Blood Runs in the Family (Rich Burlew)

This fifth book in Burlew's series about the adventures of the Order of the Stick maintains and builds on the strong characters and stories he has managed to create out of a set of cartoon stick figures. Although the series began long ago as throw-away comics based on the rules and foibles of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games, it has become so much more. There are several sets of contradictions here. First, the art seems simple but manages to convey depth and personality with skill. Second, the characters are simultaneously living authentic lives within the semi-medieval setting of a typical role-playing setting and also aware of the game itself. How Burlew pulls this off, I don't know, but he does. In this book, our heroes travel to the desert on the Western Continent, searching for the third of five mystical Gates after the first two were destroyed. This gate is hidden by the illusions of a master wizard, but they find something there that shatters one of the characters almost beyond redemption. Some plot lines in the long story arc come to an end, a few threads are tied off, and there's a sense of the story arc starting to narrow in toward the final confrontations, still off in the future. I wait impatiently for the next book!

Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)

A dense, even claustrophobic, evocation of the strangeness that has taken over a section of the southeastern US called Area X. Some unexplained event (ecological? alien?) killed or pushed out all the people, and within the barrier there is untamed wildness and disturbing things that claw at the soul and twist the senses. The first-person narrator (nobody in the whole book has a name) is a member of an expedition sent within the barrier to explore and try to document what is going on in there, but the team quickly falls into paranoia and is overwhelmed by things that can't even be described, much less explained. The writing is gorgeous, drawing you into the deepening horror the main character experiences. This is the first of a series of novels set in this universe, and it never really reaches a resolution, which actually fits with the off-kilter, unnatural feeling of the whole book. I can't say I really liked it, because horror isn't my cup of tea and it reminds me of the kind of Lovecraftian story where loathsome creatures lurk around every corner, but I have to admire how well the author achieved his goal.

Daring Greatly (Brené Brown)

I'm not a big fan of self-help books. This one is a good example of the category, being backed by at least qualitative research (also something I'm not a big fan of). Brown says some important things that many people need to hear, and I believe there's nothing here's that's wrong or hurtful, so I would recommend it to anyone who finds it inspiring or helpful. Her basic message is that we need to open ourselves to vulnerability in order to have healthy relationships with ourselves and with others. When we armor ourselves against vulnerability, we cut ourselves off from growth, courage, and acceptance. Each chapter of this book focuses on one area where these forces play out (e.g. parenting) or against one aspect of how we deal with these issues (e.g. the distinction between shame and guilt). I have no quarrel with Brown's message, but it didn't resonate with me.

The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell)

This is a deep novel, tracing the interconnected stories of several people who become more and more entwined in supernatural goings-on as they try to figure out what's happening and how to survive. I really enjoyed most of it as I dug into the mystery. Who are these mysterious voices Holly is hearing? What happened to her strange but beloved brother? How do some people seem ageless, and others seem to be able to manipulate people's memories? It all pulled together near the end in a cosmic battle between good and evil. The last section, though, let me down. After pulling for the good guys to win the epic battle (and then manage to survive their victory), the book suddenly became a dystopia about how the world is going to crash when resources run out. I didn't like that sudden left turn, partly because it was unremittingly grim and partly because it didn't seem to fit with the premise or the direction of the rest of the book. Up until that point I loved it.

Bone Crossed (Patricia Briggs)

I just can't get enough of this series. Mercy Thompson is tough, funny, vulnerable, resourceful, sexy, honest -- everything one could want in a hero. In this story she's coping with the aftermath of trauma she experienced in earlier books and trying to find her footing in the new relationship she has with the werewolf pack (and its sexy Alpha), so she doesn't need a threat posted on the wall of her mechanic shop indicating that the vampires have declared open season on her and hers. She has to try to find out what the vampires are after and how to protect herself from them, and also solve a seemingly unrelated problem brought to her by an old college friend who suspects her house is haunted. Of course, the two problems turn out to be related, and much worse than anyone thought, but through bloody-minded toughness and quick thinking, and with help from various expected and unexpected sources, she manages to make everything work out as it should. Mostly. Recommended.

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.

Alena (Rachel Pastan)

This haunting novel is a deliberate updating of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and evokes much of the same sense of claustrophobia, uncertainty, and dread. The (again unnamed) narrator is an art historian, new in her profession and working her way up through assistant positions in minor museums. She meets up by chance with Bernard, the wealthy and enigmatic owner of a small but important gallery in Cape Cod, and he sweeps her off her feet by offering her the job of curator. The gallery has been closed for two years since its last curator, the larger-than-life Alena, disappeared, apparently while swimming alone. The museum's business manager adored the departed Alena and is devoted to maintaining her hold on the museum, even though she is gone, whispering to the newcomer at one point to remember that she is temporary. As in the original novel, mysteries gradually unravel and reveal something not entirely surprising about Alena's disappearance. The writing is very good, creating a strong sense of place and character, but for me this story did not work as well as the original, where the young heroine was inexperienced but gradually came into her own, finally taking charge of the household and telling the domineering Mrs. Danvers, "I am Mrs. de Winter now, you know." Alena's heroine never makes the same stand, finishing the book as the same frightened child she was when she started. She also makes some unforgivably foolish choices, for instance sneaking into the museum at night to run off and mail materials without checking on any procedures. In Rebecca, you could understand the innocent bride making some mistakes, though none of them were so egregious, but in Alena this person has been hired in a professional capacity and should live up to some basic standards. I found myself annoyed at both Bernard, who hired someone so woefully unqualified and unprepared, and then abandoned her without direction, and at the narrator herself, who should have realized how far out of her depth she was and insisted on more structure. So although I truly enjoyed the book, I was disappointed for the ways it seemed to be twisted out of its natural shape to align with the original.

Finn Fancy Necromancy (Randy Henderson)

This rollicking fun trip of a novel involves elite necromancers, formless Fey, evil witches, brutish Sasquatches, and thuggish gnomes, set in modern-day Washington State under the blind eye of the mundane world. At the center is a mystery: who framed Finn for dark necromancy and got him exiled to the Other Realm for 25 years, and now that he's finally out, who's trying to get him sent back there again? Finn and his funky family and assorted other strange folks have just three days to solve these mysteries before he's dragged back to his non-life. As he tries to figure out what's going on people around him are dying, falling in love, discovering secrets, and speaking from the grave. I enjoyed the romp quite a bit, because although it feels very comic book I could really care about the characters (including several that are diverse in mundane ways such as race, orientation, and intellectual ability, without carrying Look At Me - I'm Diverse!! signs). The ending wasn't terribly surprising but satisfying enough and leaves open lots of directions for sequels, which makes me happy.

Blindspot (Mahzarin Banaji & Anthony Greenwald)

An excellent review of all the research indicating that we humans are just a mass of prejudices, biases, assumptions, and limitations when it comes to evaluating situations, others, and even ourselves. All true! I wasn't surprised by any of the research results here, since I've followed this research for a while, but this is a good resource for pulling it all together. (With just one mistake I noticed: the misinformation effect described by Loftus is not the same thing as retroactive interference - a minor issue that doesn't detract from the work overall.) I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the science behind prejudice and discrimination.

A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Another delightful English cozy mystery featuring Flavia de Luce, 11-year-old chemist and sleuth. She invites an old Gypsy woman to stay on her family's property, and the woman is savagely attacked, so Flavia digs in to investigate the mystery. Along the way she encounters dead bodies, the enigmatic granddaughter of the injured woman, an eccentric religion, a long-vanished child, and some faux antiques, all weaving together into a satisfying conclusion. Flavia's voice as she narrates her experiences in her off-kilter household and eccentric village is delightful, despite a few unresolved loose ends. [Minor spoiler: When Flavia first meets Porcelain she "couldn't rub two shillings together if my life depended on it," but later hands Flavia a five-pound banknote (a lot of money in post-war England) to pay for her horse's care. Flavia never notices the contradiction, and I kept expecting it to mean something, but it just slid by. Unsatisfying, and not the only such glitch.]

Night Broken (Patricia Briggs)

I've jumped ahead to this most recent book in the Mercy Thompson series, and it lives up to the others that I have read. Mercy continues to work with werewolves and other friends (in this case, members of the fae) to fight evil (in this case, the personification of a volcano god - really!). One thing I missed in this book was that Mercy didn't use her ability to shapeshift into a coyote much, though a big part of the story was about her relationship with Coyote, the actual trickster god. A big part of the book related to a confrontation with Adam's ex-wife, who has come home seeking help with a stalker and polarizes the wolf pack into Mercy versus the ex. I raced through it and had a lot of fun along the way.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)

This gloriously heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel jumps back and forth through time, telling the story of the Georgia Flu pandemic that wiped out 99.9% of all humanity in a space of weeks. We meet a cast of people who faced the end of the world, some who made it through and some who didn't. We learn of their lives leading up to the disaster, getting to know who they are and where they came from. We learn of what happened to them as civilization fell apart, and for those who survived, what their world was like for the next decades. Every person is fully realized, every setting and event is hauntingly true, and moments grab you without letting go: the realization that you have eaten your last orange ever, that you will never, ever know what happened to your loved ones, that there is no choice you can make that doesn't end in disaster and death. It is a splendid story, skillfully told, and I loved it.

The Fuller Memorandum (Charles Stross)

I'm reading the Laundry Files series out of order, which is a little confusing, but I love them anyway. The mixture of humor, pop culture, computers, science geekery, Lovecraftian horror, James Bond, and soul-deadening bureaucracy really works for me. In this one, we learn a little about Angleton, Bob Howard's very scary boss, and find out why he's even scarier than we thought. Along the way Bob's wife Mo proves her badassery with the demon-killing violin and Bob has to face an army of cultists bent on sacrificing him to the ultimate dark lord, armed with nothing but his knowledge of computational demonology. Great stuff.

Golden Fleece (Robert Sawyer)

This short novel is Sawyer's first, a murder mystery aboard a spaceship on its way to explore a distant planet. The mystery is not a whodunit, because in the first few pages we witness the murder and realize it was committed by JASON, the artificial intelligence that runs the ship. The mystery is why the computer believed this murder was necessary and whether the others would figure it out. I confess that the story didn't work for me. The main human character had a past decorated with so many separate issues and traumas, none of which were actually related to the current situation, that it felt strained and overwritten. When the reason for the murder, and the ship's other unusual behaviors, is finally revealed, I don't buy it. I've read a few of Sawyer's works and had much the same reaction to them as well.

Side Jobs (Jim Butcher)

I've become a real fan of the Harry Dresden series, so I checked out this collection of short works. It begins with the first-ever Dresden story, written as an exercise for a creative writing class and never before published. Butcher acknowledges that it's not a strong story and didn't deserve publication initially, an opinion I could agree with, but I enjoyed seeing where the story began. It finishes with a novelette that Harry never even appears in, with Murphy and others of Harry's friends dealing with his apparent murder, trying to cope with the kind of evil he usually fights without him. If you like the Dresden series you will like these stories.

Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

I like most of Scalzi's work, and when I heard about this "practice novel" I knew I needed to read it. It is obviously amateurish compared with his later work. There's no serious character development and not much in the way of logic here. Aliens who have learned of Earth from our broadcasts want to meet and be accepted by humans because they're really nice guys, but they are really ugly and they smell bad. So, naturally, they come to a Hollywood ad agency to figure out a plan to get us to accept them. Coincidences pile up, aliens behave like humans, and the ending, while inevitable from the start, strains credulity past the breaking point. Still, it's fun. I enjoyed looking back at this first novel from an established leader in the field.

Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson)

This is a massive, richly detailed, comprehensive science fiction story with an almost anti-SF theme. It begins on a generation ship that's almost reached its target planet, Aurora, which has enough similarities to Earth that it seems a likely place for humans to create a viable colony.. The ship is fascinating, a character in its own right, and the people living aboard are a complex set of people with a wide range of motivations and perspectives. Robinson does a great job representing the ethnic diversity of humanity in this miniature world. Of course, people face a spiraling series of cascading technological challenges before the story finally ends. The final scenes are as warm and uplifting as one could want, but the overall message is far from encouraging. This book does not flinch from the really hard challenges of life in space, and does not gloss them over with an ad astra! (to the stars!) optimism. There is also a deep and thoughtful consideration of questions relating to artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness.

The Apocalypse Codex (Charles Stross)

Another in the Laundry Files series, which I love for its humor, its intelligence, and its willingness to twist genre boundaries into Moebius strips. Bob Howard is again the narrator, telling how he is threatened with promotion within the more-secret-than-secret British agency charged with protecting England and the world from Lovecraftian horrors that constantly try to breach the boundaries between the worlds and munch on our tasty human souls. In this version, the charismatic leader of a splinter faction of an evangelistic American church is demonstrating a distressingly effective ability to rally the faithful. It turns out that the Second Coming is not quite what they think it is, and Howard and a beautiful, powerful witch named Persephone have to shut them down. If you like humor and horror woven together, you'll love this one.

Living With a Wild God (Barbara Ehrenreich)

The author as a mature woman, veteran of marriages and illnesses and careers, looks back at a quest she began at age 14 to understand the real nature of the universe. Raised as a staunch atheist, she wondered what the purpose of life and the universe could have beyond reproduction and death. Was there some ineffable, inexpressible Other that gave the world its real nature? For most of her life, Ehrenreich has been subject to what can only be called mystical experiences, in which language and human labels are leached away, leaving only pure sensations and a strong sense of Presence. This book is her attempt to describe her experiences as accurately as she can and to determine what they might mean. My professional background and my scientific inclinations lead me to something like this: brain circuitry developed for the purpose of recognizing and predicting the behavior of the intelligent social creatures we lived with (other people) sometimes overshoots, leading to pariedolia and, in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, a strong sense of oneness with the divine. Ehrenreich dismisses these explanations too glibly, I believe, lumping them in the category of "mental illness." I will grant her that no evidence disproves the existence of Others that are invisible to any rational scientific investigation and can't even be approached in a rational linguistic frame, but I don't accept that she has provided any actual evidence in favor of its existence either. No matter--the book is a fascinating look at the really big questions, and will provoke anyone to think deeply about them.

An Impartial Witness (Charles Todd)

This second story of the intrepid WWI nurse Bess Crawford is as gentle and as strong as she is. Gentle, not in the sense that nothing bad ever happens, for there are murder and mayhem and life-and-death knife fights, but in the sense that Bess herself is a good soul, struggling to see that right triumphs in a dark world. There is an interesting mystery beginning with the murder of a young woman, where Bess is an impartial witness to some of her last hours. From there, the mystery spirals, taking in additional people and additional crimes. There were a few spots where I was annoyed at how much she pushed other people to accept her view of things because she knew she was right, only to have her view overturned moments later, and now she knows her new view is right. In the end she did wind up solving the mystery, so it all came to a satisfactory conclusion. I enjoyed the feeling of England during this bloody, heart-tearing war and the stoicism of the people determined to keep finding the best in life despite everything.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

I admired Watts's earlier Blindsight for its intelligence, its mind-blowing ideas, and its frequent reference to ideas that are square in the center of my own professional areas of interest. Echopraxia is more of the same, and even more so. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier book, focusing on what's going on back home while Humanity's heroes are engaging in a deeply mysterious first Contact. The main character, a biologist of the old school who eschews most forms of direct brain augmentation, gets caught up in an increasingly challenging set of circumstances as he fights to save himself and humanity from vampires, scientific mystics, military zombies, and alien slime mold. It's not clear whether or not he is successful. I admire the brilliance of his thinking and world-building. I love that I know about little bits of psychological research he tosses out. I was impressed with how he gave one character a unique voice, a sense of rapid delivery and impatience, simply by leaving out commas. Still, I can't say that I loved either book, and I'm afraid that it's because I'm not smart enough to read Peter Watts. I had the constant feeling that I didn't quite know what's actually happening, and kept going in the belief that it would become clear eventually, but it never did. If you loved Blindsight and you're smart enough to follow down the rabbit hole, you will probably love this one as well.

Rooms (Lauren Oliver)

Part ghost story, part mystery, this novel bounces between several points of view. After Richard Walker dies, his estranged wife, their two adult children, and their daughter's little girl come to the old house to clean up and hold his memorial service. They don't know that the house is the home, in fact the body, of a collection of ghosts. As the story unfolds, we learn about who the ghosts are and why they are still here, and we learn about the broken lives of the people moving through the old place. At times the people, living and dead, felt more like symbols than real people, but the author's language is seductive and the tale draws you in.

The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta)

At one moment, all over the world, people suddenly vanish. Cars careen driverless, dinners burn on the stove, babies stop crying between one breath and the next. Some folks immediately think it's the Rapture, but there is no rhyme or reason as to who goes and who stays: old, young, Christian, Muslim, atheist, kind, abusive. No explanation is every uncovered for the Great Departure. This book is about what happens to those who are left. Everyone is knocked off-kilter, either because of their own loved ones gone, or because of the disruption to society and to their sense of the stability of the world. A woman tries to find a life after her whole family is taken, a mother retreats from her own fully-intact family out of a sense that the world has lost something that can't be regained, a boy leaves college to follow a charismatic guru. These characters are real and their pain, and their heroism, call out to all of us. Tender and wrenching, this book draws you in and won't let go.

Three Days to Never (Tim Powers)

This intricate time travel story deals starts with an old woman dying in the mountains miles from where she was moments ago. It turns out that she had links with Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein, and these links bring her to the attention of Mossad, the Israeli security agency, as well as a rival group of spies. The woman's son and granddaughter wind up under attack from both groups because they found some mysterious artifacts in the old woman's shed, including a videocassette of Pee-wee's Big Adventure that turns out to be something else entirely. The story is complex and at many times confusing, but I really cared about the central characters and I loved how it expanded my mind.

Case Histories (Kate Atkinson)

This mystery has an unusual structure. It starts by describing three crimes that took place over a 30-year period (a little girl vanishes, an overwhelmed new mother murders her husband, a teen is killed in a random workplace attack). It then jumps to a present-day detective who winds up looking into all three cases, while dealing with the divorce-drinking-angst difficulties that fictional detectives often seem to deal with. I expected that the three cases would wind up linked somehow, but that's not what happens; their only real link is that the detective is investigating them. I enjoyed figuring out what was happening or had happened, and there were some surprising twists and turns along the way, but I can't say that I loved this book. Some of the threads remain too loose for me, and some of the events too coincidental to be convincing. So while the characters and settings were generally well drawn, and the mysteries mysterious, I didn't quite click with this book.

Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)

This is a tiny jewel of a novel, made entirely of letters of recommendation written by an irascible, acerbic professor of English at a small university. His letters tell, in pointed prose, stories of financial challenges, boneheaded administrators, past loves, present feuds, and the full range of students: clueless, ambitious, timid, gifted, and poignant. It felt perfectly real next to my own academic experience, and while I more than once literally laughed out loud (and I do know what literally means), there is more to the story than comedy. I recommend it to anyone, particularly to all who toil in the ivory tower.

The Signature of All Things (Elizabeth Gilbert)

This novel traces the long and complex life of Alma Whittaker throughout the 1800s. She was born to wealth, with parents who made their fame and fortune with plants, and developed from early childhood a strong mind with a love of science, languages, and most of all plants. In this leisurely, richly detailed book we see her childhood relationship with her parents and her adopted sister, her various unlucky loves, her travels to exotic lands, and her brilliance as a botanist. Alma is a complex person with layers and layers of strengths and weaknesses, and it is wonderful to watch her make her way in the world, sometimes battered, sometimes doing the battering herself. All the characters, settings, and events are vivid and three-dimensional. This book will disappoint those looking for action, but there is adventure in plenty of a quieter sort.

The Fold (Peter Clines)

This story features a likeable hero with an unusual ability: a truly intensely photographic memory and a sky-high IQ. Mike remembers effortlessly everything he's ever seen, in perfect detail, and can link any memory with any other to uncover patterns no one else can find. He wants to live an ordinary life teaching high school English, but is drafted by a friend in the defense department to investigate a remarkable project and determine whether its funding should be continued. A group of researchers have apparently developed the ability to transfer matter instantaneously across space, but they maintain absolute secrecy about how the trick works, refusing even to let the DoD know any details until they are ready to go public. When Mike goes in to investigate he finds that they can indeed move things, including people, from here to there as simply as taking a step, but there is something wrong. By the time he tracks it down, it's save-the-world time. A few details got rattled my belief, but by and large the story works well on all levels. I did figure out the main mystery pretty early because it triggered the memory of an old SF story with much the same idea, but that didn't spoil it for me. I recommend it.

Blood Bound (Patricia Briggs)

This second book in the Mercy Thompson series is as good as the first. Mercy is resourceful, brave, and likeable as she faces a murderous demon, with the help of her werewolf, fae, and vampire friends. And with her own ability, which is that she can shift at will into a coyote. I like her as a strong female character, though the cover of the paperback annoyed me. Mercy makes her living as an auto mechanic, but I doubt she works with her overalls zipped down below the navel. I also like that the supernatural creatures are not just stereotype. Each individual has a unique personality that comes through even when overlaid with things like the rigid pack hierarchy of the wolves. Briggs has a deft hand with contemporary fantasy, and I will definitely read more.

Darkfever (Karen Marie Moning)

This is the first book of a fantasy series by the author of the Highlander books, which is very popular though I haven't read it. I was looking for contemporary fantasy to read so I thought I'd try this. I have to say, I had problems with it. Most of the problems could have been fixed with a bit of editing. The author used inappropriate words in phrases like "the bed perched under the window" (beds don't perch). Phrases were padded with vague adjectives or unneeded words, as when she said the driveway was "framed by huge, ancient trees on both sides" (could it have been framed on one side?). I had to laugh at a tense moment when the narrator said that she had been sprinting to keep up with a monster, but now she would have to break into a run to catch it. Some basic facts were just wrong, as when it was 7 pm in Dublin at midsummer and she called it sunset (in Dublin at midsummer the sun sets three hours later). More serious than these problems, which could have been easily fixed with a sharp blue pencil, was the general attitude of the protagonist. Nearly a third of the way through the book, having had up-close interactions with fantastic monsters, she was still pretending that there was nothing supernatural going on. I wanted to slap her. There is a good story under here, and I won't say don't read it, but it's not for me.

Vicious (V. E. Schwab)

A very comic-book story, where people have super powers and make dastardly plots against a nemesis, and I loved it. Victor and Eli were brilliant college students when they started studying the origin of people with extraordinary abilities. Their research turned to experimentation, and then turned to death and destruction. Along the way we meet a pair of sisters joined by love and death, a giant tattooed man whose specialty is computer hacking, and a dog with the lives of a cat. The larger-than-life plot played out with just the right mix of inevitability and surprise, and the ending held as much tenderness as you could hope for. This is the author's first adult novel; I hope for more.

The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)

This is the sprawling, complex first volume of a trilogy about a most unusual first contact. Set in China (the author's home), starting during the Cultural Revolution and continuing until today or possibly the near future, it tracks several different people with complex relationships. A woman working at radio transmission/monitoring station dedicated to tracking and possibly attacking satellites in orbit discovers, almost by accident, a way to harness the energy of the sun to send out a brief transmission detected by aliens from Alpha Centauri. This is a binary star system, with another fainter star that is believed to be part of the system as well - hence the three-body problem of the title. Orbital mechanics can completely solve the movements of two bodies, but except for a few special cases there is no general solution for predicting the movements of three of them. This means that these aliens live in a very hostile and trying environment. Still, they manage to (a) receive the message (which somehow is more powerful than the whole sun, despite being broadcast spherically), (b) decode it almost instantly (because it uses a "self-decrypting" format, whatever that is), and (c) respond in colloquial Chinese (in the same self-decrypting format). And this isn't even the least believable part of the story. Part of the problem is that I started out thinking of this as science fiction - if I had it in my "magic realism" category, perhaps it would have fit better. I just kept bumping up against science things and going, "um, no." So it didn't work for me, and I won't be reading the rest of the trilogy.

Replay (Ken Grimwood)

I re-read this book (appropriate, no?) for my book club this year, and it holds up very well for something written in 1987. For reasons that remain entirely unexplained, after Jeff Winston dies in 1988 he wakes up in his own life, in his own body, back in 1963 and has the rest of his life to live again. But he dies again at the same minute as before, and wakes up again in 1963. It's a little like an extended Ground Hog Day; he keeps living the same times over and over. He tries different things to make his life, the lives of others, and the world better, or at least different, each time. Part of why we are reading this book now is in response to this year's award-winning The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, based on the same concept of people who repeat their lives again and again. There are differences in how this repeating happens between the two books, but mostly the difference is in the general atmosphere and attitude. Harry's story is about keeping your head down, not letting anything change, trying to survive and be safe in a world that keeps getting more and more dangerous. That (and the really gut-wrenching torture scenes) make it a dark and, for me, depressing story. This book, on the other hand, looks at the chance to live again as an opportunity to get it right, to make the kind of life that one can be proud of and happy in. Jeff may get it wrong sometimes, so that his own life and sometimes the world wind up worse off, but at least he is trying. There is a sense of optimism and love that is missing from Harry's story. I like this one much better.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross)

Another Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross. These stories are always a mind-twisting blend of horror (many-tentacled creatures from the murky deeps), police procedure (griping about pencil-neck desk-jockeys who don't know what it's really like out here in the field), and geekery (what else from someone who writes sidekicks named Pinky and Brains?). Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence agency but he's no James Bond. As a computational demonologist, his specialty is understanding how mathematical formulae and computer programs breach the walls between worlds and let those horrors through, forcing the good guys to stop them and clean up the mess according to the proper bureaucratic rules, in triplicate. In this story, Howard starts out attending an international meeting of similar organizations, expecting a boring weekend of conference rooms and PowerPoint, but winds up soul-linked with a demon assassin and dragged to a Caribbean island to stop a megalomaniacal billionaire from stealing a deep-sea artifact that can destroy the world. Of course.  Stross scatters every page with gems that are as smart as they are funny. I have to love an author whose narrator describes the experience of driving a rented Smart Car on the German autobahn "while a jerk is shooting at me from behind with a cannon loaded with Porches and Mercedes."

Summer Knight (Jim Butcher)

I'm not reading the Dresden Files novels in order, but I'm enjoying them a lot. Harry Dresden is my kind of hero: unreasonably strong and competent, but with realistic flaws and foibles and deeply concerned about other people. He is a wizard in modern-day Chicago, dragged into a war between the Summer and Winter Courts of Faerie that threatens the very existence of the Earth, not to mention the lives of everyone Harry cares about. In order to save the day Harry has to solve a murder mystery: who killed the Summer Knight? The Queen of Winter is the obvious suspect, but she's the one who hired Harry to solve the crime, so maybe not. As usual, Harry is helped out by an assortment of people: Murphy, the CPD cop; a pack of enthusiastic young werewolves; the mystical Mothers of Winter and Summer; and a small coven of changelings still balanced between the human and the faerie world. The action is nearly nonstop, and I enjoyed the ride.

How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory (Michael Hasselmo)

I love to study memory; it's my area of primary interest within cognitive psychology. For that reason, I expected to love this book, a close examination of how episodic memory works. Episodic memory is the memories of my actual life experiences, where I remember being there. For example, knowing what a toothbrush is for is a semantic memory, knowing how to brush my teeth is a procedural memory, but remembering brushing my teeth this morning, while looking out the window and observing that the sky is clear after days of rain--that is an episodic memory. I'm sad to say, however, that this book didn't work for me. Partly because this book goes deeper than my interest goes into those brain mechanisms mentioned in the title. I like to learn about different brain structures and how they work together, but kept skipping over the analyses of neural firing patterns in individual brain cells. Another problem I had is that the author explicitly defined episodic memory as the recovery of a spatiotemporal trajectory: first I went there and did that, next I went here and did this, and so on. I kept waiting for them to address the fact that some episodic memories don't have specific places and times linked to them, at least in my experience. Last week I was driving around town looking for a specific tree I had seen that I wanted to photograph. I had the location and time only very generally (somewhere within a half-hour or so of my house; somewhere in the winter, last year or perhaps the year before). I couldn't link it to anything that came before or after. But I had a clear memory of looking out the right side of the car as I rode in the passenger seat and thinking, "That's a really cool tree. I need to come back sometime and photograph it when the leaves are out." There is no trajectory in this memory, but it seems to me clearly to be an episodic memory, and this book can't account for it. While I admire and respect the work this author has done in uncovering some of the most basic aspects of episodic memory, all told it didn't click for me.

Elfland (Freda Warrington)

There is a magical Otherworld called the Spiral, inhabited by beings known as Aetherials. There is a Gateway that allows these beings to visit modern-day Earth and even to live here, undetected, for generations, raising their Aetherial children. Rosie is one of these Aetherial children, born here to Aetherial parents who love Earth and have set up lives here. Every seven years there is a ceremony in which the great Gateway is thrown wide and all the Aetherials who live on Earth go into the Otherworld to recoonect with their magical roots--only something is wrong, and the stony, unlikable Gatemaster refuses to open the Gateway, claiming that there is a danger on the other side and he must protect everyone. Cut off from their source, Aetherials begin to fade. As Rosie grows up she faces the usual angst and issues of young people, amplified by the internal turmoil of the Aetherial community over whether the Gatemaster's decision is justified or not. As rebellion brews, Rosie is torn over her relationships with various others: the Aetherial boy she is hopelessly in love with who doesn't acknowledge her, his brother who is impulsive and scary, her brother's human friend who adores Rosie, her brother's human wife who hides a frightening secret, and another brother who is not what they think him to be. If this all sounds like a soap opera, that's my only complaint about the book. I love the magical worlds and the sense of mystery and power they build. I didn't love the whole I'm-in-love-and-there's-nothing-I-can-do-about-it mythos; that's a view of life I find misleading and dull. Why is everyone so helpless in the face of their impulses? But overall I can recommend the story; I was caught up in what will happen next and how everything is going to be resolved.

Dirty Magic (Jaye Wells)

This is straight-up urban fantasy, with a gritty, mean streets vibe. When a new potion appears in the Cauldron, one that turns its users into raging monsters with a thirst for human flesh, Kate Prospero is one of the cops assigned to the Magical Enforcement Agency to find out where it's coming from and stop it. Kate has the background for this assignment: she grew up in one of the covens, a magic cooker being groomed to take over the business from her Uncle Abe who ran one region of the city, but she gave all that up after her mother died and has now sworn off all magic use. But the new assignment drags her back into that part of her past, and seems to be dragging her little brother in with her. Kate will do whatever she has to in order to save her brother and fight this implacable enemy. I'm not in love with the grim atmosphere of such a dark police story, but this one is well done and the magic is blended with the contemporary world seamlessly. Kate is a believable hero, tough but vulnerable, determined but conflicted. I will read more.

Faerie Tale (Raymond Feist)

Another contemporary fantasy, about a family living not too far from where I live (the story is set in Fredonia, NY) that winds up targeted by evil faerie magic. The victims include a famous author/screenwriter, his wife who was an actress before her marriage, a college-age daughter, twin 8-year-old boys, and assorted other friends and neighbors. That's one reason why I didn't love this story, though I didn't dislike it either; it wasn't focused on one main character. The story starts with the wife, drifts through various others, and at the end it's one of the boys who is the true hero. Another gripe is that the characters sometimes act as stupidly as the teen-movie heroines who go into the basement all alone at night to investigate the scary noise.  At one point a doctor told the father about all the horrible things happening to his son who had come through a very high fever with heart failure and apparent brain damage, displaying appalling behavior and EEG tracings nobody could make sense of, saying that he didn't even know how he can be alive, but if he were brain dead the chaotic brain scans would be flat -- and the father says, "Then he's all right?" I laughed out loud, which was NOT the reaction the author was going for. Finally, there were too many places where the mysterious events were described only as "indescribable," making me think of advice I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that you're the writer, damn it, so it's your job to describe it. These are small, niggling points, but for me they added up. Though there was a lot of atmosphere and horror, and some engaging characters, I just didn't get inside the story.

Moon Called (Patricia Briggs)

I enjoyed this first book in a fantasy series. Mercy Thompson lives in our modern world with the addition of werewolves, vampires, witches, and fae, but she is not one of them. She's not human, either; she's a walker, one of the few remaining descendants of Native American magic, who can turn at will into a coyote. She's generally maintains good relationships with the supernaturals in her area, but when a young, untrained werewolf in human form appears on the doorstep of her garage, things go bad quickly. Mercy has to negotiate two different werewolf packs and a nest of vampires in her search for a kidnapped child. I liked Mercy; she's tough and smart, but realistically limited in her abilities.The story was engaging and kept me turning pages. I will definitely read more of this series.

Human Memory: A Constructivist View (Mary Howes & Geoffrey O'Shea)

The authors present a thorough, tightly-argued case for the idea that memories are constructed, not simply stored. That is, each time we remember something, we use the bits and pieces of information available in the hugely complex network we've built, incorporating traces of all our experiences and knowledge, to build that memory. We don't just go on a shelf and find it there; it's new each time, and is changed every time we remember it. This is a very strong idea and has a huge amount of empirical support. For me, this was the weakness of this book; it argued against the idea that memories are exact replicas of our experiences, perhaps stronger or weaker, faded or intact, but otherwise unchanged. I don't know of anyone in the field who seriously takes that position any more. This made me lose patience with the book, because it seemed they were devoting their energies toward knocking down a straw man rather than actually examining the implications of the constructivist nature of memory. I also had another issue, which is much more mine than theirs; the book leaned heavily toward a philosophical approach, focusing on logic and introspection, but not so much empirical research. It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but that's not to my taste. I can't fault their conclusions, but don't feel that reading it really changed or enlarged my understanding of memory.

The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)

Sacks is famous for his insightful case studies of people dealing with neurological challenges, and this volume maintains that tradition. Here he focuses on issue related to visual imagery: the ability, or lack of ability, to see things one's imagination, the "mind's eye." The stories he tells range from people with no ability to imagine visual stimuli at all, to the blind man whose visual imagination is so strong he relied on it to climb up on his roof by himself to repair it. Along the way we met a woman who can see shapes and colors perfectly well but can't use that information to recognize what she is looking at and learned about Sacks's own journey as he progressively lost vision in one eye to cancer. As always, Sacks focuses more on each individual's experience, how the challenges affect each one as a person in daily life, than on brain circuitry or the firing of neural impulses. I enjoyed this collection quite a lot.

Mudhouse Sabbath (Lauren Winner)

Winner is a committed Christian who converted from Judaism, and offers in this short book a series of meditations on what the practices of Judaism can offer to Christians. Not in the realm of theology, but in how to bring faith into one's everyday life. For example, she doesn't advocate literally keeping kosher, but does argue that such a practice helps us think about what and how we eat as part of our relationship with the world and with God. The strict observances of the Sabbath, forcing one to disengage from the busy world and direct one's thoughts to the life of the mind, can bring mindfulness and calm to our frantic lives. I was particularly moved by the chapter on mourning and grief, with the detailed pattern imposed on the grief-stricken that allow for a gradual reclaiming over the span of a full year of the life one has lost with the loved one, supported at every step by the entire community. There is a lot of truth here that i was happy to learn about.

The Suicide Index (Joan Wickersham)

The author circles through the thoughts, feelings, actions, and images relating to her father's death decades ago from suicide. The book is truly structured as an index (the chapter titles are in outline form, alphabetized), which fits with her overall theme of trying to make sense of her father's action, to give it some kind of rational form. Wickersham doesn't try to dodge the unpleasant responses of everyone involved, looking squarely at how her image of her father shifted, how her mother struggled to regain her balance, how hard it was to talk with her young son, how survivors of suicide connected to share their silent grief. The book confidently finds the line between honesty and bitterness, between love and sentiment, as the author acknowledges the ambiguity of her situation and the lack of real answers. Highly recommended.

Hounded (Kevin Hearne)

I enjoyed this contemporary fantasy story, with an ancient druid living in Arizona as a 20-something dealer in arcane books and tea, fending off the attention of Celtic gods with the help of other gods, witches, werewolves, and his own earth magic. The hip, pop-culture attitude contrasts nicely with the old legends and dire swords. This is the beginning of a series that I expect to follow, at least for a while.

The Girl With All the Gifts (M. R. Carey)

If I'm not careful, I'll develop a theme of reading zombie stories where the protagonist is a good zombie, bent on protecting the humans from the bad zombies. That was the theme in Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory), and it's the theme here. It has all the usual zombie tropes (relentless, mindless creatures hunting human flesh, humans huddling in enclaves, fleeing across a world of decay and ruin) even though it never actually uses the word zombie. The main character is a child who, despite being infected with the zombie parasite, still has a mind and a strong sense of morality. How can she live with the humans who increasingly learn to care about her? How can she learn to live with herself? Is there any future for humanity, and what could that look like? This book doesn't have the depth of Stony, but it was engaging, thrilling, and moving. I completely enjoyed it.

The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)

This story was all the rage when it was released, in serial form, back in 1859, and it's easy to see why. Sometimes described as the first mystery novel, there is a lot of mystery here, with mistaken identities, secret assignations, brooding mansions on bleak hills, dastardly villains, and impossible love. A drawing instructor falls in love with one of his pupils, who is engaged to another man, though a mysterious woman in white warns that the marriage will come to a bad end. The plot has enough twists and turns for anyone's taste, and most of the characters are fascinating, larger-than-life individuals, both good and bad. From our modern perspective, though, the central love interest is a nobody: she is lovely, and plays the piano well, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be anyone there. We much preferred her mannish, resourceful sister, and wish he had fallen in love with her instead. Still, this old book holds up well, and I can recommend it.

Native Tongues (Charles Berlitz)

Berlitz knows languages, and this book is a collection of interesting facts about languages. Here are a few examples: After discussing various Chinese ideograms, including the one for "horse" and the one for "door," we learn that the symbol for something surprising is a horse in a door. I love knowing that the Latin word for "seagull" means "noise with feathers."  Berlitz includes the worlds most efficient travel dictionary, based on the claim that knowing eight words in 25 languages will allow you to convey most essential ideas to the vast majority of the people in the world. Language tells a lot about a culture (in traditional Chinese, the word for "wife" is "the person inside") and about history (the Russian word for "train station" is just their version of the name of an English train station, Vauxhall, that early Russian railroad engineers admired). I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about how we talk to each other, and why.

Skin Game (Jim Butcher)

I started this series (the Dresden Files) quite a while ago, and dropped out after a few books. Recently I picked up this, the most recent entry, and really enjoyed it. Harry is a wizard operating in modern-day Chicago, along with an assorted cast of other wizards, warlocks, witches, demons, faeries, shape-shifters, angels (Fallen and upright), Knights of the Cross, and on and on. In this book he's drafted by Queen Mab, who runs the Seelie Court in Faerie, to pay off a debt she owes to all-around bad-guy Nicodemus, by helping Nicodemus raid the deepest vault in Hades. Harry is not happy about this, partly because he doesn't want to do anything to benefit someone as evil as Nicodemus, and partly because he assumes that Nicodemus will turn on him and kill him as soon as Harry's part of the job is over. How can he arrange things to fulfill his obligation to Queen Mab while undermining Nicodemus's plans and keeping himself and his friends alive? I was a little disappointed by the rabbit Harry pulled out of his hat toward the end (with a first-person story, you don't expect the narrator to keep secrets like that from the reader for so long), but the breathtaking action of the climax more than made up for it. There's a moment that had me, a Star Wars fan, literally cheering aloud in delight. Now I need to go back and read some of the stories I missed before. This world is a fun place to spend time.

Sweet Silver Blues (Glen Cook)

I've heard good things about the Garrett, P.I. series and I'm interested in fantasy, so I thought I'd give it a try, starting with this, the first book of the series. It's a fairly standard noir PI novel, set in a magical world of vampires, pixies, centaurs, witches, and trolls. The writing is solid and the action interesting, but I couldn't get into it. Part of the problem is the breathtaking sexism. Granted, the story is 25 years old, but even in 1990 this should have been too much. There are exactly three female characters that appear in more than one scene. One is a literal witch, complete with haggard face, shrieking cackle, and mysterious omens. One is a figurative bitch, beautiful but stupidly, mindlessly nasty to everyone and everything. The other is a lovely and willing wench with nary a brain. That's it. This spoiled the whole thing for me. If it's not a problem for you, you might well enjoy this start to what is a popular series.

Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory)

Once again, Gregory takes broken, dangerous people and turns them into complex, intriguing, and sympathetic heroes. Stony Mayhall is a zombie, but a very unusual zombie. Found as a newly-undead newborn and taken in by a solid apple-pie Iowa family, Stony manages to do the impossible over and over again, and we are rooting for him all the way. This is a story of family, of love, of trying to do the right thing in the most difficult of situations. We know from the opening chapter, which sets a frame to which the rest of the story is flashback, that key people will survive, but how remains unclear until the very end. I have nothing but admiration for Gregory's storytelling.

Shovel Ready (Adam Sternbergh)

The first-person narrator of this book scrabbles a living in a dark, dangerous post-apocalyptic New York City. He calls himself Spademan, a name with two meanings. He once was, he tells us over and over, a garbage man, back when the city worked and people came and took away your garbage. Now, he is a killer for hire, one with strict rules about not knowing why you want someone killed, only that you're willing to pay for it. When someone points him at the estranged daughter of a famous evangelist, he starts to have second and third thoughts and winds up being drawn deeper and deeper into a morass of murder, torture, and terror as he tries to do the right thing. It is surprisingly easy to like this protagonist because we never see him acting in his primary occupation as a cold-blooded murderer; we only see him as someone who has become the unlikely defender of the young and helpless. With its intense action and its spare style (short, incomplete sentences and one-line paragraphs abound) this story moves quickly, almost breathlessly. Recommended.

The Martian (Andy Weir)

This book and Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker) are a study in opposites. Whereas Miracles was strong on characterization and relationships but weakened by stomach-clenching bad science, this one is all science, all the time, propped up with some cardboard characters in invisible relationships. I'm comfortable with what it says about me to say that I loved this one. Its narrator, Mark, is a smart, determined guy with a good sense of humor, but no deep personality beyond that, and nobody else registers much on the human meter. But then Mark finds himself stranded on Mars with no means of communication, in a habitat meant to keep six people alive for 31 days and possible rescue four years off, and he sets out to keep himself alive. He forces machinery to do things its designers would be afraid to have nightmares about. He applies chemistry, biology, and physics like an acid trip. All the science is rock-solid, while still being surprising and creative. I couldn't wait to find out what Mark, and Mars, would come up with next. Much recommended for any science nerds.

Maplecroft (Cherie Priest)

I'm not a big fan of horror, nor of historical fiction, so this book wasn't really up my alley. Given all that, I quite liked it. Lizzy Borden, she of the axe, had reasons for what she did, reasons based in an ancient evil that calls to people, turning them into inhuman creatures of death. The Victorian style, based on what are supposedly written notes and letters, is inherently slow, but the action still built to a satisfactory conclusion. I liked that the central figures are strong, intelligent women, and that science and rationality are important to survival. If horror is your cup of tea, you'll enjoy this one.

The Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker)

There is a lot to like in this touching story of a girl on the edge of womanhood dealing with the usual teenage issues and also with the global catastrophe that may signal the end of the planet. For some unknown reason, the rotation of the earth begins to slow drastically. Really drastically - it gains over half an hour in the first day. This slowing continues at an unpredictable pace throughout the book, with a day stretching to well over 70 hours before the tale ends. Along with this unexplained shift in rotation, there is also an unexplained change in gravity, which apparently increases enough to interfere with the flight of birds and soccer balls but not with walking. The orbit of the moon also shifts, so that a solar eclipse that was supposed to occur in the Pacific instead happens unexpectedly in California. So although the main character is well drawn and her family and peer relationships are touchingly illuminated, I kept being thrown off by the cavalier disregard for the most fundamental nature of reality. My disbelief just wouldn't suspend enough for me to ignore conservation of momentum, or gravity, or orbital mechanics, and not all happening together. I kept getting thrown off by other minor but unforgivable gaffes as well. When Julia's best friend abandons her she says she missed her "like a phantom limb" - but phantom limbs are not something you miss, they are something you wish would go away. Strange things are happening to airplanes, and also to the astronauts on the space station "ten thousand times higher," but of course the orbit of the space station is about 250 miles up, less than a hundred times higher than a commercial jet. When the earth's magnetic field begins to break down (something that would, indeed, follow from the slowing of the earth's rotation), people hear and feel this sudden shift, which is nonsense. The bottom line is that I just couldn't shut off the part of my brain that kept scoffing at the science, which spoiled everything else for me, which is too bad, since the other stuff was pretty good.

Dead Witch Walking (Kim Harrison)

Rachel is a witch, working with the law-enforcement agency that governs supernatural creatures like warlocks and weres, but her boss hates her and has been deliberately sabotaging her work to make her ineffective, so she quits to go start a new agency with her friend the vampire and colleague the pixie. This means breaking her contract, so naturally they hire assassins to kill her. At that point I'm already confused by the plot. Why does her boss want her to fail, when it seems like he'd want his unit to be successful? And why spend a lot of money and effort to kill her for quitting? And then Rachel decides her only course of action is to take on the most powerful criminal mastermind in the city, figuring that if she brings in the proof that he's running drugs they'll have to - what? Take her back? Cancel the contract on her life? I'm even more lost. Then the whole book is about her doing one ill-considered thing after another in an attempt to bring this guy to justice, so that he's out to get her, or at least get her to work for him (??), and at the end she does get the proof she needs to bring him down, and uses it to blackmail him into leaving her alone instead of turning him in. ???? There's a lot to like in this first book of a series. Rachel's voice is fun, and the world in which humans have an uneasy relationship with the supernatural is an interesting one, but the plot just had me scratching my head. Sorry, but it didn't work for me.

The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross)

Stross writes intelligent, funny, surprising science fiction, and his Laundry series is all of the above. This recent example lives up to the others. Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence service, defending Queen, country, and universe against many-tentacled horrors from beyond the veil, through diligent application of the principles of government bureaucracies everywhere: paperwork, committee meetings, organizational hierarchies, and very bad coffee. The current crisis begins with a group of math whizzes working on algorithms that will allow their investment bank to anticipate market trends more effectively than their competition, and unwittingly trigger an outbreak of V-syndrome (you know, the one where you burst into flame in direct sunlight, develop a craving for human blood, are stronger than normal humans, and can exercise control over other people's minds). What is behind this new nest? Is there an enemy planted within the Laundry itself? And what does Bob's malevolent, unstable ex have to do with things? It's a fun ride from start to finish.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (David Shafer)

A rollicking spy-versus-spy kind of novel, with some loosely connected misfits who wind up working together against a terrible global force of 007 dimensions out to dominate the world. The Committee is bent on capturing and owning all the world's information: everything people do, say, buy, download, comment, or otherwise engage in anywhere in the vicinity of a smart device. Once they own it all, they can charge people to access it, or use it for extortion (pay up or say goodbye to the access codes to your bank account!). The people opposing them are a little too good to be true (gentle hippies who literally find the answer in hemp plants), but it's still fun to see how our merry band of drunken, crazy, ineffective losers actually manage to bring the bad guys down. I had to suspend belief so hard I think I pulled something, but I think it was worth it.

Lush Life (Richard Price)

This is a kind of police procedural, a will-they-catch-'em mystery instead of a whodunit. It begins by introducing a collection of colorful characters, then bringing them together with a bang when one is murdered. The rest of the story tracks the aftermath of that murder on the victim's friends and family, the police officers trying to solve the crime, and the criminals involved, all set in a gritty New York City that was a character in itself. The story is a gripping one, though I often found myself lost in the no-doubt authentic street slang. In the middle my patience with some of the more self-destructive characters flagged, but not enough for me to consider quitting before the story came to its resolution. Was there closure, redemption, or healing for anyone? I doubt it. But the story did resolve, and it felt as real as anything I've read.

Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold)

Any Miles Vorkosigan story is a wild fun ride. This one starts with Miles, in a hallucinatory reaction to bad drugs, stumbling through a dark maze in an abandoned cryosleep storage facility, and ends with him on the way home having wrested triumph from the grip of evil money-hungry corporate executives. Along the way various people on both sides of the struggle are kidnapped, there's a brief mixup in the shuffling of frozen folks, and some lessons in the art of soliciting bribes as an investigative technique. As Miles ages, with wife and children to think of, there is less of the frenetic action of previous stories, but still a satisfactory sense that the poor lords of commerce with their long-term plans of financial conquest have no idea what they're up against until it is far, far too late.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Laline Paull)

This is a unique twist on a time-travel story. Harry is one of a small number of people who, for unknown reasons, live their lives over and over. Each time they die, they are born again at the same moment, in the same circumstances, to the same people, and live  through the same world again and again. What is the best way to deal with this strange situation? These folks have banded together into a society devoted to finding the newly born infants, seeing that they are shepherded into life with comfort and security, and living however they choose until their unavoidable death and cycling back yet again. By and large they try to avoid making a large impact on the unfolding of grand events in the world; past experience has shown that pushing too hard against the fabric of history has terrible ramifications. But now, someone seems to be doing just that, and the world is coming to an end. Can Harry and his friends find who is doing this and stop them? The action spirals up to a grisly, frantic, intense pitch, as Harry works against powerful hidden forces over and over again. I followed it breathlessly to the end. Recommended.

The Bees (Laline Paull)

I know this story, about a bee who rises above the rigid rules of the hive to reach a potential that challenges the reality the bees have accepted all their lives, has excellent reviews and is listed as one of the top SF/F books of 2014. It just didn't work for me. I went in expecting something more along the lines of Richard Adams's classic Watership Down, in which rabbits have speech and a longer view than rabbits really have, but otherwise were completely true to what rabbits are really like (at least, as far as I know). The Bees, though, stepped much too far outside of what I can imagine life might really be like for those creatures. The bees in this story not only talk, they shake hands and curtsey. Their hive contains large chambers with floors carved in floral patterns, with staircases and doors that swing open. They eat food from platters, and change shifts based on the ringing of bells. What they are is people in bee suits, which kept crashing my disbelief to the floor and I gave up after 50 pages. If you are more tolerant to such things then this story might work well for you, but not for me.