The Razor's Edge (W. Somerset Maugham)

This classic book book, published in 1944, follows the lives of a diverse cast of characters over a span of about 20 years. The central character is a young man whose experience in WWI has made him restless, searching for the true meaning of life. This quest sends him tramping across Europe and finally to India, where he finds enlightenment. The book is filled with people, each clearly drawn and complex, and all of them, from prostitutes to nobility, presented with unflinching affection. The locations, from Parisian drawing rooms to
German coal mines, are also vividly portrayed. While I was less impressed with the young man's sensibilities than my friends were, I truly enjoyed the seemingly effortless skill of the author in bringing it all to life.

Consciousness (Susan Blakmore)

This textbook goes into all the theories and controversies relating to the questions of consciousness. When I look at a sunset, what creates the experience of the colors? Who is the one doing the experiencing? What does it mean to experience these colors, as opposed to just registering and labeling them?  There are way more questions than answers on this amazingly complex issue. It's fun to think about, but it kind of makes my head hurt. And what does that mean, exactly? I certainly think about these questions differently than I did before!

WWW:Wake (Robert Sawyer)

This science fiction story of a blind teen given her sight through technology won the Hugo award, but I was disappointed. I couldn't get past the ludicrous scientific handwaving to appreciate the rest of the story. Caitlin (an annoyingly brilliant, cheerful, perfect teen) has a rare (and fictional) problem with the wiring of her retinas that scrambles the signals sent to the optical portions of the brain, so they give her an implant that intercepts the signals, fixes the coding, and sends them on. Immediately, her brain can process these corrected signals, and now she can see! This is, of course, incorrect on many levels. There is no fixed kind of coding that the brain expects that the retina has to get right - they wire up together and figure each other out, within certain genetically determined parameters. Even if we grant that, an occipital lobe that has never received useful data from the eyes will simply never develop the ability to process signals, and won't be able to handle them if they are later delivered. The author gets around this by saying that she has used the Internet practically since birth, co-opting her occipital lobes for "visualizing" her way around, and this meant is it well organized, so the visual signals will work. Sorry, but this means it is less able to handle signals from the eyes, now that it's been organized for some other purpose. And all of this is aside from the real point of the story, which is that a self-aware entity has developed out there in cyberspace, not knowing what it is or what existence is like, and it somehow gets plugged into Caitlin's optical feed so the two of them can become aware of each other.... I couldn't buy any of it. Sorry.

Finishing the Hat (Stephen Sondheim)

The lyrics Sondheim writes for musicals are full of unexpected rhymes, intricate interweavings, and other forms of wordplay that I love, so I was happy to read this book for my book club. Actually, I didn't read it all; it's much too dense, including as it does every lyric he wrote for every show between 1954 and 1981, along with what he refers to in the subtitle as "attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes." What I did was read all of the material on shows I was familiar with ("West Side Story," "A Funny Thing Happened...," "Company," "A Little Night Music," and "Sweeny Todd") and skim the others. It was delightful to read about how these songs came together, what he thought about each one, and why this one worked and that one didn't. For example, there's nearly a whole column on the invention of Kearny Lane, covering the difference in intonation between Lanes and Streets and the strength of the consonant K, although this place name exists in one line in one song in Sweeny Todd.This book would be a treasure for anyone who writes words for music, and I much enjoyed the bits I read.

The Children of the Sky (Vernor Vinge)

This is a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, which I really loved. This one wasn't as much to my liking. The first story had a huge galactic sweep and some really amazing, mind-blowing ideas for science and alien species. This one had no actual new ideas, and the action was limited to a small portion of one world. The story focused on the political treacheries and manipulations of several factions of Humans and Tines (the pack intelligences native to the world), which is not as much of interest to me. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N. K. Jemisin)

This was a very interesting fantasy story, with a unique view of religion and gods. They remind me of the Greek gods - extravagant powers but with curious limitations, and personalities much like humans with their petty ambitions, rivalries, and jealousies. I liked the central character, a warrior woman thrown way out of her comfort zone who gives her all to save the whole world. She turns out to be the unlikely heir to the throne of the most powerful family in the world, a family that enslaves some of the gods themselves, but her role is that of human sacrifice, until she turns the tables. I enjoyed the story, especially when things started moving more quickly at the end.

Just My Type (Simon Garfield)

A whole book just about fonts - their history, their politics, their design, and their psychology. Why does everybody hate Comic Sans? Will Helvetica take over the universe? Why is Steve Jobs almost as important in the history of type as Guttenberg? Which font should I choose for my course materials? I loved it, and learned a vast amount of quirky, fun information. I'm never going to be a font geek, the kind of person who, when watching a movie set in the 1940s, is thrown off by a store sign in a font that was invented in 1972. Still, I loved the whole thing. And yes, after reading this, I was moved to do some research and change my standard font from Century Gothic to Verdana. Read the book if design is something you are interested in.