The Everything Theory: Combining Adventure with Ancient Mysteries

I’m always looking for novels that will make me look at the world in different ways. The Everything Theory does that while entertaining readers with a fast-paced plot and memorable characters.

Theories on everything from how the pyramids were constructed to Stonehenge to Atlantis abound through this novel as the characters search the far reaches of the Earth for answers.

The adventure starts in a small town in Australia when an amateur astrologist is found dead after an apparent suicide. Luke, his assistant and cohort, doesn’t believe his friend killed himself. Then someone tries to kill Luke and he wonders if they stumbled across information that others want to keep hidden. While on the run, he meets a group of researchers who know why he’s in danger.

The result is a chase full of twists and turns and learning along the way. The theories shown in this novel made me wonder about the truth behind the ancient knowledge that we dig up and try to explain. Are we seeing the truth when we look at history in this way or are we seeing what we want to see?

Dianne Gray delivers descriptions that put you right in the middle of the action:

“Seira Kanahele scrambled from the tunnel and into the dying light where the colours of dusk and shadows of dark clouds moved like sharks through the mountains. As she looked behind for the others, her long, black plait flicked like a snake at her back. She covered her head with her gloved hands as the mouth in the mountain spewed dust and rocks and millions of years of history across the remote, uninviting slopes…Only humans could have created the beauty of the caves and only humans could have destroyed them.”

Character descriptions like this reminded me of Dickens:

“He pulled back his hood to reveal hair like black feathers styled by his pillow, a youthful complexion with rosy cheeks like fresh slap marks and a small mole between his bottom lip and strong, square jawline.”

“All his life he had thought of the Earth as nothing more than the ground beneath his feet. He never imagined ancient cities below, or the tons of rock and dirt that has been laid down through the ages like the pages of a book holding the records of a forgotten history.”

I didn’t want this novel to end. I wanted it to go on with all the theories of the world, making me wonder about what we like to call the truth. But the ending was absolutely perfect and the epilogue really made me smile. Recommended to anyone who loves to wonder about the world.

Click here to order The Everything Theory. You can connect with Dianne Gray, the author of The Everything Theory, through her blog or on Twitter.

What do you look for in a novel? Do you have any theories on ancient mysteries?

Snowbound Reading through the Decades

When the snow is up past your knees and you can’t open the door, then all you can do is stay in and read. That’s why I love the snow.

I’ve been wandering through the decades with a chronological short story collection and I’m stuck in the 1950s for now. The collection begins with a story published in 1915 and goes up to the end of the century. I’ve seen farming communities replaced by city life. Writing styles have become more rushed. Now I’m stuck in suburbia surrounded by themes of society’s expectations and restrictions. I’m looking forward to the 60s.

My favorite story from the 1930-50 era is “Resurrection of a Life” by William Saroyan, published in 1935. The character remembers being a newspaper boy in 1917, roaming the streets, shouting disastrous headlines. It beautifully shows what that might do to a young boy. Not only does he see the coldness of the city, but he repeats and sells stories of war.

“There he is suddenly in the street, running, and it is 1917, shouting the most recent crimes of man, extra, extra, ten thousand huns killed, himself alive, inhaling, exhaling, ten thousand, ten thousand, all the ugly buildings solid, all the streets solid, the city unmoved by the crime, ten thousand, windows opening, doors opening, and the people of the city smiling about it, good, good, ten thousand, ten thousand of them killed. Johnny, get your gun, and another trainload of boys in uniforms, going away, torn from home, from the roots of life, their tragic smiling, and the broken hearts, all things in the world broken.”

We see and feel the city, the people bustling by, and the boy there in the middle of it all. While others think of war as abstract, he breaks it down to individuals. He sees their faces caught up in something large and monstrous. Toward the end, he still manages to find beauty in it all:

“And all that I know is that we are somehow alive, all of us, in the light, making shadows, the sun overhead, space all around us, inhaling, exhaling, the face and form of man everywhere, pleasure and pain, sanity and madness, over and over again, war and no war, and peace and no peace, the earth solid and unaware of us, unaware of our cities, our dreams, unaware of this love I have for life.”

Sometimes I take a break to read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. It’s a great one so far.

Are you snowbound or enjoying the sunshine? What have you been reading lately?

A Century of Voices

I started the new year off with voices from the last century. I know, I’m weird.

The voices are contained within this volume of short stories. They’re in chronological order starting with the year 1915 so reading through them is like reading through history. Not the kind of history you read in textbooks, but the kind that’s filled with people’s thoughts and feelings. There have been stories about immigration and racial issues, farming communities and mobsters. Poverty. Cruelty. Injustice. And yes, hope.

Famous voices can be found through the pages, including the familiar ones of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. But I’ve enjoyed hearing the others, the ones I hadn’t heard until now.

One of my favorites so far, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, was published in 1917. It shows how often women were dismissed, even though they were always there farming, cooking, and cleaning. That attitude comes through as the normal way of things with passages like this:

“Oh well,” said Mrs. Hale’s husband, with good-natured superiority, “women are used to worrying over trifles.”

The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke.

“And yet,” said he, with the gallantry of a young politician, “for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?”

The women did not speak, did not unbend.

Reading through this volume has reminded me why I love short stories. They give the reader so much in only a few words. The best short stories could easily be novels. They’re packed full of emotion. In these times with so little time (really the way it’s always been), it’s surprising that more people don’t read short stories.

It’ll be interesting to see how writing styles have changed over the last century. I’ll keep reading through time and will let you know how it goes in future posts.

What do you think of short stories? Do you have a favorite short story writer?

History as Inspiration

History is more easily overlooked than crazy dogs or nature, but stories from long ago can also be a source of inspiration. It’s the everyday history that inspires and it’s all around us. Whether you’re writing historical fiction or an adventure novel, it’s always fun to sprinkle bits of the past through the pages.

Sometimes finding these stories is as easy as walking up to a plaque or statue, even if it might make you look like a tourist. I found this plaque practically covered in vines. It mentions Bartholomew Gosnold, who led the first recorded European expedition to Cape Cod before the Pilgrims. It brings to mind what this area would have looked like at that time, what life would have been like, the challenges people faced.

Widow’s walks or cupolas make me think of the days when women waited for years for a ship to appear on the horizon. Although we romanticize that kind of thing today, would it be all that romantic if you were really living it? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Shipbuilders, farmers, and fishermen once worked this land. Some may have spent their lives building ships bound for the Orient, hearing only tales and legends from the adventurers who came back.

Stone walls always make me think of borders that are now long gone and the people who placed each heavy stone, building and shaping their land and future.

Just imagine: ice was once cut and harvested from local ponds for refrigeration. Windmills were needed to grind grain into flour. A stone building that’s now a research center was used as a holding area for whales that were caught and hauled in from the ocean. And we think we work hard these days.

I like to imagine these people who came before us. Their stories are everywhere.

Have you found inspiration in local or everyday history? Do you think history has a place in all kinds of fiction or just historical fiction?

Book Review: American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 by H.W. Brands

Just the fact that H.W. Brands attempts to make sense of recent American and world history should earn him accolades. I think he comes as close as anyone can to accomplishing that goal in less than 400 pages.

It’s an extreme overview, but that worked well for me since I read it as research for the 1940s-80s. Many parts were emotional to read, especially the 1960s. These days that time period is romanticized for its hippies and music, yet it was also a time of deep dissension and division. Heroes were gunned down too often. We can’t help but wonder what the world might be like now if people like Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy hadn’t been killed. Those deaths caused a lot of people to retract from the world in a way, or to simply give up. Brands shows this and ties it in well with the history that follows.

It was fun to read about the more recent history that I remember living through like the Cold War and the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The 9/11 tragedy was another emotional event to read about as history. Brands seems to be pretty objective through most of the book, which is always tough to do when discussing politics. At one point, he mentions that President Obama was elected for economic reasons. Dreamer that I am, I believe he was elected for peace.

Near the end, Brands states that an odd inversion in the nature of American dreams occurred between 1945 and the present day. He says, “The dreams of 1945 had been collectively ambitious but individually modest; those of 2010 were collectively modest but individually ambitious.”

While that may be true overall, it’s also very sad whenever a back is turned on the world in favor of individual pursuits. As history continues and the world faces more environmental challenges, I hope we’ll learn that we all share this one world and that we need to take better care of it and each other.