The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Jill Lepore)

I've never been a big comic-book fan, and only remember Wonder Woman from her TV days with Lynda Carter playing the Amazon princess. This book details the history of how Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a harvard-trained psychologist and inventor, by some accounts, of the lie detector test - and advocate of feminism and free love. This is a fascinating story because Marston is such an outre character. He was never really successful at any other career except Wonder Woman, and he very deliberately used her to project propaganda that women can and should have power over men to make the world a better place. His is a story of contradictions, though. While pressing the agenda of women's rights and independence, in his own life he ruled a small harem with a wife, a live-in mistress, and an occasional other mistress who often visited and lived with them for a time. The mistress wore a wide bracelet on each arm as "love bonds" to symbolize her subjugation to Marston; they are eerily similar to Wonder Woman's bracelets that allow her to deflect bullets. This history delves deeply into the lives of Marston and those around him, including his women, his business dealings, and his family. The author argues that Wonder Woman, by herself, bridged the gap in women's rights from the suffrage movement in the 1910-1920 time frame and the resurgence of "women's lib" in the 1960s, keeping the flame of feminism alive. I'm not so convinced. She was clearly a force for strong, independent woman in the 1940s, but after Marston died in 1947 her message was much diluted and she became a pretty face in tight clothes, focused on finding a husband rather than saving the world. One clear sign of this change: The Wonder Woman comic book for years in the 1940s had a four-page section on Wonder Woman in History, profiling strong, independent, world-changing women. In the 1950s, this section changed to one giving wedding tips. How far she had fallen.

The Suicide Murders (Howard Engel)

This is a pretty typical example of the hardboiled detective story. Benny Cooperman is in his office when a beautiful woman brings him a job - she thinks her husband is having an affair. Cooperman agrees to look into it and starts following the husband, but then the next thing he knows the husband is dead of an apparent suicide. He's not convinced, though, and continues to dig into what he is more and more convinced is murder, and along the way uncovers more suspicious "suicides" that prove to be murders in disguise. Most of the typical tropes are here: an ambivalent relationship with police, corrupt politicians, getting waylaid by thugs, and being suspected of a crime himself. I definitely enjoyed the story enough to stick with it and learn how it ended, but have to say that I found it vaguely disappointing, especially when Cooperman made some pretty stupid decisions. No great enthusiasm here, but also no real aversion.

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.