Manifold. Time (Stephen Baxter)

This is a big, sweeping SF novel with lots of interesting ideas, but it didn't click with me. A failed astronaut turned wealthy businessman creates an aerospace company ostensibly to use old rocket motors to destroy dangerous waste, but really he plans to create his own rogue space company to take mankind out to the asteroids and ultimately to the stars. He is under the influence of a doomsday cult that claims that the human race is destined to die out in  200 years, and believes this can only be averted through space travel. They work together to search for signals sent back in time from future generations, and find some that seem to suggest they should start by visiting a particular asteroid first. The ship that visits this asteroid is piloted by a cognitively enhanced squid, who has much more flexible navigation and control abilities than a computer or robot. It turns out the asteroid has a portal that is a gateway to the future (or sometimes to other places - it's not consistent). All of this seems to me to be a patchwork of implausible concepts that just doesn't work. At the very beginning I shook my head at the statistical argument put forward to prove that the human race is doomed, which goes like this: If humanity continues to expand in the future as it has in the past, then all the people alive today are a vanishingly small percentage of all the humans who will ever exist. Therefore it is hugely unlikely that we are here, now, unless we are a substantial fraction of all humanity, in which case the race can't keep going much longer. Sorry, but this argument doesn't work! In addition to the unconvincing science and technology in the story, the people also failed to convince me (I never felt they were more than props acting out the author's plot visions). I know that the story grabs other people who are taken with the big ideas here, but it just passed me by.

Iron Kissed (Patricia Briggs)

Another story of Mercy Thompson, the shapeshifting mechanic and her world of werewolves, vampires, witches, and fae. She is called in to investigate a series of murders in the fae reservation: murders that have never been reported to authorities because the fae handle these things themselves, but Mercy's fae friend Zee thinks her special coyote abilities might be useful. Along the way Zee winds up imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit and Mercy finds herself a target of the real murdered, who stalks her for his own twisted pleasures. Mercy's ties to Adam, the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, grow ever tighter in this story. I'm really loving these books!

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Eimear McBride)

This is the story of a troubled girl growing up in a disturbed family, overshadowed by her brother's childhood brain surgery and her single mother's religious fixations. I admired the author's unique language, using broken sentence fragments and neologisms to convey the broken, emotionally forceful story she wanted to tell, but it didn't work for me. I was constantly focusing on the words and had difficulty pushing through them to the story itself. This probably reflects a failure on my part to appreciate the poetic rhythm of the language and how it could pull you in, stuck in my own literal thinking. but there it is. I can recommend it to anyone who is more open than I am to the abstract impressionism the author is going for here.

The Flicker Men (Ted Kosmatka)

A complex, mind-blowing novel about what quantum mechanics is really telling us about the nature of reality. How can observing events change what events happen? Whose observations matter? Will being observed by a bacterium collapse the indeterminate waveform?  How about a cricket, or a garter snake, or a hamster? How about a cat, a monkey, an ape? Is it only humans? Only SOME humans? What if there are humans who qualify as observers, from the point of view of an indeterminate probability waveform, and some who don't? Then the novel goes on from there - how many universes are there? Where do new universes come from? Where does our universe fit into this fractal system? I loved how the ideas built on each other, but confess that as the novel pushed toward its gripping conclusion I started skipping some of the physical ideas and just going for the external plot, and then got lost completely at the very end. Were there different realities the narrator experienced? How was his timeline bent, and was it broken? I guess I'm not quite smart enough, or knowledgeable enough, to stay aboard through the author's train of thought right to the end.

Silver Borne (Patricia Briggs)

After this, I will focus more on reading this series in order! Mercy Thompson, the shapeshifting hero of these books, has a life that progresses and changes, with the events of each book affecting the shape of future events, and dipping into her life at random is making me nuts! Here Mercy learns that a book in her possession is much more important than she realized and is trying to untangle that problem without getting anyone killed. In the meantime her roommate, an alpha werewolf she used to be in a relationship with, has become despondent, and Mercy must also struggle with resentment and outright hostility from the local pack since its Alpha took her as his mate. Briggs handles these relationship issues with skill, dodging any tendency for soap opera overindulgence, while delivering a thrilling life-or-death supernatural mystery to solve. I really enjoy these books a lot.