Blood Bound (Patricia Briggs)

This second book in the Mercy Thompson series is as good as the first. Mercy is resourceful, brave, and likeable as she faces a murderous demon, with the help of her werewolf, fae, and vampire friends. And with her own ability, which is that she can shift at will into a coyote. I like her as a strong female character, though the cover of the paperback annoyed me. Mercy makes her living as an auto mechanic, but I doubt she works with her overalls zipped down below the navel. I also like that the supernatural creatures are not just stereotype. Each individual has a unique personality that comes through even when overlaid with things like the rigid pack hierarchy of the wolves. Briggs has a deft hand with contemporary fantasy, and I will definitely read more.

Darkfever (Karen Marie Moning)

This is the first book of a fantasy series by the author of the Highlander books, which is very popular though I haven't read it. I was looking for contemporary fantasy to read so I thought I'd try this. I have to say, I had problems with it. Most of the problems could have been fixed with a bit of editing. The author used inappropriate words in phrases like "the bed perched under the window" (beds don't perch). Phrases were padded with vague adjectives or unneeded words, as when she said the driveway was "framed by huge, ancient trees on both sides" (could it have been framed on one side?). I had to laugh at a tense moment when the narrator said that she had been sprinting to keep up with a monster, but now she would have to break into a run to catch it. Some basic facts were just wrong, as when it was 7 pm in Dublin at midsummer and she called it sunset (in Dublin at midsummer the sun sets three hours later). More serious than these problems, which could have been easily fixed with a sharp blue pencil, was the general attitude of the protagonist. Nearly a third of the way through the book, having had up-close interactions with fantastic monsters, she was still pretending that there was nothing supernatural going on. I wanted to slap her. There is a good story under here, and I won't say don't read it, but it's not for me.

Vicious (V. E. Schwab)

A very comic-book story, where people have super powers and make dastardly plots against a nemesis, and I loved it. Victor and Eli were brilliant college students when they started studying the origin of people with extraordinary abilities. Their research turned to experimentation, and then turned to death and destruction. Along the way we meet a pair of sisters joined by love and death, a giant tattooed man whose specialty is computer hacking, and a dog with the lives of a cat. The larger-than-life plot played out with just the right mix of inevitability and surprise, and the ending held as much tenderness as you could hope for. This is the author's first adult novel; I hope for more.

The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)

This is the sprawling, complex first volume of a trilogy about a most unusual first contact. Set in China (the author's home), starting during the Cultural Revolution and continuing until today or possibly the near future, it tracks several different people with complex relationships. A woman working at radio transmission/monitoring station dedicated to tracking and possibly attacking satellites in orbit discovers, almost by accident, a way to harness the energy of the sun to send out a brief transmission detected by aliens from Alpha Centauri. This is a binary star system, with another fainter star that is believed to be part of the system as well - hence the three-body problem of the title. Orbital mechanics can completely solve the movements of two bodies, but except for a few special cases there is no general solution for predicting the movements of three of them. This means that these aliens live in a very hostile and trying environment. Still, they manage to (a) receive the message (which somehow is more powerful than the whole sun, despite being broadcast spherically), (b) decode it almost instantly (because it uses a "self-decrypting" format, whatever that is), and (c) respond in colloquial Chinese (in the same self-decrypting format). And this isn't even the least believable part of the story. Part of the problem is that I started out thinking of this as science fiction - if I had it in my "magic realism" category, perhaps it would have fit better. I just kept bumping up against science things and going, "um, no." So it didn't work for me, and I won't be reading the rest of the trilogy.

Replay (Ken Grimwood)

I re-read this book (appropriate, no?) for my book club this year, and it holds up very well for something written in 1987. For reasons that remain entirely unexplained, after Jeff Winston dies in 1988 he wakes up in his own life, in his own body, back in 1963 and has the rest of his life to live again. But he dies again at the same minute as before, and wakes up again in 1963. It's a little like an extended Ground Hog Day; he keeps living the same times over and over. He tries different things to make his life, the lives of others, and the world better, or at least different, each time. Part of why we are reading this book now is in response to this year's award-winning The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, based on the same concept of people who repeat their lives again and again. There are differences in how this repeating happens between the two books, but mostly the difference is in the general atmosphere and attitude. Harry's story is about keeping your head down, not letting anything change, trying to survive and be safe in a world that keeps getting more and more dangerous. That (and the really gut-wrenching torture scenes) make it a dark and, for me, depressing story. This book, on the other hand, looks at the chance to live again as an opportunity to get it right, to make the kind of life that one can be proud of and happy in. Jeff may get it wrong sometimes, so that his own life and sometimes the world wind up worse off, but at least he is trying. There is a sense of optimism and love that is missing from Harry's story. I like this one much better.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross)

Another Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross. These stories are always a mind-twisting blend of horror (many-tentacled creatures from the murky deeps), police procedure (griping about pencil-neck desk-jockeys who don't know what it's really like out here in the field), and geekery (what else from someone who writes sidekicks named Pinky and Brains?). Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence agency but he's no James Bond. As a computational demonologist, his specialty is understanding how mathematical formulae and computer programs breach the walls between worlds and let those horrors through, forcing the good guys to stop them and clean up the mess according to the proper bureaucratic rules, in triplicate. In this story, Howard starts out attending an international meeting of similar organizations, expecting a boring weekend of conference rooms and PowerPoint, but winds up soul-linked with a demon assassin and dragged to a Caribbean island to stop a megalomaniacal billionaire from stealing a deep-sea artifact that can destroy the world. Of course.  Stross scatters every page with gems that are as smart as they are funny. I have to love an author whose narrator describes the experience of driving a rented Smart Car on the German autobahn "while a jerk is shooting at me from behind with a cannon loaded with Porches and Mercedes."

Summer Knight (Jim Butcher)

I'm not reading the Dresden Files novels in order, but I'm enjoying them a lot. Harry Dresden is my kind of hero: unreasonably strong and competent, but with realistic flaws and foibles and deeply concerned about other people. He is a wizard in modern-day Chicago, dragged into a war between the Summer and Winter Courts of Faerie that threatens the very existence of the Earth, not to mention the lives of everyone Harry cares about. In order to save the day Harry has to solve a murder mystery: who killed the Summer Knight? The Queen of Winter is the obvious suspect, but she's the one who hired Harry to solve the crime, so maybe not. As usual, Harry is helped out by an assortment of people: Murphy, the CPD cop; a pack of enthusiastic young werewolves; the mystical Mothers of Winter and Summer; and a small coven of changelings still balanced between the human and the faerie world. The action is nearly nonstop, and I enjoyed the ride.

How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory (Michael Hasselmo)

I love to study memory; it's my area of primary interest within cognitive psychology. For that reason, I expected to love this book, a close examination of how episodic memory works. Episodic memory is the memories of my actual life experiences, where I remember being there. For example, knowing what a toothbrush is for is a semantic memory, knowing how to brush my teeth is a procedural memory, but remembering brushing my teeth this morning, while looking out the window and observing that the sky is clear after days of rain--that is an episodic memory. I'm sad to say, however, that this book didn't work for me. Partly because this book goes deeper than my interest goes into those brain mechanisms mentioned in the title. I like to learn about different brain structures and how they work together, but kept skipping over the analyses of neural firing patterns in individual brain cells. Another problem I had is that the author explicitly defined episodic memory as the recovery of a spatiotemporal trajectory: first I went there and did that, next I went here and did this, and so on. I kept waiting for them to address the fact that some episodic memories don't have specific places and times linked to them, at least in my experience. Last week I was driving around town looking for a specific tree I had seen that I wanted to photograph. I had the location and time only very generally (somewhere within a half-hour or so of my house; somewhere in the winter, last year or perhaps the year before). I couldn't link it to anything that came before or after. But I had a clear memory of looking out the right side of the car as I rode in the passenger seat and thinking, "That's a really cool tree. I need to come back sometime and photograph it when the leaves are out." There is no trajectory in this memory, but it seems to me clearly to be an episodic memory, and this book can't account for it. While I admire and respect the work this author has done in uncovering some of the most basic aspects of episodic memory, all told it didn't click for me.