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.