The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki *****

The Full Moon Coffee Shop

When your life has taken a wrong turn, where do you go? The Full Moon Coffee Shop. How do you find it? It finds you. What should you order? You can’t. The cats will bring desserts and drinks selected just for you, consult your horoscope, and reveal where your path has deviated from your true self. “Who knows—maybe it’s all a dream.”

Warning: The author describes this as “a book about astrology.” Welcome back to the 1970s and The Age of Aquarius.

“After graduating from university, [Mizuki Serikawa] became a substitute primary-school teacher. The scriptwriting work felt like a side hustle, a hangover from [her] student days.” However, her scripts were very successful. After years as a “hitmaker,” she lost touch and her fancy apartment with expensive furnishings. She made ends meet by writing scripts for side characters for video games. Her only friend was Jiro, the gay hair stylist.

Akari Nakayama was a director who remembered Mizuki’s time as a hitmaker. She arranged a meeting with Mizuki to turn down her latest submission, and … She forgot to tell Mizuki that she remembered her from primary school. Mizuki led Akari’s walk-to-school group.

Satsuki Ayukawa was a popular, cute/kawaii actress until the tabloids reported that she had an affair with a married man. Akari broke the news to her that this was the end of her career. Satsuki was also in the walk-to-school group.

Takashi Muzimoto hired Mizuki to write scripts for his video game. He was also in the walk-to-school group. When the old man who played piano died, he found foster homes for the man’s cats.

Megumi Hayakawa, also in the walk-to-school group, left her hair stylist job and ended up with Jiro.

All these people were intertwined, and the horoscope-reading cats at the Full Moon Coffee Shop set them all straight through the use of astrology.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cats Press books and book recommendations. 

The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack *****

The End of Everything

The stuff of planet Earth constitutes 5% of the universe. The rest is dark energy and dark matter. If physics has left you behind, Katie (despite what the records might say, the fire was not my fault) Mack will catch you up with her readable and enjoyable book, The End of Everything. For example, “The 2D surface is a saddle shape (or, if you don’t have a saddle handy, you can use a Pringles chip),” or “If we need weirdness in physics, we can always rely on the quantum realm to serve us up something good.” Her physics is more fun than you remember.

Some memorable quotes:

“It means I have to learn a lot about everything, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.”

“The fundamental incompatibility of our theories of the very massive and the very small is one of the things that hints at the direction we should go in creating new, more complete theories. But it is also rather inconvenient when we’re trying to explain the very early universe.”

“If you zoom in to a small enough scale, do space and time act like discrete particles, or perhaps waves that interfere with each other? Are there wormholes? Are there dragons??? We have no idea.”

“And, to be clear, it’s not that we necessarily can explain everything from the Planck Time on, but that we currently definitely cannot explain anything before it.”

“I have a moral objection to the word quadrillion.”

As a bonus, Dr. Katie Mack (BS Caltech, PhD Princeton) mentions several notable female and POC physicists and astronomers, including: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Freya Blekman, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Ruth Gregory, Anna Ijjas, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Hiranya Peiris, and Vera Rubin. Surprisingly, she omits Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

The book ends with a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “But that means the whole point is that you understand it, and then you enjoy it, and then… ‘so long and thanks for all the fish.’ Cool.”

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cats Press books and book recommendations.