Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)

The next installment of the Harry Potter series, which I am reading through again. I am constantly in awe of Rowling's imagination: the spells she thinks of, the names she gives things, the complex ways her plots unfold. She also seems to get the reality of adolescents, including their tendency to obsess with one thing (Quidditch!) and block out other things (Marked for death!) that might seem more important. I also love the things she emphasizes again and again, not through words but through the very essence of the stories. Things like bravery, honesty, loyalty, and love. This is what the series is really all about, as Harry grows into the kind of person we can all admire.

Skippy Dies (Paul Murray)

This is the story of a private Catholic boys' school in Ireland and various people connected with it: the boys, their teachers, their girl friends, and their neighbors. Skippy does indeed die in the first pages. Two-thirds of the book describe the events leading up to his death, and the remaining third describes the aftermath. This book is excruciatingly well-written; the dialogue, the settings, the events, the interactions--all are drawn with precision and clarity. This makes the book even harder to take, as the events described are painful in the extreme. The story is saturated with drugs, sexual abuse, lies, betrayal, cruelty both casual and sadistic, and the utter futility of trying to oppose any of this. Nothing in this story is uplifting or ennobling. I found it gloomy, depressing, and infuriating. Not recommended.

Why We Make Mistakes (Joseph Hallinan)

This interesting book on psychology explains a number of the common mistakes people make. Some are very scary (pilots flying a plane right into the ground because of a distraction over a malfunctioning light bulb; long-distance truck drivers sending and receiving emails on the road). Others are silly (why do people believe that they'll be so much happier living in California than in Michigan?), but still have important effects on people's lives. The author not only discusses things like the overconfidence effect (we tend to believe we will be more successful than we are, because we remember having been more successful than we were), but also gives suggestions on how to remedy this problem (through prompt, clear feedback). Not the most scintillating writing, but clear and easy to follow, and covers some really important topics.

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

This is one of my very favorite science fiction books of all time. Vinge has created an amazing, mind-blowing universe, filled it with fascinating aliens, set up a truly epic battle between good and evil, and laid it all on the shoulders of characters, human and non-human, you really come to care about. There is action ranging from galaxy-wide cataclysms to up-close-and-personal betrayals. There is technology ranging from the literally unimaginably godlike to muzzle-loading cannon and wheeled carts. Highly recommended.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J. K.Rowling)

More magical wonderfulness from the Harry Potter universe. I'm reading my way through all the novels again, and remembering why I liked them so much the first time. As with most books for children or young adults there are places where the protagonists act with total illogic, because doing the logical thing would bring in the adults and end all the fun. But the books are all about loyalty, and bravery, and standing up for what is right. Knowing how everything ends makes it fun to see how Ginny and Harry interact in this story. We learn more of Hagrid's back story and the origins of He Who Must Not Be Named. Very enjoyable.

On Being Certain (Robert Burton)

Burton is a neurologist who writes here about the neurobiology of the feeling of knowing, a sense of certainty we have that is often independent of any conscious reasoning process. He makes a compelling case that this feeling of knowing is as much a sensory or perceptual experience as our feeling of pain when we stub our toe or feeling of seeing a baseball coming toward us. All these feelings arrive in consciousness after a sometimes lengthy process in the "hidden layers" of the mind (to use a term from the AI work in neural networks). This is great stuff, and I have seen similar conclusions from similar research from lots of directions. Where I disagree with Burton is his apparent conviction that we are chained by our biology to requiring this feeling of knowing from our unconscious thought processes in order to be able to function effectively. (I say "apparent" because I didn't always follow his reasoning, so my characterization of it might be wrong.) If the feeling of knowing never arose, he says, we would realize that all our beliefs and perceptions might be wrong, and would therefore be stuck in an infinite loop of wondering whether there might not be a better decision or idea, and would be frozen by uncertainty. But science itself is the continual drive to improve our ideas and beliefs while recognizing that every single one of them might be wrong, and science is not frozen by this. He seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion of skepticism and toleration for ambiguity. He likens the effort to instill in people a more scientific, skeptical view of the world to encouraging "a clown that he'd be more useful as a mortician." He recognizes that the essential scientific viewpoint is one of provisional acceptance of ideas, and offers the "practical suggestion" that science and faith can be reconciled if only "both science and religion should try to adopt and stick with the idea of provisional facts," despite the reality that faith and religion are defined by the unconditional acceptance of truths not revealed in evidence but in conviction. Isn't this basically trying to talk that clown into opening a funeral parlor? It seems that Burton himself has trouble with accepting in a real and meaningful way ideas that don't match with his unconscious feeling of knowing. He quotes Scientific American on the origin of  the universe ("The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the only answer can be that the big bang happened everywhere.") and describes it as "unsatisfying" because our visual system is incapable of imagining a point without it being surrounded by something. To me, this statement is not unsatisfying. It is breathtakingly beautiful and mind-blowing! In a similar way he denigrates Stephen Hawking's theories of the universe without boundaries as "an idea that, even if entirely correct, isn't consistent with how our mind's eye works. We want a palpable resolution for the tension created by trying to understand the surrounding background, not an abstraction that we can't see or feel." So even if Hawking is "entirely correct" in his description of the universe, it's not good enough because it doesn't fit nicely with our preconceptions? Because the great stuff here is stuff I already knew and I didn't like the stuff I didn't know, I was not impressed with the book overall.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling)

Now that all the movies are out, I've decided to start over again with the books, reading them all in order to remind myself of the whole story, including all the parts the movies left out. The story is so magical (pun intended!) and so amazingly creative! I don't care that a few minutes with Google would have solved much of the problem, or wonder why Snape didn't tell Dumbledore about Quirrell. I just get caught up in the whole adventure of it. This story fulfills a deep need of all of us (not just children) to imagine that the world is full of delicious, dangerous, thrilling secrets, hiding just around the corner, and that I can learn to step around that corner and be part of it all.