On a whim, I picked up The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales by Alex Rose while in a local public library the other day. I had never heard of it or Alex Rose, but the title and the slim volume grabbed my attention as I perused the New Fiction section. I just started it and am only a handful of pages in. Already it is clear that the various short tales are a mish-mash of fiction and non-fiction - or perhaps, a better description would be that they are fiction wrapped up to look like non-fiction. The first part of the book is about time and quantification. I don't know where it is going, but I already like what it is saying. Here's an excerpt from the small piece on cause-and-effect:
Even now, many of us are content to relinquish our curiosity by invoking a primordial agent, the particular breed of which is arbitrarily determined by our religious heritage. But unlike the ancient teachings, these traditions are rooted in sacred scripture rather than observation, undeterred by modern methods and reasoning. In yet another strange loop, history would seem to have folded in one itself, cycling back to an era of willful ignorance.
Well, back to the book.
