Lock In (John Scalzi)

Scalzi's latest is a murder mystery/police procedural set in a future where a new illness left a substantial percentage of the population has been locked in, with complete awareness and full cognitive functioning but no voluntary control over their own bodies. Technology allows these people to live full lives in two ways: through remote operation of a mechanical bodies (charmingly called "threeps") or, much more rarely, through stepping in to the brains of people called Integrators and taking over their bodies for a while. The protagonist is one of the locked-in folks, starting his first day on the job as an FBI agent and faced with a bizarre murder involving an integrator. The murders proliferate and lead him to the fringes and the center of the new world culture being created by and for the thousands upon thousands of locked-in people. Many of the standard tropes of the genre are here -- the tough-talking, hard-drinking partner, the tension between the Feds and the local police, the triumphant confrontation with drunken thugs harassing a woman on the streets, the interrogation of suspects dancing the line between intimidation and the law -- but they all have a new twist because of the futuristic setting. I quite liked it.

The Memory Garden (Mary Rickert)

As a pretty old woman myself, I appreciated a novel in which one of the main characters is an even older woman, portrayed with unsentimental honesty but also love and respect. Nan has sore bones and faulty memories, but she is loyal and as good as she know hows to be. The other main character is her adolescent adopted daughter, a foundling left on her doorstep, born under a caul that gives her powers she doesn't know about. The main action takes place in a few days, as estranged friends from Nan's past come to visit, but this visit is just the stage on which old memories play out their flawed, contradictory, and ultimately redeeming story. As we wind backward and forward in time characters cross the boundary between life and death over and over, to the point where at the end it's not clear which side of this line each is on. This book reminds us that memories, as unreliable and fickle as they are, make us who we are. Highly recommended for its quiet, simple, but profound story telling and the lush descriptions of gardens, food, and experiences in general.

El Deafo (Cece Bell)

A charming story, told in graphic novel form with everyone as anthropomorphic bunny rabbits, which is a fictionalized memoir of the author's childhood growing up with a profound hearing loss. It is, as she emphasizes in the afterword, only one person's story of one way to be deaf, and her strong desire to fit into the hearing world and resist learning sign language will probably earn the ire of many in the Deaf community. I appreciated the honesty of the story, though, including the angst of difficult friendships, budding crushes, and struggles to fit in. We all have things that make us different, some more than others, and we all struggle to find our way in our complex social world, so her story is not that different from anyone's. I recommend it, especially for someone who is or has a child with anything that can be labeled as a disability.

My Real Children (Jo Walton)

Patricia, the protagonist in this story, leads two different lives. One day a man tells her she must decide at that moment whether to marry him, now or never. She chooses now, and goes into a marriage filled with strife. She chooses never and goes into life unmarried, and into a very different relationship. Both of these lives play out side by side, in different worlds with histories that diverge from that point not just personally but globally. The stories of the two lives were interesting, but with a certain narrative distance that kept me from becoming as engaged as I would have liked. I stayed with it to the end partly to find out what happened to the two different Patricias and partly to find out why she was living in this strange, mirrored way. While I did find out what happened to her, I never did find out why, and this left me feeling unsatisfied. So while I can recommend it for the loveliness of the characterizations, I can't recommend it for those who, like me, want a little more closure in their stories.

The Science of Fear (Daniel Gardner)

Gardner sounds a clarion call for making decisions based on rationality and reason, rather than the emotionality encouraged by our primitive brains and the media that surrounds us. Why do we spend such a huge amount of energy and money on fighting terrorism, which objectively offers virtually no risk, when automobile accidents and heart disease are much more dangerous? Why is everyone convinced that crime is going up, that our children are at great risk for being stolen by strangers, that chemicals are giving us all cancer,when none of this is actually true? Gardner explains this irrationality by describing the many cognitive biases and shortcuts we use when making sense of the world, and how they can lead us astray. I found it compelling and very readable. Highly recommended.

The Devil's Alphabet (Daryl Gregory)

This is not my favorite of Gregory's books (that I've read so far, anyway), but still really good. Years ago the residents of a small town in Tennessee suddenly started to change - some became huge, tall and strong, some grotesquely fat, some red-skinned and hairless (and spontaneously pregnant, always with girls). Many died in the transition. A few were skipped over, not changing at all, including the narrator who escaped to Chicago after the quarantine was lifted. Now he's come back to town for the funeral of a dear friend and is drawn back into mysteries within mysteries, relating to drugs, violence, death, and the true nature of this metamorphosis. I loved his other books for their view from inside madness; the narrator here is rather tamely sane, so I never felt drawn into the wonder of the story quite so much. Gregory does explore the nature of family, including the narrator's strained relationship with his father and how family and children shape our view of the world.

Our Own Minds (Radu Bogdan)

I'm reminded once again that I'm a psychologist, not a philosopher. I'm fascinated by the workings of the mind. but I want to approach them empirically and don't have the patience for the fine-grained logical analysis philosophers do. So while I enjoyed the basic ideas put forward in Bogdan's work on the development of consciousness, I found myself skipping over some of the painstaking argument and semantic distinctions here. Here's that basic idea. Children are born with an external orientation (to the environment and especially other people). Their minds work furiously to figure out how what others are doing and why, and what this has to do with the events and objects in the world. They very quickly start internalizing some of this, in the sense of developing their own relationships with the world, including the world of other people, but they're still looking at their own minds and relationships more or less from the outside, and don't start to develop a truly internal view of themselves until after around age four. That's when they start to be able to perceive their own internal thoughts and motivations directly. This fits with what I've always thought of as the nature of our self-awareness. As social creatures, we have to try to understand and predict what others will do. Because humans are flexible in our responses to the environment, with very few specific behaviors controlled directly by biology, we needed to develop internal models of other people, figuring out their motivations and goals and preferences. This mental machinery, created to help us think of others, is then available for us to use to understand ourselves, and that's where we get our ability to think of our own motivations and goals and preferences. Makes sense to me.

Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie)

Okay, a confession: I'm hopelessly focused on gender. I learned this in reading this book,in which the narrator's (fictional) native language has no gender-marking and the character himself (herself?) is oblivious to gender. In this English translation, the default pronouns are all feminine, so we read that she drove the shuttle and her voice was loud, but some of these individuals are probably male. Which ones, though? I can't tell, and it drives me crazy! Aside from this personal foible of mine, though, there's a lot here to like. There's an interstellar empire run by an immortal tyrant who has her (his?) mind loaded into armies of clones, supported by an army including vast ships run by AIs and manned by ancillaries, former people whose minds have been subsumed into the ship's mind. The narrator is one of these ancillaries, and the story shifts back and forth between the past in which the ship was part of the takeover of a new world, and the present in which the ancillary is separated from the ship and working toward a goal of vital personal importance. We don't learn what the goal is, why it is important, or what happened to the rest of she ship for much of the book. I can't say that all became clear, but enough did to be satisfying, and the mystery was intriguing.

Pandemonium (Daryl Gregory)

I love how Gregory captures a sense of insanity framed by mundane reality. In the two books of his I read (this and Afterparty) the main character experiences what, in the real world, we would call hallucinations and delusions, but within their own warped world they make a slantwise kind of sense. Here, the narrator, Del, was one of thousands who have been at some point possessed by what people call demons: recognizable personalities who take over someone and cause them to act out the demon's archetypal story. At age 5, Del was possessed by one they call the Hellion, a force that chooses young tow-headed boys and sends them swinging from rafters and throwing spitballs, and has been dealing with the aftermath of that possession ever since. He winds up working with others to try to learn what the demons actually are and to rid himself, and the world, of their presence. It is a fascinating world peopled with intriguing characters, and the ending is poignant and difficult and real.

Peking to Paris (Dina Bennett)

This is the author's story of a 35-day road rally across Asia and Europe in 2007, made by over 100 classic cars duplicating a trip over much the same route in 1907. I enjoyed a lot of the details of what the trip was like, including experiences in crowded Chinese cities, vast Mongolian deserts, and frustrating Russian checkpoints. The ongoing saga of their car's inadequate shock absorbers was, forgive me, absorbing. I was less enthralled with the author's harping on her overly-fragile emotional state. She was upfront about admitting that slights she perceived from other rally members evoked the angst of her 13-year-old self; I was less likely to find this charming or enjoyable in an adult. I would have preferred to spend more time on the journey, less on her inner securities. I can say that I liked parts of it, but don't feel that my life was better in any way for having read it.

Killing Jesus (Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard)

I was glad to read this book because it painted a vivid picture of what life was like in the time of Jesus (sometimes too vivid, in the case of the excesses of some of the Roman leaders). If it had not called itself an accurate historical document I would have enjoyed it more, because it was so clearly elaborated beyond what history can tell us and bent to O'Reilly's own biases. I suppose I could forgive the statements about the weather on a particular day, or what Agrippa was thinking as he stood looking out a particular window, as unimportant attempts to bring the narrative to life. But when he describes how Mary gasped in shock at finding Jesus teaching at the temple at age 12, because he had never shown such an ability before, I am left wondering how he could possibly know this, and such unsupportable insight is rampant in the text. He also ignores a lot of biblical scholarship when he assumes, for instance, that the Gospels were actually written by the specific Apostles for which they were named, or that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. All together I found it an interesting book if one is careful not to take it too seriously, but I can't really recommend it.

Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

Swamplandia! is a Florida tourist attraction featuring alligator wrestling and a family steeped in its own mythical history, fallen on hard times after the mother of the family dies and a slick tourist attraction on the mainland draws away all the customers. One by one the family members leave the island, each trying in some individual fashion to find a new future for them all. The author paints both the human drama of the family and the overwhelming, lazy explosion of life in the swamp with heartbreaking clarity. At times the story wanders a little far into the mists of unreality for my taste, and there was a certain distance from the experiences of the characters, even in the parts of the story told in first person from inside the experience of young Ava Bigtree. Still, I never stopped wanting to know what came next.

Frozen Heat (Richard Castle)

Sorry. I love the Castle TV show, and I am tickled at the joke of having the Nikki Heat novels actually published by "Richard Castle," but I don't actually want to read them. What is good fun on TV comes across as too formulaic as a novel. Oh, well.

Afterparty (Daryl Gregory)

I loved this science fiction story about a near-future world where everyone with a couple of bucks and an Internet connection can develop and produce their own designer drugs. A few years ago an enthusiastic group of young entrepreneurs in a budding start-up were working on something that they hoped would treat many of the ills that plague so many of us, and it went horribly wrong. The narrator of the story was one of the developers, and one of the initial victims, living out her life in a mental institution until she becomes convinced someone is recreating that drug and putting it out on the street again, and she goes on a mission to find out who is doing it and stop them. Her quest involves a Toronto drug cartel, an ex-spy, a dual-faced assassin, and a mixed crew of the folks from the original start-up. The writing is taut, the narrator's voice convincing and engaging, the action gripping, and most of all everything was clearly informed by the best thinking in  neuroscience. How could I not love it?

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)

This is an interesting enough story about a teen who discovers that his grandfather's stories about strange creatures and children with magical powers were real, when something nobody else can see tears his grandfather apart. He goes on a quest to the island where the grandfather lived as a child to try to uncover what is true and what is imagination, and uncovers who the peculiar children are and how Miss Peregrine keeps them safe. An assortment of weird vintage photos illustrate the story, bringing an element of the surreal. The ideas are interesting and the stakes are high, but somehow I couldn't really get into the story or feel much of a connection to the characters. Perhaps that's because I'm such a long way from being a young adult myself.

Orange is the New Black (Piper Kerman)

The book on which the Netflix series is based contains virtually no sex, drugs, or violence. Kerman was a rebellious young woman who got involved briefly in the drug trade after college, once carrying drug money for her girlfriend who arranged transport for the ring. She got out of the business quickly and went on with her life, but five years later the feds caught up with her, and then five years after that she was in a minimum-security Federal women's prison. What I found most striking about her story is that there was almost none of what I would have most feared, but was still worse than I dreamed. She was never attacked or even threatened, physically or sexually, though there were occasional moments of harassment. The only drugs she saw people using were those handed out by the medical staff at the prison. Until the last few weeks of her stay she never actually wore orange or shackles. Still, the system was brutal, demeaning, and dehumanizing on a level that seems carefully calculated. I was moved by this view of what life was like for her on the inside, and almost want to try the recipe for prison cheesecake.

A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Rachel Cantor)

This is an odd story, set in a strange future where the main social conflicts are between philosophies of  fast food chains and the nature of time and reality are breaking down. A few people are thrown together to save the world: Leonard, a Pythagorian who handles phone complaints for Neetsa Pizza; Felix, his nephew with unexplained super powers; Sally, a book guide from the university; and an assortment of dead people, including Leonard's grandfather, Marco Polo, and Roger Bacon. The action is absurd, funny, and, in the end, satisfying. Nothing happens the way you think it will, but it all works out. I enjoyed it.

Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Stephen Brookfield)

Stephen Brookfield is inspiring and dynamic in his approach to teaching. In this volume he dissects what it means to be critically reflective: to question your assumptions, uncover your biases, empower your students, and open your mind to different ways of understanding your own teaching. There are a lot of specific techniques in here that can be very useful. I particularly like what he calls the Critical Incident Report (though the name seriously needs to be changed), which invites students to reflect on their own experiences in the classroom. Through this report, not only do students become more reflective themselves, but teachers get vital feedback on how their practices are experienced from the other side of the desk. Not everything in this volume works for me, and Brookfield does tend to ramble on, but overall it is quite variable.

The Rook (Daniel O'Malley)

The tag line reads, "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service," which is a pretty good indication as to the subject of the book. There's a super-secret organization in England (with counterparts in a few anglo-centric areas of the world) dedicated to using people with supernatural powers to fight problems generated by other entities with supernatural powers. The special conceit of this story is that it centers on one member of the organization, the Rook of the title (most of the organizational structure is inspired by chess, for unclear reasons) who starts the story by coming to standing in the rain surrounded by unconscious bodies, and she has no memory of her past self whatsoever. She finds a set of extremely chatty letters left for her by her former self and uses them to orient herself, identify the enemy who took her memory, and pretty much generally save the day. The story is fun enough, and I was never really tempted to abandon it, but belief just wouldn't suspend very well. The superpowers were an inexplicable mishmosh - this one can shape any metal with his fingers like putty, that one seems compelled to twist his otherwise-human body into pretzel shapes, this one oozes various toxic chemicals at will from his pores - they seemed arbitrary and nonsensical. I also had trouble with a really super-secret organization having such poor security, so that someone with no memory and just a few poorly-organized notes to go on could fake her way in without anyone suspecting she was a mole. Too may things seemed to happen just for the plot. To take an example from early in the story, no-memory girl is offered a choice by her former self: open one safe-deposit box at the bank and learn what she needs to know to function in the life she's stepped into, or open a different one and get everything she needs to start a new life elsewhere in the world. It apparently never occurs to her that she could open both before deciding. As I said, pleasant enough, but not much "there" there.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce)

This is a charming, gentle, life-affirming book, though there is a lot of dark material there.  Harold and Maureen are living in a cold, empty marriage in a cold, empty house, when Harold gets a letter saying that an old friend is facing death on the other side of England, and it shakes him. He heads out to mail her a letter of sympathy, but simply keeps walking, heading north to be with her in her last days. His walk takes on mythic dimensions, and helps him and Maureen work separately on the issues that keep them apart. The big reveal toward the end is not actually much of a surprise, but it all fits together. I found it moving and engaging, and felt that I got to know the characters well.

The Other Wes Moore (Wes Moore)

This is a memoir and a biography, telling the stories of two men named Wes Moore.  Both were black, both lived in the same neighborhood in Baltimore at the same time, both grew up in single-mother households, both had scrapes with the law at an early age, both struggled in school. Their lives diverged wildly, though; the Wes Moore who authored this book became a military man, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, a happily married man, and a nationally-known speaker, while the other Wes Moore will live out his life in prison for murder. What happened? How did the author's life get turned around and set back on track, while the other kept spiraling further and further down a dark path? The book offers many possibilities: one father abandoned his boy while the other died unexpectedly, one mother was never able to complete college while the other was a college graduate, one dropped out of failing inner-city schools while the other was able to attend private and military schools. Ultimately, though, there are no clear answers. This book is a thoughtful look at the questions, opening our eyes to the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of finding the answers. Highly recommended.

The Interestings (Meg Wolitzer)

In this story we follow the lives of six young people who bonded together in a summer art camp in 1975 and who called themselves, with pretentious teen irony, The Interestings. As they progress to adulthood and middle age we see them grow and change in unexpected ways. Each of the characters is clearly drawn and engaging, and I was always eager to know what happened next in their very different lives. The events that happened to them and their reactions to them were not always entirely believable, but I was willing to suspend disbelief to stay with the story. In the end, it's not clear what point the author was making in this story, beyond "Look at these people - aren't they interesting?" Each moment was well done, but I wanted them to add up to more of a story and less of a picture of a life, or rather several lives. All that aside, though, it was good and I'm very glad to have read it.

The Kindred of Darkness (Barbara Hambly)

I love how Hambly writes: the lush, sensuous language, the strong sense of place and character, the intensity of emotion. I have enjoyed all the stories in this vampire series, though non as much as the first one, Those Who Hunt the Night. This story fits well into the series and is better, in my mind, than the last one. Here it gets personal, when Lydia and Jamie's daughter is kidnapped by the vampire master of London to force their cooperation in his battle with an interloper. Lydia and Jamie are, of course, nearly superhuman in their determination and cleverness, and so is tiny Miranda, but others are a too-human mix of good and evil, anchored firmly in a world you can touch and smell. Highly recommended for action and adventure.

You (Austin Grossman)

A team of eccentric young geniuses work for a small video game company, developing games based on the vision of the most eccentric, most brilliant of them all. Buried in the code, ported from system to system, is a bug that crops up occasionally and wreaks havoc before the game completely crashes. This is the story of where that bug came from and how it can be found and fixed. Even more, though, it is the story of what video games are and how they become so important. In each game there are characters and worlds to choose from, but at the core you are still you, and that core of you-ness can never got away. Do we want it to? What, after all, is the ultimate game? I liked this story, but didn't get as engaged in it as much as in Grossman's original novel (Soon I Will Be Invincible) which is much less realistic but somehow more real.

The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)

I confess: I skimmed this book. I'm just not cut out for speeches on philosophy and reality that go on for pages and pages without a break. It's a classic, though, so I stuck to the end, all 854 pages. In the years before WWI, a young German engineer, Hans, goes to a sanitarium high in the Swiss Alps to visit with his cousin who is being treated there for TB. His visit is meant to last three weeks, but shortly after his arrival he is himself diagnosed with TB and winds up staying for seven years. During his time there other patients arrive and leave, some via cure, some via death, some via simply being fed up with the routine of the place. And routine it is, with patients spending hours each day in mandatory rest cures, constantly taking and tracking their temperatures, and indulging in five hearty meals each day. There are numerous interesting incidents--romantic infatuations, seances, blizzards, duels--but none of it seems to add up to much, at least not for me. I suppose it has given me an insight into the life and times of pre-war Europe, but that doesn't seem enough to counterbalance those 854 pages.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Donald Finkel)

This slim book presents the author's philosophy about education and learning. He is passionate about teachers doing things other than lecture and other things he calls Telling - presenting information to students with the idea that this will cause them to learn. Instead, he says, teachers need ton craft experiences and situations in which students will actively engage in creating their own understanding. Some of his specific ideas I find exciting and will try myself, at least in modified form, such as conceptual workshops (very similar to the in-class activities I do in some classes) and responding to student papers with an actual letter (similar to what I already do in my Honors class). Others strike me as unworkable and frankly appalling. He holds up as a model a teacher who tells students on day one (a Monday) that on Tuesdays the class will be entirely run by students as a discussion of the assigned Shakespeare play, and he won't tell them what to do. The next day he sits at one seat in a circle, silently, reading his copy of the play and jotting in a notebook. If nobody else has said anything after 5 minutes he sighs and says, "Remember, I won't tell you what to do. Discuss the play." He is then silent for the rest of the two-hour class. This is to encourage independence in the students and a democratic environment in the class, but all I can imagine is fruitless struggle and resentment. I am apparently not as enlightened as Dr. Finkel.

Parasite ( Mira Grant)

In the near future, most people carry genetically engineered tapeworms in their gut that provide all kinds of medical benefits against diabetes, infections, autoimmune disease, allergy, and much more. Sally Mitchell is alive because one of these implants brought her back from a coma after a car accident six years ago, and SymboGen, the company that makes the implants, is helping her recover her memory and deal with numerous health issues in the aftermath. But something is going wrong, and this technology might not be as benign as it seems, and Sally has to figure out who to trust, what's really going on, and who she is. I devoured this book in a day, mesmerized by the action, the questions, and Sally's struggles. The big reveal at the end was no surprise to anyone but Sally, who for some reason refused to consider the most obvious possibility, but I enjoyed the ride so much this didn't bother me. My only frustration is to come to the end and find To be continued...! The next book won't be out for months, and the final book in the trilogy for probably another year. Rats!

Thanks, but This Isn't for Us (Jessica Page Morrell)

Excellent advice from a developmental editor (one who works with authors to get their projects ready to submit to publishers or agents) on how to avoid many of the problems that leads to rejection. I found useful tips here about things like balancing plots and subplots and structuring scenes, and a good plan for the many stages of revision. Recommended for people who want to write fiction or memoir.

The Faded Sun (C.J. Cherryh)

This is one story in three books: Kesrith, Shon'Jir, and Kuruth. The mri are a humanlike alien race who served as mercenaries to another race, the nearly sedentary Regul, in their decades-long war with humans. Now there is a treaty to end the war and form an alliance with the Regul, and the mri are seen by their erstwhile employers as a loose end that needs to be cut off. This complex tale (three books, after all) involves intrigue, misdirection, and the deaths of individuals, worlds, civilizations, and species. A human special forces man, brought in to serve as aide to the governor to one of the planets humans claimed in the peace settlement, and one of the last of the mri fighters become unlikely allies in the battle to save a people. The characters sometimes feel a little wooden, puppet-like to the plot, but the sprawling story and the depth of the plot made up for these weaknesses, and I hardly shouted at all to myself about the whole "desert planet" trope.

Orfeo (Richard Powers)

There is a lot to like in this book, especially if you know something about music. Peter Els is a retired composer who spent his life searching for music that would break through the walls of reality and people's souls, giving up his family and, to a certain extent, polite society in the search. In his final years he goes back to an early, abandoned love of chemistry and starts dabbling in do-it-yourself biochemistry, tinkering with the genetic sequences of common household bacteria. Along the way he comes to the attention of government officials and finds himself to be the target of an increasingly hysterical government manhunt. It's difficult to talk about music in a way that conveys anything like the experience of listening, but Powers has done this rather well. On the other hand, the characters, including Peter himself, are less well drawn. I never grasped anything like the core of Peter's personality that would lead him to make the choices he did, particularly at the end of the book. It felt more like the masks of an ancient mime, illustrating large themes, than the intimate story of real people. Overall, though, I was drawn in and really wanted to find out how Peter's story would end.

The Golem and the Jinni (Helene Wecker)

I really liked this intricate, touching story about a Golem (a woman of clay brought to life through Kabbalistic magic) and a Jinni (a magical creature from the Syrian desert) who find themselves adrift in turn-of-the-century New York City. Their separate worlds come together in complex, overlapping ways as they struggle with who they are and how they can live among humans. There are evil forces that would destroy them and those they care about, and lives are sacrificed as they fight for survival. It's amazing that this is a first novel. Though the sense of place could have been stronger, I was caught up in their lives and their tale. Recommended.

Battlestations! (Diane Carey)

A friend said this was his favorite Star Trek novel, so I had to give it a try. What he liked was also something I liked: a female protagonist who is strong as d resourceful without being Wonder Woman.  Still, it's a little too melodramatic for my taste. The maguffin is a device that has the potential for galactic power and evil (of course) that must be kept from the wrong hands, despite betrayal from several quarters. There is an annoying layer of hero worship over it all, with Spock and McCoy and especially Kirk elevated to god-like levels. It's a good example of the genre, though, better than many.

Family Matters (Rohinton Mistry)

This is a close-up, unflinching portrait of a family in present-day Bombay struggling with many issues. The central character for most of the book is the family patriarch, living with his two adult stepchildren, who seem to be too bitter and focused on complaining about life to have ever married. He has Parkinson's and, on one of his daily walks, is injured, putting an intolerable burden of nursing and care on these two. Across town his biological daughter is living with her husband and two children in a two-room apartment, and his relationship with them is loving and tender. How will this family deal with the patriarch's escalating needs for care when money, space, and patience are stretched thin? Mistry paints unforgettable pictures of all the people, from the patriarch to the laborers hired to haul heavy things, and the epic city of Bombay itself. My personal preference is for stories with more likeable characters; as this story goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those to curl up with. The last section of the book, which I originally took for a small epilogue but spanned at least a chapter, seemed almost to come from a different story entirely - the main character had changed in ways that did not feel entirely justified. These are the only weaknesses in an otherwise fine novel.

Time Warped (Claudia Hammond)

An interesting discussion of the many ways in which our perception of time can warp. The author comes back again and again to the Holiday Paradox - the fact that while on a vacation trip, seeing new things and having new experiences every day, the time seems to fly by, but after returning home and looking back on it the trip seems to have lasted a very long time. How is this possible? There are many theories, and she discusses them all, but the most likely has to do with attention and memory. When we are focused on things because they are new an unexpected, we lose track of the passage of time and are surprised when suddenly it is dinner time, so the day seems to have gone quickly. Looking back, however, we have so many separate memories it seems impossible that they all fit into that one small time frame. There is a lot more here, including why time seems to speed up as we get older and how to make better predictions about our own future. At times the material seemed scattered, with less organization than I would have liked, but overall it was interesting and informative.

After Visiting Friends (Michael Hainey)

In this memoir, the author describes his search for the truth about his father, who died when he was only six. Although the people and events are drawn clearly, there seemed to be missed opportunities to bring the story to life. Pages and pages were devoted to detailing the interviews with people who had little to add to the story, but there was not enough about two core people: the author and his mother. We see both of them from the outside, from a distance, and never get to know either of them well. Though the author describes how the loss of his father colored his childhood, there was nothing much about his current life; he mentions a girlfriend in passing, but we are never told about this relationship or about anything in his professional life aside from pursuing the investigation. This made the story seem distant and passionless.

Hikikomori and the Rental Sister (Jeff Backhaus)

In Japan, it is something of an epidemic that young men who feel too much pressure become hikikomori, withdrawing from the world, and rental sisters are employed to coax them out again - here the concept is applied to a man closer to middle age who withdraws after a family tragedy. After trying for three years to get her traumatized husband to emerge from his room, his wife engages a young Japanese woman as his rental sister. The story was engaging enough, but ultimately not really satisfying. It seemed that there was too much sex involved; it distracted from the actual inner lives of the people involved. It seems to be the view of the male author that a sister couldn't accomplish what a lover could. I don't agree.

The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)

Aside from being perhaps 20% longer than it should have been, this is a remarkable book. Theo grows up from an anxious but happy boy through tragedy,neglect, and disturbance to a broken, wounded, but still coping man. He was drawn with dead-on accuracy at each stage of his scattered life, and I cared about him a lot. Other characters were less clearly drawn or less plausible, and some of the changes he went through were not as thoroughly justified as I would have liked, but on the whole it was engrossing and touching. I am unsurprised to learn that it won the Pulitzer.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends (Rob Lowe)

In this memoir, Lowe tells how he knew he wanted to be an actor from age 6, and fought single-mindedly to make that happen. He writes fairly openly about his difficulties with relationships and with alcohol that led to a downward spiral, and about the redemption that turned his life around. There is a great deal of name-dropping, but this is to be expected from someone whose middle-school friends included Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn. Aside from a disconcerting tendency to switch from past tense to present, the writing is quite good. He describes drunken evenings with his gang of friends, living for weeks in Paris with a princess, and other debaucheries without avoiding them but also without sensationalism or meanness. It is a good look at a life most of us will never know.

Lexicon (Max Barry)

This story reminds me a little of Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus, in its premise that words can have profound, devastating effects on people's minds. I enjoyed this one more, though, because it wasn't as relentlessly dark and hopeless. It tells of two people, a street-wise runaway girl and a stoic Australian EMT, caught up in an international conspiracy of people who learn to use the power of words to control society. Some of the characters' transformations seem a little weakly justified, and some of their antagonists seem a little mustache-twirlingly evil, but overall I found the story more than just entertaining. It explores some of the challenges of being a good person in trying circumstances, and the difficulty of knowing just what a good choice might be. I quite liked it.

Jennifer Government (Max Barry)

This is an over-the-top cautionary tale of capitalizm (yes, that's how it's spelled here) gone mad. With few exceptions, most of the world has chosen to do away with practically every function of government, privatizing education, police, and so on. People are so identified with their corporate lives they take it as their last name: John Nike, for instance. Nothing is more important than corporate profits, and if a few teenagers need to be killed in order to increase sneaker sales, well, teenagers die every day for much worse reasons, so it's not a big deal. but Jennifer Government, one of the small number of people representing law and order, takes exception to that, and tries to fight against the worst corporate offenses. The characters are fairly two-dimensional, the plot at times unconvincing, but the story is entertaining enough to support its message, and I enjoyed finding out what would happen next.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman)

The main events in this very small novel involve a seven-year-old boy, but this is not a children's book. As a child, the narrator became involved in increasingly bizarre and dangerous supernatural events, centering on the inhabitants of a neighboring farm. It is framed in a flashback from the man's middle age, but even the framing story has a surprise. The tale is magical, literally and literarily, and captured my spirit and my imagination. This is not a weighty book; it floats. I loved it.

Love Minus Eighty (Will McIntosh)

This story asks the question: What will we do when it is possible, but expensive, for people to be frozen and restored after they die? Who will get to be resurrected? Obviously, the very wealthy can purchase all the resurrections they need. There is another group of people, though, who might be brought  back: young and beautiful women, who are willing to sign away all their rights into actual slavery for the chance to live again. These women are called bridesicles, and they can be brought back to consciousness without complete resurrection so wealthy men can interview them and decide if they are lovely enough and desperate enough to be compliant wives. In this book there are layers of love stories, all connecting in some way to the fate of the bridesicles. I was intrigued but not convinced by the future that was described here, and ultimately left it confused about the various love stories at the center. Aside from the one that was resolved definitively at the end, I couldn't tell who really loved who, so I couldn't root for lovers to get together, which left me somewhat distanced from the whole thing. The human story of the people and their lives seemed to be taking back seat to the cautionary tale of greed and oppression. I didn't dislike it, but I was disappointed.

A Reliable Wife ((Robert Goolrick)

Ralph Truitt, the stern, upright titan of business in a small town in Wisconsin in 1907, long widowed, placed a newspaper ad seeking a "reliable wife." Catherine Land, who answered the ad, is not who she seems to be. We follow the two of them, their lives, past and present, and their deepening relationship, built on lies and lust. There is a whole lot of lust in this book; most of the characters seem driven by unslakable desires. The author explores in some detail life in the darkest, most depraved corners of society, as well as the life available to Truitt, who seems to be limitlessly wealthy.There are secrets within secrets here, but aside from one surprise in the middle of the book, few of the secrets are so very secret after all. I found the setting and the characters interesting and well-drawn and I cared what happened to them, even as they seemed larger than life, nearly mythic. There was more lush, slow description and is my preference, and I found myself skipping paragraphs and whole pages, especially toward the end of the book. This first novel is not without its problems, but its strengths outweigh them.

A Tale for the Time Being (Ruth Ozeki)

On hold for now - I'll get back to it later.

Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

I enjoyed this rather odd story, but left it unsatisfied. Ursula Todd is born on a snowy morning in 1910, but dies in childbirth. She is born, and is saved by her doctor, but falls from the roof when she tries to rescue a doll that was tossed out the window. She drowns at the seashore; she is rescued by a stranger. Over and over again, she lives, and dies. It is fascinating to see the events in the world, and in her life, from so many different perspectives, and all the settings and people are beautifully drawn.. Eventually she begins to remember her past lives, and starts trying to manipulate what happens. I really enjoyed it all, but at the end it didn't seem to have gone anywhere. She set herself a specific goal, and I can't even tell whether she accomplished it or not. Aside from this letdown at the end, it is a good story.