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.