I finished reading this book a day ahead of my Sci-Fi Fantasy Book Club Meeting (August 12, 2014) to discuss the book. This fiction is a zany exploration into the concept of multiverses and how to use them for fun and profit. It contains very little hard science (which is good; my background is in accounting), and I found it to be a throughly fun book.One year ago Theo Bernstein was a well-respected, wealthy, world-class physicist, aged 30, in charge of the Very Very Large Hadron Colliider. But one year ago he misplaced a decimal point and blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider, resulting in the destruction of a multi-billion dollar project and of the mountain in Switzerland that blew up with the VVLHC. The explosion left him with an invisible right hand and made him personal non grata in the world of physics; he then lost all of his twenty million dollar personal fortune he inherited from his father when his investment firm went belly up, and his fourth wife left him. His brother Max is presumed dead at the hands of Honduran drug traffickers, and his sister Janine has a restraining order against him (which would be violated by him even calling her on the phone). He is much reduced in circumstance (learning that a large cardboard box is not a good shelter when it rains), and finds himself applying for a job – any job – that will keep him from eating roadkill to survive.Enter Pieter van Goyen, the renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, who was Bernstein’s mentor and who had recommended him for the running of the VVLHC. Bernstein is advised that Goyen has died, and has left the contents of his safe deposit box in Leiden and five thousand dollars in US dollars to him. Bernstein duly travels to Leiden, and embarks on a journey that will rewrite the laws of physics and give Bernstein a great appreciation of doughnuts.I throughly enjoyed this book, not to mention all of the various universe permutations dreamed up by the author. (My personal view is that a multiuniverse is the only concept that reconciles free will with an all-knowing God, and that throwing doughnuts into the mix is an added perk.) I am very much looking forward to discussing this book tomorrow night at my Sci-Fi Fantasy Book Club Meeting, and I hope that someone at the Meeting can tell me what happened to the demon on the train. This was enjoyable, but would have been excellent had it been 100 pages shorter. Clever only lasts for so long until it begins to grate on your nerves. I enjoyed popping into alternate realities, and not the constant fight between brothers which, as I saw it, had no background and did not make that much sense. That said, I can totally see Martin Freeman playing Theo in the movie and I would love to see another novel based in the sky world.
What do You think about Doughnut (2013)?
Fun, funny, and imaginitive. Reminded me a little of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
—Lizbackus
See that's a good reason to become a hermit!
—miraclebaby65
