whiskey.

The reliance on liqueur and whiskey also means that this cocktail is stronger than many of the others on this list. This could be perfect if you want to fully enjoy the taste of whiskey, rather than burying it with a mixer.”

(recipe from liquor.com)

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 ounces scotch
  • 3/4 ounce Drambuie

Steps

  1. Add the scotch and Drambuie into a mixing glass with ice and stir until well-chilled.
  2. Strain into a rocks glass over one large ice cube.

Genre Discussion:

The ability to bounce around different parallel universes is a staple of science fiction stories, and is increasingly being used in more fiction stories. Wikipedia defines it all: “A parallel universe, also known as a parallel dimension, alternate universe, or alternate reality, is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with one’s own. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called a “multiverse“. While the four terms are generally synonymous and can be used interchangeably in most cases, there is sometimes an additional connotation implied with the term “alternate universe/reality” that implies that the reality is a variant of our own, with some overlap with the similarly-named alternate history.”

And if you are enjoying the idea of parallel universes, it may be because you recognize the idea. We have an article called “You probably live in a parallel universe. Here’s why.” “At one time or another, we’ve all been invited to imagine copies of ourselves running around in some other dimension, living out a life almost but not quite identical to our own. But why do people think multiverses exist in the first place? As it happens, I spent the first half of my time in grad school trying to figure out the answer to this question — and the second half trying to figure out how to explain it to people who don’t have a physics degree.”

So now is the time to enjoy your life in a parallel universe, part of the multiverse, as you enjoy some new books. You want to be sure you are reading as many good books as your parallel selves are reading, after all!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

A Thousand Pieces of You (Firebird #1), by Claudia Gray  [a YA book]

Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their groundbreaking achievements. Their most astonishing invention, called the Firebird, allows users to jump into multiple universes—and promises to revolutionize science forever. But then Marguerite’s father is murdered, and the killer—her parent’s handsome, enigmatic assistant Paul— escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.

Marguerite refuses to let the man who destroyed her family go free. So she races after Paul through different universes, always leaping into another version of herself. But she also meets alternate versions of the people she knows—including Paul, whose life entangles with hers in increasingly familiar ways. Before long she begins to question Paul’s guilt—as well as her own heart. And soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is far more sinister than she expected.

A Thousand Pieces of You explores an amazingly intricate multi-universe where fate is unavoidable, the truth elusive, and love the greatest mystery of all.

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami 

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers. 

A Darker Shade of Magicl (Shades of Magic, 1), by     V. E. Schwab  

Kell is one of the last Antari―magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black.

Kell was raised in Arnes―Red London―and officially serves the Maresh Empire as an ambassador, traveling between the frequent bloody regime changes in White London and the court of George III in the dullest of Londons, the one without any magic left to see.

Unofficially, Kell is a smuggler, servicing people willing to pay for even the smallest glimpses of a world they’ll never see. It’s a defiant hobby with dangerous consequences, which Kell is now seeing firsthand.

After an exchange goes awry, Kell escapes to Grey London and runs into Delilah Bard, a cut-purse with lofty aspirations. She first robs him, then saves him from a deadly enemy, and finally forces Kell to spirit her to another world for a proper adventure.

Now perilous magic is afoot, and treachery lurks at every turn. To save all of the worlds, they’ll first need to stay alive.

The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.

On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.

But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse. 

The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief – no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero – or maybe a villain; in war, it’s hard to tell the difference.

The City & The City, by China Miéville

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities. 

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

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Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!