Blood Maidens (Barbara Hambly)

I love Barbara Hambly's writing - so richly evocative of character and setting. I love these characters and this story, and have since the first in this series (Those Who Hunt the Night). I may be overdosing on them, though, because the formula is getting just a little old. The ancient and honorable merciless killer vampire Ysidro needs the help of the ex-spy James and his fiercely competent wife Lydia to solve a problem that requires someone who can go about in the daytime. The problem, again, involves a possible joining of forces between vampires and the political/military leaders of a country inimical to England, so James feels he must help and Lydia has to support him. Again, James and Lydia are separated in space and in time (because there is no quick communication in pre-WWI Europe), each trying to help and protect the other. I still loved it, and I'm planning to read the next one, but I hope the plot changes more this time.

Machine Man (Max Barry)

This is a strange story, darkly humorous, and I loved it. The first-person narrator is an engineer working for a soulless corporation dedicated to making whatever technology will bring in the most money. He is brilliant and rational and very bad at social relationships and fuzzy thinking, and has always had a feeling of connection to machines. When an industrial accident costs him a leg, he is disappointed in the poor quality of the prostheses available and dedicates himself to the project of building a better leg in the lab. He does--but it doesn't stop there. Behind the humor and absurdity of the steadily-increasing mayhem is an exploration of what it means to be human, of whether we are our bodies or whether all our parts are just inefficiently engineered biological components we can replace with something better, and what it would mean if we did.

Dispatches from the Edge (Anderson Cooper)

Anderson Cooper has been a reporter and anchor for CNN for years, bringing back stories from some of the worst places in the world: Sarajevo, Somalia, Beirut, Iraq, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, In this memoir he tells what some of those stories were like. He talks about the driving need to tell the truth about what people were experiencing, and about the need to get out there where lives were in danger because of his own addiction to the adrenaline rush. It is an honest and open look at what this life was like for him. He also talked about his own childhood, growing up as the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, losing his father to a heart attack at age 10 and his brother to suicide four years later. These stories helped illuminate the person he became, but I have to admit the juxtaposition was often annoying, as when the tears of a grandmother in Sarajevo, whose family was torn apart and dying, reminded him of the tears of his nanny when she had to leave as he entered high school. Though I'm sure the psychological resonance was real, he seemed to be equating his loss to hers. When he talked about the lives of those around him, though, his voice spoke true.

The Dante Club (Matthew Pearl)

This is a creepy, atmospheric murder mystery set in Cambridge in 1865, as a body of famous poets led by Longfellow worked on the first American translation of Dante's Divine Commedy. A wave of particularly grotesque murders (described in vivid detail) begins, and it gradually becomes clear that the murders are someone's attempt to make the tortures of hell Dante described into reality. The novel is generally well-written, though it necessarily suffers from the overwrought language its characters use; while no doubt an accurate reflection of how men of letters talked at the time, it becomes tedious to read. The other issue I have with it is that there was not enough information for the reader to have discovered the killer before it is revealed. In general, though, the mystery held my interest.

Anathem (Neal Stephenson)

This huge novel covers a whole lot of territory - almost enough to justify its 900+ pages. The action takes place on Arbre, a world that is specifically not Earth but is inhabited by people that are indistinguishable from humans. Why they are so similar to us is actually explained about 2/3 of the way through in a mind-blowing philosophy of the nature of the universe. The main character lives in what amounts to a monastery in a church dedicated, not to religion, but to science and natural philosophy. The dialog of these characters all sounds like they are all in one of Plato's Dialogues, even when they are just hanging out, even the people who don't live in the monastery, so I was not impressed with this aspect. In many ways it all felt distant from me, but the story and the ideas carried the book anyway.

Lost (Michael Robotham)

This exciting mystery-thriller opens with a police detective pulled from the Thames with a bullet hole in his leg. He spends 8 days in a coma and wakes up with no memory of the days before his injury. The rest of the story outlines his fight to remember what happened, starting only from his belief that it has something to do with the kidnapping and apparent murder of a 9-year-old girl three years before. I liked the main character, a flawed but determined fighter for lost children, and the supporting characters were also interesting and well drawn. The action, with its many twists, held me, and I liked the dimension of his amnesia (as someone with an interest in memory, it felt real to me). I'll read more by this author.

Traveling with the Dead (Barbara Hambly)

This sequel to Those Who Hunt the Night, one of my favorite vampire novels, is not quite as good as the first, but still good. It is set in the early 1900s, and features the same main characters: James Asher, former spy turned Oxford professor; his wife Lydia, brave medical researcher in a man's world; and Don Simon Ysidro, ancient vampire they have to work with. Hambly is a wonder at creating the ambiance of Paris and Vienna and Constantinople in historical realism, and evokes soul-numbing horror that storms the gates of melodrama without a qualm. She also raises the moral questions many such stories overlook. Why is one vampire a "good" vampire and another not, when they both must feed on the death of humans to survive? The added ingredient that made the first novel better is that it had a splendidly unexpected but completely fitting solution to the central mystery, whereas this one did not click quite so well. Still, I enjoyed it and was eager to find out what happened next. There are others in this series, and I will certainly read them, too.

Teaching Critical Thinking (bell hooks)

Author bell hooks (who uses lower-case for her name for some reason) is all the rage at my institution. People have read and extolled her earlier books on teaching, and since I'm interested in improving critical thinking, I picked up her latest. I was very disappointed. It's not that what she has to say is incorrect or that it is not useful, but it is not what I was expecting from a book subtitled "Practical Wisdom." I want to know how to increase the kind of scientific skepticism that is fundamental in my profession; she wants to increase her students' freedom from what she calls the "colonization by a paternalistic dominator culture." There are no specific, practical ideas here. She offers generalizations such as: "Negative conflict-based discussion almost always invites the mind to close, while conversation as a mode of interaction calls us to open our mind [sic]" (p. 45). How, specifically, does one make conversation work in the classroom? She is silent on this. This book is wonderful if you want a philosophical, moral, and feeling-based discussion of what is important in education. It does not help with the day-to-day structure of a class, at least not for me.