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.

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.

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!

State of Wonder (Ann Patchett)

This story, appropriately enough, reads like something from a dark fever dream. Marina is a pharmacologist in Minnesota working for a drug company that is sponsoring a team in the Amazon river basin working on developing a revolutionary new drug. The team has been there for years, soaking up research funds  and providing nothing in return aside from assurances they are making progress. One of Marina's colleagues was sent down to press the team for more details, but word has come back that he died of a fever. Marina goes to Brazil to find out how he died and what he had learned, going deeper and deeper into an exotic world she is unprepared for. I was completely caught up in the story and the environment, though at times I felt like shouting at Marina about decisions she was making and I came away with too many unanswered questions. The writing is vivid and lyrical and it all feels real, oppressively real, even when it is at its most bizarre. Highly recommended.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)

This book is half science, half biography. The science part is about the HeLa cell line, made up of the only human cells that grow robustly and eternally in culture. They are cervical cancer cells, and they are enormously valuable to medicine.They can easily be grown to test how diseases work and find cures, how radiation and chemicals attack cell functions, and just generally how cells work. The biography part is about Henrietta Lacks, the poor uneducated black woman whose fatal tumor yielded the sample that started the whole HeLa cell line, and her family. The author describes them in brutal and tender detail, including the violence and ignorance of their lives as well as the faith and courage. She does a marvelous job of blending the two halves, so that each of them is strengthened by the other. I very much enjoyed it.