The Faded Sun (C.J. Cherryh)

This is one story in three books: Kesrith, Shon'Jir, and Kuruth. The mri are a humanlike alien race who served as mercenaries to another race, the nearly sedentary Regul, in their decades-long war with humans. Now there is a treaty to end the war and form an alliance with the Regul, and the mri are seen by their erstwhile employers as a loose end that needs to be cut off. This complex tale (three books, after all) involves intrigue, misdirection, and the deaths of individuals, worlds, civilizations, and species. A human special forces man, brought in to serve as aide to the governor to one of the planets humans claimed in the peace settlement, and one of the last of the mri fighters become unlikely allies in the battle to save a people. The characters sometimes feel a little wooden, puppet-like to the plot, but the sprawling story and the depth of the plot made up for these weaknesses, and I hardly shouted at all to myself about the whole "desert planet" trope.

Orfeo (Richard Powers)

There is a lot to like in this book, especially if you know something about music. Peter Els is a retired composer who spent his life searching for music that would break through the walls of reality and people's souls, giving up his family and, to a certain extent, polite society in the search. In his final years he goes back to an early, abandoned love of chemistry and starts dabbling in do-it-yourself biochemistry, tinkering with the genetic sequences of common household bacteria. Along the way he comes to the attention of government officials and finds himself to be the target of an increasingly hysterical government manhunt. It's difficult to talk about music in a way that conveys anything like the experience of listening, but Powers has done this rather well. On the other hand, the characters, including Peter himself, are less well drawn. I never grasped anything like the core of Peter's personality that would lead him to make the choices he did, particularly at the end of the book. It felt more like the masks of an ancient mime, illustrating large themes, than the intimate story of real people. Overall, though, I was drawn in and really wanted to find out how Peter's story would end.

The Golem and the Jinni (Helene Wecker)

I really liked this intricate, touching story about a Golem (a woman of clay brought to life through Kabbalistic magic) and a Jinni (a magical creature from the Syrian desert) who find themselves adrift in turn-of-the-century New York City. Their separate worlds come together in complex, overlapping ways as they struggle with who they are and how they can live among humans. There are evil forces that would destroy them and those they care about, and lives are sacrificed as they fight for survival. It's amazing that this is a first novel. Though the sense of place could have been stronger, I was caught up in their lives and their tale. Recommended.

Battlestations! (Diane Carey)

A friend said this was his favorite Star Trek novel, so I had to give it a try. What he liked was also something I liked: a female protagonist who is strong as d resourceful without being Wonder Woman.  Still, it's a little too melodramatic for my taste. The maguffin is a device that has the potential for galactic power and evil (of course) that must be kept from the wrong hands, despite betrayal from several quarters. There is an annoying layer of hero worship over it all, with Spock and McCoy and especially Kirk elevated to god-like levels. It's a good example of the genre, though, better than many.

Family Matters (Rohinton Mistry)

This is a close-up, unflinching portrait of a family in present-day Bombay struggling with many issues. The central character for most of the book is the family patriarch, living with his two adult stepchildren, who seem to be too bitter and focused on complaining about life to have ever married. He has Parkinson's and, on one of his daily walks, is injured, putting an intolerable burden of nursing and care on these two. Across town his biological daughter is living with her husband and two children in a two-room apartment, and his relationship with them is loving and tender. How will this family deal with the patriarch's escalating needs for care when money, space, and patience are stretched thin? Mistry paints unforgettable pictures of all the people, from the patriarch to the laborers hired to haul heavy things, and the epic city of Bombay itself. My personal preference is for stories with more likeable characters; as this story goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those to curl up with. The last section of the book, which I originally took for a small epilogue but spanned at least a chapter, seemed almost to come from a different story entirely - the main character had changed in ways that did not feel entirely justified. These are the only weaknesses in an otherwise fine novel.

Time Warped (Claudia Hammond)

An interesting discussion of the many ways in which our perception of time can warp. The author comes back again and again to the Holiday Paradox - the fact that while on a vacation trip, seeing new things and having new experiences every day, the time seems to fly by, but after returning home and looking back on it the trip seems to have lasted a very long time. How is this possible? There are many theories, and she discusses them all, but the most likely has to do with attention and memory. When we are focused on things because they are new an unexpected, we lose track of the passage of time and are surprised when suddenly it is dinner time, so the day seems to have gone quickly. Looking back, however, we have so many separate memories it seems impossible that they all fit into that one small time frame. There is a lot more here, including why time seems to speed up as we get older and how to make better predictions about our own future. At times the material seemed scattered, with less organization than I would have liked, but overall it was interesting and informative.

After Visiting Friends (Michael Hainey)

In this memoir, the author describes his search for the truth about his father, who died when he was only six. Although the people and events are drawn clearly, there seemed to be missed opportunities to bring the story to life. Pages and pages were devoted to detailing the interviews with people who had little to add to the story, but there was not enough about two core people: the author and his mother. We see both of them from the outside, from a distance, and never get to know either of them well. Though the author describes how the loss of his father colored his childhood, there was nothing much about his current life; he mentions a girlfriend in passing, but we are never told about this relationship or about anything in his professional life aside from pursuing the investigation. This made the story seem distant and passionless.

Hikikomori and the Rental Sister (Jeff Backhaus)

In Japan, it is something of an epidemic that young men who feel too much pressure become hikikomori, withdrawing from the world, and rental sisters are employed to coax them out again - here the concept is applied to a man closer to middle age who withdraws after a family tragedy. After trying for three years to get her traumatized husband to emerge from his room, his wife engages a young Japanese woman as his rental sister. The story was engaging enough, but ultimately not really satisfying. It seemed that there was too much sex involved; it distracted from the actual inner lives of the people involved. It seems to be the view of the male author that a sister couldn't accomplish what a lover could. I don't agree.

The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)

Aside from being perhaps 20% longer than it should have been, this is a remarkable book. Theo grows up from an anxious but happy boy through tragedy,neglect, and disturbance to a broken, wounded, but still coping man. He was drawn with dead-on accuracy at each stage of his scattered life, and I cared about him a lot. Other characters were less clearly drawn or less plausible, and some of the changes he went through were not as thoroughly justified as I would have liked, but on the whole it was engrossing and touching. I am unsurprised to learn that it won the Pulitzer.