Blindspot (Mahzarin Banaji & Anthony Greenwald)

An excellent review of all the research indicating that we humans are just a mass of prejudices, biases, assumptions, and limitations when it comes to evaluating situations, others, and even ourselves. All true! I wasn't surprised by any of the research results here, since I've followed this research for a while, but this is a good resource for pulling it all together. (With just one mistake I noticed: the misinformation effect described by Loftus is not the same thing as retroactive interference - a minor issue that doesn't detract from the work overall.) I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the science behind prejudice and discrimination.

A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Another delightful English cozy mystery featuring Flavia de Luce, 11-year-old chemist and sleuth. She invites an old Gypsy woman to stay on her family's property, and the woman is savagely attacked, so Flavia digs in to investigate the mystery. Along the way she encounters dead bodies, the enigmatic granddaughter of the injured woman, an eccentric religion, a long-vanished child, and some faux antiques, all weaving together into a satisfying conclusion. Flavia's voice as she narrates her experiences in her off-kilter household and eccentric village is delightful, despite a few unresolved loose ends. [Minor spoiler: When Flavia first meets Porcelain she "couldn't rub two shillings together if my life depended on it," but later hands Flavia a five-pound banknote (a lot of money in post-war England) to pay for her horse's care. Flavia never notices the contradiction, and I kept expecting it to mean something, but it just slid by. Unsatisfying, and not the only such glitch.]

Night Broken (Patricia Briggs)

I've jumped ahead to this most recent book in the Mercy Thompson series, and it lives up to the others that I have read. Mercy continues to work with werewolves and other friends (in this case, members of the fae) to fight evil (in this case, the personification of a volcano god - really!). One thing I missed in this book was that Mercy didn't use her ability to shapeshift into a coyote much, though a big part of the story was about her relationship with Coyote, the actual trickster god. A big part of the book related to a confrontation with Adam's ex-wife, who has come home seeking help with a stalker and polarizes the wolf pack into Mercy versus the ex. I raced through it and had a lot of fun along the way.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)

This gloriously heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel jumps back and forth through time, telling the story of the Georgia Flu pandemic that wiped out 99.9% of all humanity in a space of weeks. We meet a cast of people who faced the end of the world, some who made it through and some who didn't. We learn of their lives leading up to the disaster, getting to know who they are and where they came from. We learn of what happened to them as civilization fell apart, and for those who survived, what their world was like for the next decades. Every person is fully realized, every setting and event is hauntingly true, and moments grab you without letting go: the realization that you have eaten your last orange ever, that you will never, ever know what happened to your loved ones, that there is no choice you can make that doesn't end in disaster and death. It is a splendid story, skillfully told, and I loved it.

The Fuller Memorandum (Charles Stross)

I'm reading the Laundry Files series out of order, which is a little confusing, but I love them anyway. The mixture of humor, pop culture, computers, science geekery, Lovecraftian horror, James Bond, and soul-deadening bureaucracy really works for me. In this one, we learn a little about Angleton, Bob Howard's very scary boss, and find out why he's even scarier than we thought. Along the way Bob's wife Mo proves her badassery with the demon-killing violin and Bob has to face an army of cultists bent on sacrificing him to the ultimate dark lord, armed with nothing but his knowledge of computational demonology. Great stuff.

Golden Fleece (Robert Sawyer)

This short novel is Sawyer's first, a murder mystery aboard a spaceship on its way to explore a distant planet. The mystery is not a whodunit, because in the first few pages we witness the murder and realize it was committed by JASON, the artificial intelligence that runs the ship. The mystery is why the computer believed this murder was necessary and whether the others would figure it out. I confess that the story didn't work for me. The main human character had a past decorated with so many separate issues and traumas, none of which were actually related to the current situation, that it felt strained and overwritten. When the reason for the murder, and the ship's other unusual behaviors, is finally revealed, I don't buy it. I've read a few of Sawyer's works and had much the same reaction to them as well.

Side Jobs (Jim Butcher)

I've become a real fan of the Harry Dresden series, so I checked out this collection of short works. It begins with the first-ever Dresden story, written as an exercise for a creative writing class and never before published. Butcher acknowledges that it's not a strong story and didn't deserve publication initially, an opinion I could agree with, but I enjoyed seeing where the story began. It finishes with a novelette that Harry never even appears in, with Murphy and others of Harry's friends dealing with his apparent murder, trying to cope with the kind of evil he usually fights without him. If you like the Dresden series you will like these stories.

Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

I like most of Scalzi's work, and when I heard about this "practice novel" I knew I needed to read it. It is obviously amateurish compared with his later work. There's no serious character development and not much in the way of logic here. Aliens who have learned of Earth from our broadcasts want to meet and be accepted by humans because they're really nice guys, but they are really ugly and they smell bad. So, naturally, they come to a Hollywood ad agency to figure out a plan to get us to accept them. Coincidences pile up, aliens behave like humans, and the ending, while inevitable from the start, strains credulity past the breaking point. Still, it's fun. I enjoyed looking back at this first novel from an established leader in the field.