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.

Moonwalking with Einstein (Joshua Foer)

Foer, a journalist, while covering the 2005 US Memory Championship, asked many of the contestants how they managed their amazing feats of memory, and they all said the same thing: Anybody can learn to do this, if they practice hard enough. So he decided to find out for himself. During the next year he studied all the mnemonic techniques the memory champions use, coached by Ed Cooke, English memory grandmaster, to prepare to enter the 2006 US Memory Championships. Along the way he researched many different aspects of memory, including the history of memorization techniques (starting from Simonides in his collapsed banquet hall), memory theories and education, savant syndrome, traumatic amnesia, training and expertise, and creativity. He blends all this information into a compelling (and scientifically accurate) view of the mind and how to use it. I was completely caught up in his drive toward the competition, and riveted by the action, cerebral though it might be, of the championship itself. The epilogue is the clearest explanation I have ever seen of the usefulness of mnemonics in the real world. Highly recommended.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (John McWhorter)

I really enjoyed this investigation into the history of English grammar and the various influences that, apparently, made it what it is today. Since I'm not a linguist, I grew tired in a few places where the author became strident in his condemnation of the traditional story, but this detracted very little from the weird and wonderful story he wove. English is a Germanic language, but has several quirks of grammar different from all the others in this family, such as the "meaningless do." We say "You like pasta," but also "You do not like pasta" and "Do you like pasta?" The do in these sentences has no meaning, and almost no other languages in their world require this. Why is it there? McWhorter thinks he knows, and he makes a good case. I found it fascinating.

The Unit (Ninni Holmqvist)

What a sad book. It is set at some unnamed future time in Scandinavia, when men over 60 and women over 50 are either needed (primarily by having children, occasionally by virtue of important professions) or dispensible, and dispensible people go into a Unit. While there they are very well cared for (it's a lovely place with all the amenities and all for free), but they have to make themselves useful to society by participating in medical and psychological experiments and donating organs and tissues needed by the needed people. Their existence is truly a gilded cage. As people start making themselves needed more consistently (teens start having babies, just to be sure), the number of dispensible people drops relative to the population, and they start reducing the exempt professions and lowering the entrance age to ensure their supply of organs and participants. There's a side theme about feminism carried too far (it's basically illegal for a man to flirt with a woman or even to display his physical strength too much), but it's not really developed. In fact, the sociology of the whole dispensible/needed concept and the forced induction into the unit isn't really developed. This is just the story of one woman undergoing this experience, from beginning to end. Nicely written (and translated) and, in many ways, engrossing, but left me wondering about so many things.

Heat Wave (Richard Castle)

I couldn't resist reading this just for the novelty value. Castle is a TV show about this writer, Richard Castle, who uses his pull with the mayor to get permission to follow along with a NYC homicide unit, headed by detective Kate Beckett. In the show, he writes a novel called Heat Wave about the tough and gorgeous detective Nikki Heat, who is based on the real-life (within the show) Kate Beckett. So now Hyperion has put out that book, the fiction-within-a-fiction, allegedly by the (fictional) Richard Castle. The book features blurbs from actual writers (who appear occasionally on the show as Castle's writer buddies) and an interview with the (still fictional) author. The whole thing is really very well done. The story itself is so-so. The mystery is interesting, the action engaging, and so on, but there's nothing outstanding. The best-selling, blockbuster novelist is still fictional. But I had fun reading it.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Laura Lippman)

This slender novella is an interesting mystery with the twist that the protagonist is a detective laid up on total bed rest by a difficult pregnancy. She watches life in the park she can see from her window, and notices a woman in a green raincoat walking her dog every day, until the day the dog shows up trailing its leash, and the woman is gone. What happened to her? I figured out the answer about halfway through, but still enjoyed the story in a mild way. As a novella, it doesn't have the scope to fully develop the characters or the events, and as a late novel in a long series it relies on a lot of back story I didn't have, which left me somewhat unsatisfied. Not bad, though.

The Postmistress (Sarah Blake)

This lovely, intensely moving novel explores issues of love and truth against the backdrop of WWII. Three women's lives are intertwined in a small town at the tip of Cape Cod: the local doctor's young bride, a cocky radio reporter, and the town's postmistress. Their lives are all affected by experiences that happen, in the author's words, "around the edges" of the war. There are no combat scenes here, though part of the story is set in London during the Blitz and part follows the horror of the mass deportations of Jews in Europe. Still, the war has profound effects on all of them, and threatens their deepest convictions. I became very involved in their lives, and their actions were always believable and poignant. Beautifully written.