Lock In (John Scalzi)

Scalzi's latest is a murder mystery/police procedural set in a future where a new illness left a substantial percentage of the population has been locked in, with complete awareness and full cognitive functioning but no voluntary control over their own bodies. Technology allows these people to live full lives in two ways: through remote operation of a mechanical bodies (charmingly called "threeps") or, much more rarely, through stepping in to the brains of people called Integrators and taking over their bodies for a while. The protagonist is one of the locked-in folks, starting his first day on the job as an FBI agent and faced with a bizarre murder involving an integrator. The murders proliferate and lead him to the fringes and the center of the new world culture being created by and for the thousands upon thousands of locked-in people. Many of the standard tropes of the genre are here -- the tough-talking, hard-drinking partner, the tension between the Feds and the local police, the triumphant confrontation with drunken thugs harassing a woman on the streets, the interrogation of suspects dancing the line between intimidation and the law -- but they all have a new twist because of the futuristic setting. I quite liked it.

The Memory Garden (Mary Rickert)

As a pretty old woman myself, I appreciated a novel in which one of the main characters is an even older woman, portrayed with unsentimental honesty but also love and respect. Nan has sore bones and faulty memories, but she is loyal and as good as she know hows to be. The other main character is her adolescent adopted daughter, a foundling left on her doorstep, born under a caul that gives her powers she doesn't know about. The main action takes place in a few days, as estranged friends from Nan's past come to visit, but this visit is just the stage on which old memories play out their flawed, contradictory, and ultimately redeeming story. As we wind backward and forward in time characters cross the boundary between life and death over and over, to the point where at the end it's not clear which side of this line each is on. This book reminds us that memories, as unreliable and fickle as they are, make us who we are. Highly recommended for its quiet, simple, but profound story telling and the lush descriptions of gardens, food, and experiences in general.

El Deafo (Cece Bell)

A charming story, told in graphic novel form with everyone as anthropomorphic bunny rabbits, which is a fictionalized memoir of the author's childhood growing up with a profound hearing loss. It is, as she emphasizes in the afterword, only one person's story of one way to be deaf, and her strong desire to fit into the hearing world and resist learning sign language will probably earn the ire of many in the Deaf community. I appreciated the honesty of the story, though, including the angst of difficult friendships, budding crushes, and struggles to fit in. We all have things that make us different, some more than others, and we all struggle to find our way in our complex social world, so her story is not that different from anyone's. I recommend it, especially for someone who is or has a child with anything that can be labeled as a disability.

My Real Children (Jo Walton)

Patricia, the protagonist in this story, leads two different lives. One day a man tells her she must decide at that moment whether to marry him, now or never. She chooses now, and goes into a marriage filled with strife. She chooses never and goes into life unmarried, and into a very different relationship. Both of these lives play out side by side, in different worlds with histories that diverge from that point not just personally but globally. The stories of the two lives were interesting, but with a certain narrative distance that kept me from becoming as engaged as I would have liked. I stayed with it to the end partly to find out what happened to the two different Patricias and partly to find out why she was living in this strange, mirrored way. While I did find out what happened to her, I never did find out why, and this left me feeling unsatisfied. So while I can recommend it for the loveliness of the characterizations, I can't recommend it for those who, like me, want a little more closure in their stories.

The Science of Fear (Daniel Gardner)

Gardner sounds a clarion call for making decisions based on rationality and reason, rather than the emotionality encouraged by our primitive brains and the media that surrounds us. Why do we spend such a huge amount of energy and money on fighting terrorism, which objectively offers virtually no risk, when automobile accidents and heart disease are much more dangerous? Why is everyone convinced that crime is going up, that our children are at great risk for being stolen by strangers, that chemicals are giving us all cancer,when none of this is actually true? Gardner explains this irrationality by describing the many cognitive biases and shortcuts we use when making sense of the world, and how they can lead us astray. I found it compelling and very readable. Highly recommended.

The Devil's Alphabet (Daryl Gregory)

This is not my favorite of Gregory's books (that I've read so far, anyway), but still really good. Years ago the residents of a small town in Tennessee suddenly started to change - some became huge, tall and strong, some grotesquely fat, some red-skinned and hairless (and spontaneously pregnant, always with girls). Many died in the transition. A few were skipped over, not changing at all, including the narrator who escaped to Chicago after the quarantine was lifted. Now he's come back to town for the funeral of a dear friend and is drawn back into mysteries within mysteries, relating to drugs, violence, death, and the true nature of this metamorphosis. I loved his other books for their view from inside madness; the narrator here is rather tamely sane, so I never felt drawn into the wonder of the story quite so much. Gregory does explore the nature of family, including the narrator's strained relationship with his father and how family and children shape our view of the world.

Our Own Minds (Radu Bogdan)

I'm reminded once again that I'm a psychologist, not a philosopher. I'm fascinated by the workings of the mind. but I want to approach them empirically and don't have the patience for the fine-grained logical analysis philosophers do. So while I enjoyed the basic ideas put forward in Bogdan's work on the development of consciousness, I found myself skipping over some of the painstaking argument and semantic distinctions here. Here's that basic idea. Children are born with an external orientation (to the environment and especially other people). Their minds work furiously to figure out how what others are doing and why, and what this has to do with the events and objects in the world. They very quickly start internalizing some of this, in the sense of developing their own relationships with the world, including the world of other people, but they're still looking at their own minds and relationships more or less from the outside, and don't start to develop a truly internal view of themselves until after around age four. That's when they start to be able to perceive their own internal thoughts and motivations directly. This fits with what I've always thought of as the nature of our self-awareness. As social creatures, we have to try to understand and predict what others will do. Because humans are flexible in our responses to the environment, with very few specific behaviors controlled directly by biology, we needed to develop internal models of other people, figuring out their motivations and goals and preferences. This mental machinery, created to help us think of others, is then available for us to use to understand ourselves, and that's where we get our ability to think of our own motivations and goals and preferences. Makes sense to me.