This is another book sale find, and it’ll be a book that in, let’s say 30 days, I will remember nothing about, will struggle to remember the title, and will only know I’ve read it by seeing the cover. It probably also won’t help my memory that I only got about halfway through this one before throwing in the proverbial towel.

To break it down, the central theme here has to do with the theory of Shrodinger’s cat, which you may have run across in a college course or two. Basically, there is a cat in a box and it’s either dead or alive, but without being viewed by a person, it still exists as both dead AND alive. So is the case with Johnny, who shoots himself in the face while cleaning his gun. However, his body isn’t discovered until days later, so he’s theoretically both alive and dead in this book. His friends hang out with him and feel that something is different about him but can’t quite pinpoint what’s going on. Johnny himself feels different. The scientist Shrodinger himself is a character in one of the sub-plots, following a group of the narrator’s friends around and boring them to tears with his theories. Their attempts to ditch him are in vain.

Then there’s this whole thing about the President of Montana, which has apparently seceded from the good ol’ U.S. of A. I kind of lost interest at this point, so I can’t tell you much about it.

And lastly (I think), there’s a homeless lady who seems rather intelligent in her sub-plot, which is told through her diary entries. I skipped through most of those, though.

If I didn’t have a metric ton of other books to read, I might have gone the distance with this one, because it was interestingly written. There were some very meta things that happened, and I was interested in the Johnny storyline. Other than that, this one will get donated back to the library, where it will be sold again at a book sale, to someone who maybe has a bit more interest in getting through this one.