Dead Aim (Thomas Perry)

Mallon is a retired builder who has lots of money but no real life - he spends his days walking aimlessly along the Santa Barbara shore. One day he sees a young woman walk into the ocean, and he pulls her out and tries to convince her not to take her own life. A few days later he finds out he failed, and becomes obsessed with finding out who she was and why she believed she had to die. His search takes him to an exclusive self-defense school in the mountains, and from there he finds himself fighting for his life. The action is gripping, and the author made it almost plausible that the mild-mannered protagonist could succeed over a cadre of highly-trained killers. I enjoyed it.

Apprentices of Wonder (William Allman)

I really enjoyed this exploration of the connectionist/neural network approach to cognitive psychology, showing how the field was getting started. It does a great job of explaining how the connectionist view differs from the traditional computer analogy for mental processing, and describes the excitement and the wariness practitioners felt. The only problem is that the book is more than 20 years old (published in 1990), so it can't describe how the promises and perils have played out as the viewpoint matured. Otherwise, it's a good way for someone just exploring the field to get a picture of what these ideas are all about.

Show Me the Funny (Peter Desberg & Jeffrey Davis)

This book is a collection of interviews with dozens of individuals and teams who write humor for TV and movies. They were all given the same premise, about a young woman whose father dies, leaving her mother unexpectedly without funds, so the mother moves in with the daughter and hilarity ensues. Each interview maps out a different path this premise might take, showing the varieties of creative processes, and goes into the different styles and systems different people use. I found it entertaining, but can't say I got any great insights from it.

I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

This charming book features a delightful young narrator, telling her story through journals she writes to "capture" her world in a fresh, engaging voice. The story begins with a family living in genteel poverty, patching clothes and struggling to find enough to eat, in the ruins of an old castle in the English countryside. The story evokes Jane Austin in its focus on people falling in love with appropriate and inappropriate people as the family's situation changes in unpredictable ways. Written in 1948, the story echoes the absolute thinking of love at the time: either you are in love or you aren't and there is nothing you can do about it. This way of thinking rubs me the wrong way, but I loved the writing so much it didn't bother me as much as it usually does. Recommended.

Whistling Vivaldi (Claude Steele)

A in-depth exploration of the concept of stereotype threat - how being in a situation where we are in a minority creates stress that can reduce our performance on the things most important to us, including academic performance in school. The research is thorough and convincing. I have to say that I found the book less than enthralling, since it goes step by step over the same ground in many different ways. This is the right and proper way to do research of this kind, but it doesn't make for a page-turner. It has a big and important idea to express, but there is no second act. Highly recommended if you are interested in this idea; otherwise, not so much.

The Snow Child (Eowyn Ivey)

This lovely story of a childless couple making their way on a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s features poetic language, delightful characters, and a gripping sense of the wild, cruel beauty of the place. It also straddles the line between reality and magic in a way my prosaic soul had some trouble with. The main characters basically fled to the Alaskan wilderness to escape their grief after their only child was stillborn, but found that they had brought the grief with them into a land that was unforgiving and harsh. In a rare moment of frivolity they built a little girl out of snow and gave her a coat, mittens, and a scarf. The next day the snow and the clothes are gone, and there are only footsteps leading away into the woods. After that the girl become more and more real. I kept alternating between believing the child they saw was a real girl living by her wits and believing she was some kind of spirit of the wilderness; perhaps she was both. Regardless of my unease with this dichotomy, I still loved the story and the people.

Arctic Rising (Tobias Buckell)

The plot of this story was interesting and kept me turning pages. In the fairly near future, global warming has melted the ice caps and opened the entire arctic circle to settlement and shipping. Lots of groups are exploring and exploiting this region, including those who want to do things like dump various waste products. The UN has airships in the area watching for this, but one gets shot down, and its pilot barely survives. She finds herself hunted and threatened, and is nearly killed several more times as she tries to unravel the mystery of what's going on at the pole. With the help of various shady characters, she uncovers a nest of competing conspiracies between those fighting to save the world from ecological disaster and those who just want to exploit it, and it turns out that neither of these is really the good guy. Things are very exciting, but none of the characters ever felt very real to me, partly because the dialogue never rang true. A good thriller, though.