The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N. K. Jemisin)

This was a very interesting fantasy story, with a unique view of religion and gods. They remind me of the Greek gods - extravagant powers but with curious limitations, and personalities much like humans with their petty ambitions, rivalries, and jealousies. I liked the central character, a warrior woman thrown way out of her comfort zone who gives her all to save the whole world. She turns out to be the unlikely heir to the throne of the most powerful family in the world, a family that enslaves some of the gods themselves, but her role is that of human sacrifice, until she turns the tables. I enjoyed the story, especially when things started moving more quickly at the end.

Just My Type (Simon Garfield)

A whole book just about fonts - their history, their politics, their design, and their psychology. Why does everybody hate Comic Sans? Will Helvetica take over the universe? Why is Steve Jobs almost as important in the history of type as Guttenberg? Which font should I choose for my course materials? I loved it, and learned a vast amount of quirky, fun information. I'm never going to be a font geek, the kind of person who, when watching a movie set in the 1940s, is thrown off by a store sign in a font that was invented in 1972. Still, I loved the whole thing. And yes, after reading this, I was moved to do some research and change my standard font from Century Gothic to Verdana. Read the book if design is something you are interested in.

Rule 34 (Charles Stross)

I've liked Charles Stross's  work, but I would have picked this one up for the title alone! Rule 34 is one of the supposed rules of the Internet: If it exists, there is pornography of it. In the Scotland of the future, there is a special police unit that monitors the Internet to try to separate people's fantasies from actual crimes. An unusual attracts attention, and proves to be just the tip of a very strange iceberg. I enjoyed the story, with its exotic twists and turns and Stross's usual dropping of pop-culture references at every opportunity. The writing was odd, though. It was in present tense, which is fine, but I didn't love the fact that it was written in second person. If immediacy is what you're after, why not use first person? Still, it was a fun ride.

Father of the Rain (Lily King)

This is the story of the rocky, frustrating, heartbreaking relationship between a father and daughter. It begins when the daughter is 11 and her parents get divorced, and she spends the next years of her life visiting him every weekend. He is never abusive, but he is often an inappropriate, angry, outrageous drunk. The book then moves on to her as a young adult, with loving relationship and a tenure-track professorship at Berkley, but her father's health issues drag her back to his home as she tries to help him climb up from rock bottom. The third part of the story deals with her life years after that. In the middle of the book I became frustrated with her, but at the end the story was uplifting and satisfying as a clear portrait of a deeply flawed man.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J. K. Rowling)

This fourth volume in the Harry Potter series takes a decided turn toward a darker narrative, as Harry has to deal not only with the dangers of the Triwizard Tournament, with events that killed champions in the past, and the increasingly dire threats of the evil  wizards, but the more mundane but equally painful challenges of asking a girl to the big dance. In this story, various wizards pay the ultimate price in the war between good and evil, including one of the young wizards. I'm not convinced the elaborate plot for  Harry's life was justified, but the book is definitely worth it for its creativity and its staunch celebration of courage, loyalty, and friendship.

Nightwatch (Sergei Lukyanenko)

This contemporary vampire story, by a Russian author, is interesting but not fully engaging, perhaps because of the cultural differences. Walking among us are Others, humans who have magical powers that make them more than human. These Others take sides in an eternal battle between Light and Dark, in which the agents of the Night Watch represent Light and agents of the Day Watch represent Dark. An ancient treaty constrains their battle, but still they struggle for the souls of the humans who surround them, oblivious to their powers. In this book, which is the first of a series, a powerful new Other arises and the opposing forces struggle for his soul. I enjoyed it to a mild degree, but won't be following more books in the series.

The Tiger (John Vaillant)

This carefully researched true story about the hunt for a man-eating tiger in far-eastern Russia is engrossing and moving. Woven in with the story of what made this tiger stand out and how it was hunted is the history of Russia and particularly its far East rim, the natural history of tigers, and the complex and changing relationship between humans and tigers in the ancient forests. What was most amazing, aside from the sheer nail-biting adventure of it, was that the author managed to portray all sides in the story with even-handed empathy. Highly recommended.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)

The next installment of the Harry Potter series, which I am reading through again. I am constantly in awe of Rowling's imagination: the spells she thinks of, the names she gives things, the complex ways her plots unfold. She also seems to get the reality of adolescents, including their tendency to obsess with one thing (Quidditch!) and block out other things (Marked for death!) that might seem more important. I also love the things she emphasizes again and again, not through words but through the very essence of the stories. Things like bravery, honesty, loyalty, and love. This is what the series is really all about, as Harry grows into the kind of person we can all admire.

Skippy Dies (Paul Murray)

This is the story of a private Catholic boys' school in Ireland and various people connected with it: the boys, their teachers, their girl friends, and their neighbors. Skippy does indeed die in the first pages. Two-thirds of the book describe the events leading up to his death, and the remaining third describes the aftermath. This book is excruciatingly well-written; the dialogue, the settings, the events, the interactions--all are drawn with precision and clarity. This makes the book even harder to take, as the events described are painful in the extreme. The story is saturated with drugs, sexual abuse, lies, betrayal, cruelty both casual and sadistic, and the utter futility of trying to oppose any of this. Nothing in this story is uplifting or ennobling. I found it gloomy, depressing, and infuriating. Not recommended.

Why We Make Mistakes (Joseph Hallinan)

This interesting book on psychology explains a number of the common mistakes people make. Some are very scary (pilots flying a plane right into the ground because of a distraction over a malfunctioning light bulb; long-distance truck drivers sending and receiving emails on the road). Others are silly (why do people believe that they'll be so much happier living in California than in Michigan?), but still have important effects on people's lives. The author not only discusses things like the overconfidence effect (we tend to believe we will be more successful than we are, because we remember having been more successful than we were), but also gives suggestions on how to remedy this problem (through prompt, clear feedback). Not the most scintillating writing, but clear and easy to follow, and covers some really important topics.

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

This is one of my very favorite science fiction books of all time. Vinge has created an amazing, mind-blowing universe, filled it with fascinating aliens, set up a truly epic battle between good and evil, and laid it all on the shoulders of characters, human and non-human, you really come to care about. There is action ranging from galaxy-wide cataclysms to up-close-and-personal betrayals. There is technology ranging from the literally unimaginably godlike to muzzle-loading cannon and wheeled carts. Highly recommended.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J. K.Rowling)

More magical wonderfulness from the Harry Potter universe. I'm reading my way through all the novels again, and remembering why I liked them so much the first time. As with most books for children or young adults there are places where the protagonists act with total illogic, because doing the logical thing would bring in the adults and end all the fun. But the books are all about loyalty, and bravery, and standing up for what is right. Knowing how everything ends makes it fun to see how Ginny and Harry interact in this story. We learn more of Hagrid's back story and the origins of He Who Must Not Be Named. Very enjoyable.

On Being Certain (Robert Burton)

Burton is a neurologist who writes here about the neurobiology of the feeling of knowing, a sense of certainty we have that is often independent of any conscious reasoning process. He makes a compelling case that this feeling of knowing is as much a sensory or perceptual experience as our feeling of pain when we stub our toe or feeling of seeing a baseball coming toward us. All these feelings arrive in consciousness after a sometimes lengthy process in the "hidden layers" of the mind (to use a term from the AI work in neural networks). This is great stuff, and I have seen similar conclusions from similar research from lots of directions. Where I disagree with Burton is his apparent conviction that we are chained by our biology to requiring this feeling of knowing from our unconscious thought processes in order to be able to function effectively. (I say "apparent" because I didn't always follow his reasoning, so my characterization of it might be wrong.) If the feeling of knowing never arose, he says, we would realize that all our beliefs and perceptions might be wrong, and would therefore be stuck in an infinite loop of wondering whether there might not be a better decision or idea, and would be frozen by uncertainty. But science itself is the continual drive to improve our ideas and beliefs while recognizing that every single one of them might be wrong, and science is not frozen by this. He seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion of skepticism and toleration for ambiguity. He likens the effort to instill in people a more scientific, skeptical view of the world to encouraging "a clown that he'd be more useful as a mortician." He recognizes that the essential scientific viewpoint is one of provisional acceptance of ideas, and offers the "practical suggestion" that science and faith can be reconciled if only "both science and religion should try to adopt and stick with the idea of provisional facts," despite the reality that faith and religion are defined by the unconditional acceptance of truths not revealed in evidence but in conviction. Isn't this basically trying to talk that clown into opening a funeral parlor? It seems that Burton himself has trouble with accepting in a real and meaningful way ideas that don't match with his unconscious feeling of knowing. He quotes Scientific American on the origin of  the universe ("The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the only answer can be that the big bang happened everywhere.") and describes it as "unsatisfying" because our visual system is incapable of imagining a point without it being surrounded by something. To me, this statement is not unsatisfying. It is breathtakingly beautiful and mind-blowing! In a similar way he denigrates Stephen Hawking's theories of the universe without boundaries as "an idea that, even if entirely correct, isn't consistent with how our mind's eye works. We want a palpable resolution for the tension created by trying to understand the surrounding background, not an abstraction that we can't see or feel." So even if Hawking is "entirely correct" in his description of the universe, it's not good enough because it doesn't fit nicely with our preconceptions? Because the great stuff here is stuff I already knew and I didn't like the stuff I didn't know, I was not impressed with the book overall.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling)

Now that all the movies are out, I've decided to start over again with the books, reading them all in order to remind myself of the whole story, including all the parts the movies left out. The story is so magical (pun intended!) and so amazingly creative! I don't care that a few minutes with Google would have solved much of the problem, or wonder why Snape didn't tell Dumbledore about Quirrell. I just get caught up in the whole adventure of it. This story fulfills a deep need of all of us (not just children) to imagine that the world is full of delicious, dangerous, thrilling secrets, hiding just around the corner, and that I can learn to step around that corner and be part of it all.

Moonwalking with Einstein (Joshua Foer)

Foer, a journalist, while covering the 2005 US Memory Championship, asked many of the contestants how they managed their amazing feats of memory, and they all said the same thing: Anybody can learn to do this, if they practice hard enough. So he decided to find out for himself. During the next year he studied all the mnemonic techniques the memory champions use, coached by Ed Cooke, English memory grandmaster, to prepare to enter the 2006 US Memory Championships. Along the way he researched many different aspects of memory, including the history of memorization techniques (starting from Simonides in his collapsed banquet hall), memory theories and education, savant syndrome, traumatic amnesia, training and expertise, and creativity. He blends all this information into a compelling (and scientifically accurate) view of the mind and how to use it. I was completely caught up in his drive toward the competition, and riveted by the action, cerebral though it might be, of the championship itself. The epilogue is the clearest explanation I have ever seen of the usefulness of mnemonics in the real world. Highly recommended.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (John McWhorter)

I really enjoyed this investigation into the history of English grammar and the various influences that, apparently, made it what it is today. Since I'm not a linguist, I grew tired in a few places where the author became strident in his condemnation of the traditional story, but this detracted very little from the weird and wonderful story he wove. English is a Germanic language, but has several quirks of grammar different from all the others in this family, such as the "meaningless do." We say "You like pasta," but also "You do not like pasta" and "Do you like pasta?" The do in these sentences has no meaning, and almost no other languages in their world require this. Why is it there? McWhorter thinks he knows, and he makes a good case. I found it fascinating.

The Unit (Ninni Holmqvist)

What a sad book. It is set at some unnamed future time in Scandinavia, when men over 60 and women over 50 are either needed (primarily by having children, occasionally by virtue of important professions) or dispensible, and dispensible people go into a Unit. While there they are very well cared for (it's a lovely place with all the amenities and all for free), but they have to make themselves useful to society by participating in medical and psychological experiments and donating organs and tissues needed by the needed people. Their existence is truly a gilded cage. As people start making themselves needed more consistently (teens start having babies, just to be sure), the number of dispensible people drops relative to the population, and they start reducing the exempt professions and lowering the entrance age to ensure their supply of organs and participants. There's a side theme about feminism carried too far (it's basically illegal for a man to flirt with a woman or even to display his physical strength too much), but it's not really developed. In fact, the sociology of the whole dispensible/needed concept and the forced induction into the unit isn't really developed. This is just the story of one woman undergoing this experience, from beginning to end. Nicely written (and translated) and, in many ways, engrossing, but left me wondering about so many things.

Heat Wave (Richard Castle)

I couldn't resist reading this just for the novelty value. Castle is a TV show about this writer, Richard Castle, who uses his pull with the mayor to get permission to follow along with a NYC homicide unit, headed by detective Kate Beckett. In the show, he writes a novel called Heat Wave about the tough and gorgeous detective Nikki Heat, who is based on the real-life (within the show) Kate Beckett. So now Hyperion has put out that book, the fiction-within-a-fiction, allegedly by the (fictional) Richard Castle. The book features blurbs from actual writers (who appear occasionally on the show as Castle's writer buddies) and an interview with the (still fictional) author. The whole thing is really very well done. The story itself is so-so. The mystery is interesting, the action engaging, and so on, but there's nothing outstanding. The best-selling, blockbuster novelist is still fictional. But I had fun reading it.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Laura Lippman)

This slender novella is an interesting mystery with the twist that the protagonist is a detective laid up on total bed rest by a difficult pregnancy. She watches life in the park she can see from her window, and notices a woman in a green raincoat walking her dog every day, until the day the dog shows up trailing its leash, and the woman is gone. What happened to her? I figured out the answer about halfway through, but still enjoyed the story in a mild way. As a novella, it doesn't have the scope to fully develop the characters or the events, and as a late novel in a long series it relies on a lot of back story I didn't have, which left me somewhat unsatisfied. Not bad, though.

The Postmistress (Sarah Blake)

This lovely, intensely moving novel explores issues of love and truth against the backdrop of WWII. Three women's lives are intertwined in a small town at the tip of Cape Cod: the local doctor's young bride, a cocky radio reporter, and the town's postmistress. Their lives are all affected by experiences that happen, in the author's words, "around the edges" of the war. There are no combat scenes here, though part of the story is set in London during the Blitz and part follows the horror of the mass deportations of Jews in Europe. Still, the war has profound effects on all of them, and threatens their deepest convictions. I became very involved in their lives, and their actions were always believable and poignant. Beautifully written.

Crazy Time (Kate Wilhelm)

This is one of Wilhelm's earlier books, a cross between a romantic comedy and science fiction, and while it was enjoyable it didn't grab me as much as the book of hers I recently read (the mystery The Deepest Water). It was much more superficial in its emotions, relying for depth on some very iffy SF. A military experiment goes awry (because of some hacking by a fat, nerdy 14-year-old boy, the first of many stereotypes) and the adorably awkward hero gets blasted into an altered state of existence where his consciousness is dispersed around the globe. He manages to get himself back together partly because he's on the mind of the adorably awkward heroine, who was the person who happened to be looking at him when he vanished. She spends most of the book denying that he is real or that he is attracted to her, enough that I just wanted to slap her upside the head. Meanwhile, an obtuse military man is convinced that both of them, and practically everyone in the state as well, are involved in a complex spy ring. Eventually, of course, everything ends happily, though I have to say I didn't really get most of the big reveal at the end. Not a strong book, but she definitely got better.

Zero History (William Gibson)

This book shares a universe and several characters with Pattern Recognition, which I loved, but this one didn't work quite as well for me. It seemed more scattered. Pattern Recognition had one central character; this had two or three, and they didn't seem quite as well realized. Milgram, for instance, has "zero history," meaning that he has no credit, employment, or other records, but this doesn't seem to figure in the story much, and no explanation is given as to why Bigend chose this particular drug addict out of the millions in the world to rehabilitate and use as a tool. The plot seems equally scattered, with themes of military contracting, flying robot penguins, rock bands, secret fashion designers, odd hotel rooms, and stock market manipulation. The solution involved a real deus ex machina, for though the character who pulled it off had been mentioned throughout, no justification for his skill set was forthcoming. I probably shouldn't have expected it to live up to its predecessor, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu)

This book scores high on the cool-meter, with lots of geek references and self-consciously meta structure. The protagonist is named Charles Yu, and he is a time-machine repairman, a kind of blue-collar bloke, who spends his time outside of the time line waiting for service calls in a closet-sized time machine, equipped with a low self-esteem AI system and accompanied by a nonexistent dog. He gets trapped in a time loop after shooting himself in the stomach, and in the loop he visits a hypothetical version of his mother and simultaneously reads and writes a book called How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe as he tries to find his disappeared father, who sort of invented the time travel technology. The story is just as off-kilter as this sounds, and while I admired its originality, I never really got into it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)

This book is half science, half biography. The science part is about the HeLa cell line, made up of the only human cells that grow robustly and eternally in culture. They are cervical cancer cells, and they are enormously valuable to medicine.They can easily be grown to test how diseases work and find cures, how radiation and chemicals attack cell functions, and just generally how cells work. The biography part is about Henrietta Lacks, the poor uneducated black woman whose fatal tumor yielded the sample that started the whole HeLa cell line, and her family. The author describes them in brutal and tender detail, including the violence and ignorance of their lives as well as the faith and courage. She does a marvelous job of blending the two halves, so that each of them is strengthened by the other. I very much enjoyed it.

Omnitopia Dawn (Diane Duane)

This story is about MMORPGs and corporate espionage. Omnitopia, a hugely popular gaming system of a great many interconnected universes, is poised to roll out a major expansion, but lots of competitors and hackers want to make it fail. The man who runs Omnitopia is an all-around great guy (too good to be true, actually), and leads an amazing team of folks in defense of his world and the players. I was really caught up in the whole battle, especially with all the fantasy elements they use as metaphors while fighting. The ending was a little overblown, where it wasn't predictable, but it was still a fun trip.

Heir Apparent (Vivian Vande Velde)

I seem to have been on a YA book kick lately! I can't remember why this book landed on my list, but I did enjoy it for what it is--a decent example of the species. A teenage girl goes in for an hour of virtual reality game play, in a typical Medieval setting, with princes, barbarians, wizards, ghosts, and dragons. The gaming center is attacked by a citizens' group against fantasy as dangerous to the proper upbringing of children, and the equipment is damaged. They can't pull her out without injuring her; the only way she can safely exit is by winning the game. The plot reminds me of the constant problems with the holodeck on the Enterprise! Naturally, she figures out a solution to the game and emerges successfully in the nick of time. Charming and fun, at a YA level. I'm ready for something grown up now!

The Deepest Water (Kate Wilhelm)

This beautifully written mystery novel starts quietly and gently, but builds to a tense and surprising climax. A young woman's much-beloved father was murdered at his isolated cabin in the mountains, and she is drawn into a convoluted chain of evidence and speculation leading, finally, to justice. The characters are sometimes one-sided (all good or all bad), but the plot progresses realistically and the story is compelling. I very much enjoyed this book and will read others by this author.

The Titan's Curse (Rick Riordan)

This third installment in the Olympians series is very much like the first two. Percy Jackson, half-blood son of the god Poseidon, has to face mythical monsters and rogue Titans to save his friends and, oh yes, the whole world. This time the goddess Artemis and Percy's good friend, Annabeth, have been taken hostage and have to be rescued. The author is doing a good job keeping the stories interesting and exciting, but they are for teenagers and, for me, are getting a little stale. I still like them enough to want to keep reading, but need to wait a while before reading the next one.

Mostly Harmless (Douglas Adams)

This is the fifth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, which makes about as much sense as the books do. They are zany, imaginative, mind-blowing, and funny. It's been a long time since I've read one of them, which may be why this one didn't appeal to me as much as the others did, though I still enjoyed it. The usual characters (Arthur Dent, Ford Perfect, and assorted aliens and humans) careen around the universes like pinballs on TILT, running up against corporate greed, multidimensional bison, unexpected offspring, and Elvis in the process.I was mostly disappointed in how it ended, or didn't; the major issues of the book are entirely unresolved. The ride was fun, but the destination left something to be desired.

The Red Garden (Alice Hoffman)

This quiet, moving novel is a set of linked stories set in Blackwell, MA, starting with its founding in 1750 to the present day. Each story is a focused portrait of someone in the town, and they are linked in many ways: through the first house built in the town, through bears and dogs, through eels and Eel Creek, through drowned children and runaways, and through an old garden where the dirt is the color of blood and, no matter what you plant, it comes up red. I thoroughly enjoyed it, coming to know these people and this place deeply.

Imajica (Clive Barker)

I've decided to abandon this book. After a week, I'm only 20% done, and it's becoming a real chore, so I'm moving on to other books waiting on the shelf. This is a grand vision kind of book, very convoluted, and I have never really grabbed a thread I can follow through the maze. There are these 5 dominions, which might be planets or alternate planes of existence, and 4 of them are joined so that travel between them is easy, but Earth (maybe our planet, maybe our whole universe) is a 5th dominion that's relatively isolated from the others. The rituals and processes that can allow people fro Earth to travel to the other dominions and invoke entities from there to come here are basically magic, which nearly caused some kind of cataclysm at some point in the past, so magic is systematically squelched by a secret organization. There is a character who is obviously from another dominion, who is an assassin but also a good guy, and two other characters who I think are going to prove
to be as well, but they don't know it. It's all too vague for me, and I've given it all the time I plan to give it.

Shadows Bright as Glass (Amy Ellis Nutt)

This fascinating book describes in detail the experiences of Jon Sarkin, who suffered a massive stroke that tore him loose from his former self and shattered his experience of time and space. He found peace and his way of connecting back to life through art, as he began  doodling compulsively and it expanded  into a national career as an artist. Woven into Sarkin's story is much information about the history of neuroscience and the search for the nature of consciousness and identity. This book is much more accurate and well-researched than the Taylor book I read recently, though not without its own errors. The author repeatedly conflates information seen by the left eye with information in the left visual field, for example, and reports straight-faced that "Some scientists have suggested that there are more synapses in the human brain than there are atomic particles in the universe (p. 24)." Any scientist who suggested this does not deserve to be reported in a serious work of nonfiction. Overall, though, I found the story compelling, and my only real complaint is that there are no pictures of Sarkin's art, aside from the cover.

The Sea of Monsters (Rick Riordan)

This second book in the Olympians series lives up to the standards of the first one, delivering action, humor, and relationships in about equal parts. Percy, who discovered in the first book that the ancient gods are real and he is the son of Poseidon, now must go on a dangerous, unauthorized quest to save the camp that protects other half-bloods like him and the life of his satyr friend. This series is aimed at young adults, so its story is somewhat less complex and nuanced than others, but it emphasizes the eternal truths of most fiction, at least the fiction I like: bravery, friendship, honesty, and resourcefulness will win through in the end. I quite enjoyed it and will read others in the series.

Making Money (Terry Pratchett)

Classic Discworld mayhem and hilarity. The hero of "Going Postal" is back, applying his extensive past experience with running cons and minor thievery to a new challenge, now that the Royal Post is running so smoothly: The Royal Bank. Along the way he runs afoul of a Master Clerk who is more than he seems, a madman trying to become the Patrician through sympathetic magic, a cellar-filling hydraulic economic model, and golems. Great fun!

On Second Thought (Wray Herbert)

This book is right down my alley - it's all about the automatic processes we use to make quick, effortless decisions and how, depending on the situation, they can be wrong. The author makes the point that saving time and energy on decisions is often necessary (you can't possibly re-think and analyze every choice about which cereal to have for breakfast, which socks to wear to work, or which parking place to take at the mall). Still, we need to be aware that some decisions require more careful thinking, and we need to be aware of the snap judgments we make so we can countermand them when appropriate. The book includes all the basic heuristics I am familiar with (availability, or familiarity, for example) and describes other processes that I don't think are commonly referred to as heuristic but which serve the same purpose (our tendency to feel lonelier when exposed to low temperatures, for example). An interesting introduction to some of the complex processes going on "behind the curtain" in our minds.

The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie)

Another collection of classic Christie mysteries, including a few with Miss Marple and Poirot. She is a clear master of the whodunit, but after a while they become rather bloodless puzzles, especially in this short form. There is nothing really there beyond the subtle clues set for you to find.

The Atrocity Archives (Charles Stross)

This is Stross's first published novel, and it's a delightful geekfest, encompassing everything from Pinky and the Brain to the Church-Turing conjecture and Knuth's fourth book, which was written but classified. The basic idea is that some advanced forms of computation destroy entropy rapidly (tying in with the Gleick book I read recently), which tunnels through to another universe and, depending on the details, summons anything from a demon you can control to a universe-destroying monster. Shannon meets Lovecraft! The narrator is part of a super-secret British agency, part James Bond and part ISO 9000, triplicate form bureaucracy, trying to protect reality from this kind of thing. How can a geek like me not love a book where the hero works in an office of twisty little cubicles, all alike? (If that means nothing to you, you'll miss half of what the author tosses out in this novel.) I enjoyed it quite a lot.

My Stroke of Insight (Jill Bolte Taylor)

Though the story of Dr. Taylor, neuroanatomist, experiencing a stroke is fascinating, and the story of her recovery moving and inspiring, I was ultimately disappointed in this book. The beginning held all the fascination, but the second half, where she shared the deeper, more meaningful lessons from her experience, left me cold, and I wound up skimming through, in a hurry to be done. She would say that this is a sign that I am too dominated by my linear, logical left hemisphere, and I would roll my eyes. Though a neuroanatomist and scientist, she seems to have completely bought the new-age mysticism about the brain at a level I would not accept from one of my Intro Psych students. She attributes part of her recovery to constantly thanking her body's cells for all their hard work, and believes that "this induces some sort of vibration within my body that promotes a healing environment." She attributes all manner of positive energy and feeling to the right hemisphere, saying that when others offer anger she chooses whether to "reflect your anger and engage in argument (left brain) or be empathetic and approach you with a compassionate heart (right brain)." This ignores research showing that the right hemisphere handles more negative emotions and the left handles the positive ones! Even the compelling, moment-by-moment description of the morning of the stroke is suspect; they were reconstructed a year after the event with the help of a therapist, and she doesn't doubt them at all because "Thanks to the skills of our right mind, we are capable of remembering isolated moments with uncanny clarity and accuracy." She knows nothing about the fallibility of flashbulb memories. Quite a let-down.

The Information (James Gleick)

A fascinating examination of what information is (knowledge, uncertainty, meaning, and bits) and how our understanding of and relationship to information has changed over time. It starts with the pre-literate communication of word and talking drums and works its way up, through writing, printing, telegraphy, radio, computers, and the Internet, to Google and Wikipedia. There is much to enjoy here. I loved learning about how talking drums actually talk, about the Analytical Engines of Babbage (never quite realized) and MIT (which took up a room and actually worked to solve differential equations). The controversies over whether information has a thermodynamic cost or whether Wikipedia should include a page on one screw in one particular bicycle were a delight to behold. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this sort of history and philosophy of ideas.

The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)

My D&D friends recommended this book (actually, the series that it begins: The Olympians). Though it's YA, it is still a fun adventure, bringing the classic Greek pantheon into the modern world to seriously mess with the life of a dyslexic, ADHD, troubled New York kid. The story has everything: major gods (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) assorted secondary gods (Ares, Chiron, and Dionysus) plus hell hounds, furies, satyrs, fates, and so forth. I enjoyed the ride and will read more of the series.

The Gone-Away World (Nick Harkaway)

This post-apocalyptic tale is different from the ones I've been reading lately - it is much zanier, farther out, and still more human and believable than the others, not because the science is more convincing but because the people are. A fancy new weapon that makes your enemy Go Away is supposed to be clean, without fallout or collateral damage, but of course it doesn't work out that way - the whole fabric of reality is ruptured, creating monsters and turning dreams into reality, and swallowing up the real without a trace. In the midst of horror and death and destruction, it is the story of love and loyalty and finding truth. It is also about pirates, and ninjas, and mimes, and epic battles between good and evil. It also has a moment, about 2/3 of the way through, when absolutely everything goes sort of sideways, or maybe twists itself inside like a Mobius strip, and you spend a hundred or so pages wondering WTF very loudly before, amazingly, it all begins to make sense again. How could I not love this book!

Double Sin (Agatha Christie)

This collection of short stories is a mixture of classic Dame Agatha, including several Poirot mysteries and a couple of Marples, mixed in with a few strange, atmospheric mysteries of a darker type: a doll that haunts a dressmaker's shop, a medium who manifests a dead child physically. I've never been a great fan of short stories, and these are pretty typical of what one would expect.

The Waters Rising (Sherri Tepper)

A complex, fantastic tale of a post-apocalyptic land, after the Big Kill that resulted from the reckless use of technology. This world has talking animals (left over from genetic engineering experiments) and killing curses (from old biological weapons), and people drawn together by destiny to save humans from the rising waters and ancient killing machines. I found the mix of technology and fantasy unconvincing, along with the big underlying reality, which is that the waters are rising now not just because of climate change but because a huge icy comet that had been trapped in the earth when it originally formed had broached its boundaries, and the water it was made of was being squeezed out to drown the entire world, right up to the highest mountains. The solution to this problem didn't really convince me, either. So while it was a pleasant enough story, it didn't really work well for me.

Hull Zero Three (Greg Bear)

A mysterious, intriguing tale of a man who wakes up (or is created) on a giant interstellar ship in mid-voyage and must figure out what is going on. The ship is obviously damaged and malfunctioning: heat and gravity are erratic, monstrous things keep trying to kill him, and he is plagued by a faulty, untrustworthy memory. He finds others he thinks he can trust, and together they try to solve the mystery of the ship, its past and future. The mysteries were explained in the end, which made the story worthwhile. I enjoyed it, in a dark and frustrated kind of way. The author definitely accomplished what he set out to achieve.

The Cookbook Collector (Allegra Goodman)

This novel follows two sisters, their various lovers, their family (and their secret family) two different tech startups, neighbors, and assorted others as they deal with betrayals, secrets, the dot.com crash, September 11, and an amazing collection of classic cookbooks. The writing is lovely and the characters skillfully drawn, but the book seems unfocused and sprawling. I enjoyed it, but didn't love it.

Daemon (Daniel Suarez)

Matthew Sobol, a brilliant computer genius and online game designer, dies and unleashes the Daemon - an autonomous, web-based system that resides in bazillions of fragments distributed around the world, reading newsfeeds and responding to events in ways that he had pre-programmed, to make the world into what Sobol wanted. For example, he doesn't like spammers, so they are murdered in their thousands, and while I approve of the goal, I strongly disapprove of his methods. The Daemon is untraceable and unstoppable, because it is everywhere and nowhere and none of its many minions know its plans or what their part in those plans are. They get messages that, for instance, they are to go to X location, pick up an object from Y person, attach it to another object they already had, and deliver to Z person, and they never know why. I found the book frustrating, since the characters who were sympathetic and positive stand against the Daemon, but the overall message seemed to be that the Daemon is not only inevitable but is in fact a force for good overall. There's a cold calculus we are expected to accept, that the horrific murder of thousands (and the collateral deaths of more thousands who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) is OK because if the Daemon doesn't take over there will be a worse calamity in some abstract future. I also had trouble with the idea that one man's genius could really be that awesomely perfect, to have anticipated so much and planned in such detail as to be completely unstoppable. While the details of the technology are no doubt accurate and could really happen, no system is that perfect and free of bugs and glitches! So while I am glad I read this, and it gave me some interesting ideas to talk about, I didn't really enjoy it or buy it completely..

The Learners (Chip Kidd)

Kidd is a famous graphic designer, and the book is a festival of graphic design, much of which I found irritating. What's the point of splitting the disclaimer in half down the middle and separating the two halves by a page? You've just made it a chore to read, and if you think nobody reads it then it's just an exercise with no purpose. I also found the characters a little overblown, as though trying too hard to be dramatic and special. But as a psychologist I was very interested in the inside details of the Milgram study (NOT an experiment!). Still, though most participants were stressed, my recollection was that severe psychological reactions didn't occur - certainly, nobody committed suicide as a result. All in all I'm glad I read it, but I didn't love it.

The Algebraist (Iain Banks)

I enjoyed this huge, deep novel about a galaxy chock-full of alien factions, slow-motion wars, intrigue, hidden codes, and more. Most of the technology seemed plausible and I cared about the main characters. I thought the space warfare was handled especially skifully. That said, I still had problems with part of it, mostly the time frames. I know why it was necessary, but still, species that not only survive but stay at essentially the same technological and sociological level for billions of years? Even among the main characters, technology didn't change over hundreds of years. Think back 200 years and decide how likely that is. Also, all the species (with one significant exception) are at basically the same technological level, and even that one exception is not different by orders of magnitude. These factors kept getting in the way of my suspension of disbelief. Overall, though, I liked it.

Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)

This story of a dysfunctional family is beautifully written but painful to read. Ex-jock Patty is married to environmental activist Walter but more attracted to bad-boy rocker Richard, which poisons their marriage. Their children also suffer, especially Joey, who grows up a self-centered hedonist in and out of a troubled relationship of his own. The words and sentences are splendid, drawing such a vivid picture of all the characters and events, but I can't say I enjoyed the experience completely, because what they were going through was sad and twisted.

The Girl who Played with Fire (Stieg Larsson)

The sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is just as violent and fascinating as its predecessor. Lisbeth Salander once again squares off against the world, pitting her wits, intelligence, and kick-ass take-no-prisoners attitude against some very scary people. As usual, she has a hard time recognizing or accepting help from those who care about her, but in this story we learn some of what made her who she has become. I'm looking forward to the next book.

The Sorcerer's Circle (Michael Siverling)

Another pleasant, if not outstanding, mystery from this author. A self-styled psychic man of mumbo-jumbo shows up at the detective agency saying that he has forseen his own murder, then turns up dead hours later - but nothing is what it appears to be. Once again the characters are less than convincing, bit the plot is interestingly convoluted and the settings and action fun.

The Sterling Inheritance (Michael Siverling)

This first novel is a cheerful, enjoyable murder mystery with some fun characters. The story centers around a burned body found outside a derelict theater that's being brought back to life, the family involved in the theater's past and present, and the detective agency investigating all of this. The mystery itself was interesting enough, though the plot was sometimes thin and the dialogue and characters sometimes a little too arch for realism. Still, I enjoyed it, and I already have the author's next book out of the library and will read it next.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport (Cathleen Schine)

Betty Weissmann's comfortable life in her CentralPark West condo is disrupted when her husband of 48 years decides to divorce her and, on the advice of lawyers, cuts off her credit cards and throws her out of the apartment. Her younger daughter is facing an enormous scandal, lawsuits, and bankruptcy at the same time, while the older daughter, though not in a crisis, has her own disappointments and feels responsible to take care of the other two. The three womenwinf up living in a tiny, dilapidated cottage in Westport as they try to put their lives back together. I was afraid this book would be too chick-lit and saccharine for me, but it wasn't. The problems the women dealt with, and their reactions, felt real. The characters, locations, and dialogue were fully drawn. The ending was satisfying without being a forced "happy ending." I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Year's Best Science Fiction, 18th Annual (ed. Gardner Dozois)

As with any collection, I liked some of these stories (deemed the best of 2000) better than others. Some just seemed to go on pointlessly (e.g. Cook & Hogan's Oracle Harvest). Others I just didn't quite get (e.g. Stross's Antibodies, though I usually like Stross). Some were entertaining (e.g. Fintushel's Milo & Sylvie) and some were very moving (e.g. Due's Patient Zero). I also got ideas for novels to put on my list!

Watch Your Back (Donald Westlake)

An especially fine example of a Dortmunder comic crime novel. A pompous and wealthy financier is at Club Med hiding out from his ex-wives and their lawyers, leaving his New York apartment empty and vulnerable to Dortmunder's crew. Meantime, some Mob-connected guys have their talons into the OJ, where the crew meets, so they decide to do something about that also. Everything goes south, of course, in the most unexpected ways. Quite a ride!

Coyote (Allen Steele)

A relatively recent (2002) example of a classic SF theme: pioneers carving out a foothold on an alien planet. The kicker is that they stole the ship, through a conspiracy under the leadership of its captain, to allow political prisoners to escape a brutal, tyrannical regime. The colony seems surprisingly poorly equipped (the conspiracy didn't affect the planning, only the individuals who got to come along). Colonists made remarkably irrational decisions, poorly justified. What responsible adult lets a bunch of teens sneak off with vital supplies? Practically nobody seems concerned about irreplaceable things like ammunition or medicines. So, though I enjoyed it overall, it had significant flaws that detracted from it's success.

Eight of Swords (David Skibbens)

I very much enjoyed this mystery with an unusual and likeable protagonist. For 30 years he's bee underground, having faked his death and living under various false identities; he doesn't spell out details, but if either the police or his former 50s revolutionary comerades knew he was alive he sous be imprison or dead. He is making a living as a Tarot reader on the street in Berkeley (the cards don't seem to care that he doesn't really believe on them) when a young woman stops for a reading and is promptly kidnapped. Feeling responsible for not warning her of the dangers shown in the cards and under suspicion in her disappearance, he begins calling in favors to solve the crime. In the process, he confronts his past and himself.

Djibouti (Elmore Leonard)

A thriller centered on an American woman making a documentary about Somali pirates, who gets ties up in an al Quaeda plot to blow up a ship loaded with liquified natural gas. One man in particular, an African American who turns to Islam and terrorism in prison because it gives him a chance to shoot people and blow things up, becomes her nemesis, and the last part of the book is about trying to find him before he manages to find her and kill her. The dialogue is excellent and the characters real and intriguing, but I couldn't really get into a sense of danger. Perhaps this is because I read it as an e-book, on a tiny screen. I still don't know how this affects my response to a story.

Orbit (John Nance)

The lucky man who wins a lottery to ride along on a four-day low-orbit commercial space flight deems it not so lucky when a micrometeorite kills the flight commander and leaves him trapped in orbit with no communications with the ground and no chance of returning. He begins recording his thoughts on a laptop, expecting they might be found decades later; he doesn't know what he types is being picked up in real-time and broadcast around the world. Humanity gets caught up in his story, and it has powerful influences on everyone. The end is rather unconvincing, but I found the story gripping and struggled with him as he tried to figure out how to live his last days.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave (Written by Himself)

A beautifully engaging and compelling story of the experience of slavery, written by one of the famous spokespersons of the abolitionist movement. He speaks eloquently of the physical hardships, and also the soul-crushing effects on both slaves and masters, and the yearning of people to be free. A good choice for Black History Month.

Dog On It (Spencer Quinn)

I enjoyed this mystery, which is fairly standard except for being narrated by the detective's dog. The author makes being in the dog's head quite convincing, as when he loses the thread of a human conversation because he noticed something moving under a bush that needed investigating, or had an itch that needed scratching, or caught scent of a discarded burned hot dog that needed eating (and then developed an upset stomache ache). the story and the characters were plausible, and the whole romp was fun.

For Better, For Murder (Lisa Bork)

A friendly, entertaining murder mystery that includes a romance, but (as opposed to the last book I read) is more mystery than romance. Jolene, trying to keep her sports car business going in a well-to-do Finger Lakes town, finds a body in her showroom, and has to face her not-quite-ex husband who is a police detective. She becomes a suspect, along with her mentally ill sister who has run off from a state institution. The mystery was intriguing, the characters and setting well-drawn, the action and dialogue convincing. It's not great literature, but it is a fun read.

Dead Until Dark (Charlaine Harris)

I only read this because it was the first ebook I got on the waiting list for at the library, and I'm still into this new technology. I did actually finish it, but I never would have if it weren't such a cool techy thing. It's basically a romance novel with vampires. The heroine is pretty tough and smart - it's certainly 1000 times better than Twilight! - but it's all about trying to find true love, and sex scenes. The plot was short on logic, and there was no support for the various magical abilities people have. But Bubba was a nice touch.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Alan Bradley)

A sequel to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and equally charming. Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce is fascinated by chemistry, poison, and death, and is an extremely astute observer of those around her in her little English town.these talents serve her well when a puppeteer is murdered in the midst of a performance, and allow her to solve not only this crime but an older one as well. Very enjoyable.

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday (Alexander McCall Smith)

This quiet, charming book describes the inner life of a thoughtful, caring Scottish woman, a philosopher and new mother, in a loving relationship with the baby's father. There are a couple of minor mysteries, but no real detection as such. It was peacefully enjoyable. The big news about this is that it was the first book I checked out of the library electronically and read entirely on my iPod Touch. I always said I would get a book reader when I could get library books on it, and now I don't need to buy a reader - my existing device will do it. The technology certainly isn't fully mature yet (there aren't enough titles or copies, so there's a waiting list for almost everything, and no good way to search the list), but it's still quite a milestone.

Fantasy in Death (J. D. Robb)

This one popped up in a library scan for Computer Games (fiction), so I decided to givenit a try. The writing isn't bad, particularly the dialogue, but I figured out the big mystery within the first 10 pages. I enjoyed it, but it didn't really grab me.

My life in France (Julia Child & Alex Prud'homme

This memoire covers most of Julia Child's married life, in her own voice (she worked on the book with her grand-nephew, though it was finished after her death). It tells of her falling in love with France and French cooking, getting her diploma from the Cordon Bleu, starting a cooking school, writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and making her TV show, all interwoven with her relationships with family, friends, and great names in the world of food. It is a charming, optimistic book, with only occasional frustration when I couldn't puzzle out the untranslated French phrases. Though many of the classic French dishes she describes didn't sound appealing to me, her joy and enthusiasm are contagious.

Never Trust a Dead Man (Vivian Vande Velde)

I picked up this YA mystery on impulse, based on reviews in Amazon. In a medieval village, a teen is condemned to death for a murder he didn't commit. He runs into a witch who agrees to help him find the real murderer by bringing back the spirit of the dead man in the body of a bat, but he doesn't know who killed him. More bikinis ensue before all is resolved. It was pleasant snough, but nothing special.

Revelation Space (Alastair Reynolds)

This well-regarded SF novel didn't work for me. After 50 pages I had no idea what was going on, who these people were, what order events occurred in, or why I should care.
LATER: Inspired by the commentator, I returned and finished this book. It did get very much better after about 150 pages, when things started to make more sense. I began to figure out who was who and what was happening. I'm glad I finished, but have to say I didn't love it. It is really strong on the sense of awe and wonder, and the universe being a place much larger, stranger, and more dangerous than we can really comprehend. I prefer a little stronger characterization with my awe and wonder, though, giving me people I can identify with and really understand. So I give it thumbs up, but it's not my favorite.

Little, Big (John Crowley)

This deep, rich, comPlex fantasy novel is justly famous for the intelligence and imagination it brings to the relationship between the realms of Faerie and reality. It follows a vast cast of characters, linked by blood and by fate, to play out a Tale that will bring to a safe end this relationship, preserving the magical within the real. At the heart of the Tale is a house, Edgewood, which is really many houses, all overlapping, and also a door between realms. I was definitely caught up in the story, but ultimately it left me untouched - too opaque, too symbolic, with too many unanswered questions for my logical mind.