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2012's going down as one of the less consistent book log years.

The Best American Science Writing 2010 (Jesse Groopman, editor; Jesse Cohen, series editor):. Table of contents below, ask for reactions to any titles that strike your interest.

( ToC )

The Best American Science Writing 2011 (Rebecca Skloot, Floyd Skloot, editors; Jesse Cohen, series editor): Not as good as the 2010 edition, with a standout for "The Mathematics of Terror" for comprehensively demonstrating the need for better math education in the States.

( ToC )

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2012): Despite serious consideration of suicide by Komarran balcony, implied war crimes, that ImpSec thing that probably wasn't insured, and the laying to rest of unquieting family tradition,s this was charming without ever being challenging. It's... it's fluffy. A gooey warm-feeling novel, with few sharp edges. At some point I'll appreciate CVA for what it is, rather than what I'd like it to be.

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (1813): Reread. Classic romantic story of two proud, intelligent personalities forced to reflect on their flaws, and reassess their assessment of the character of others. P&P took three tries to accomplish the first complete reading, which may be a strong argument for letting people find books at their own speed and maturity. It's grown on me; I doubt I will ever be Darcy's partisan, but the wit and observation of human foibles that weren't appreciated by a teen have greater appeal as I get a little more sympathetic and less judging.

Emma (Jane Austen) (1815): The focus on a young woman with more energy and self-regard than application in a closed society made for curiously relevant lunchtime and public transit reading. When I was giggling at Emma's matchmatching schemes instead of reviewing for the board, or absorbing the narrative's reflections on the anxieties of Society (Highfield, classroom, and/or workspace), Austen's people sense seemed uncannily universal.

I reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein) (1966) in that way you do. As I get older, I have a harder time taking Heinlein's characterization seriously.

The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells) (2011): Moon, orphan and wanderer of the Three Worlds, is reunited with his people, and must face challenges of integration, trust, and the Big Bad.

( Cut for length and minor spoilers. )

This isn't deep: I marathoned The Cloud Roads and its sequel in one weekend, and didn't have much impulse to reread after closing the second novel. The ancilliary comments about the Arbora (nonwinged Raksura, usually the makers, sometimes ground fighters) and Aeriat (winged, usually the leaders and fighters) also highlighted, how to say it? Who gets the bulk of the writer love. I mean, flying people, what's not to love.

The Serpent Seas (Martha Wells) (2012): Sequel to The Cloud Roads. Moon had been consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court, for eleven days; nobody had tried to kill him yet, so he thought it was going well so far. Moon's integration into a Raksuran court and their relocation to a new home is interrupted by the theft of a core element of their new home.

( Rich worldbuilding... sometimes a little too rich. But the characters are awesome. )

So I have mixed feelings: on the one hand, fun adventure novels. On the other hand, the second-order worldbuilding is sometimes not as clever as I'd like.

The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien) (1954): Reread. I wasn't foolish enough to open The Hobbit before watching the new movie, but late fall is Tolkein weather.

The Siren Depths (Martha Wells) (2012): Third novel and sequel to The Serpent Seas; Wells fills in missing pieces of Moon's history, and he lays to rest some of his angst. ( Some of it! Don't worry, there remain plenty of unresolved issues for future novels to deal with. )

Numbers game: 10 total finished. 8 new, 2 reread; 8 fiction, 2 nonfiction.

6xH: Six Stories by Robert H. Heinlein (Robert A. Heinlein): 1961 collection of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag", "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants", "All You Zombies", "They", "Our Fair City", and finally, "And He Built a Crooked House".

( Cut for length and one Unpleasant Profession spoiler. )

I think the unifying theme of the collection (other than, "hey! We have the rights to six random Heinlein stories!") is the all-consuming Idea, the single sense-of-wonder moment when your mind expands a bit to contemplate a new perspective. Most contemporary SF fails at this, possibly because we've come to emphasize other writing components: character, plot, elaborate worldbuilding, meta. Instead of the writing building to that vertiginous Moment of Cool, we get the more considered Novel of Interesting, and occasionally very interesting genre conversation. But I came for the cool, for the morning of the world, and its afternoon sometimes fades compared to the remembered joy of the Idea.

Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen): Autobiographical vignettes of a year as a mental health resident. This could have been a downer, this could have been emo, this could have been just terrible. However, Kaysen sticks to her strengths - pithy, sharp turns of phrase - which forces the reader to pay attention to snapshots of life in the ward as they come. I will not say that it rewards close attention, though people paying more attention than me might find something to say about the psychology and biochemistry mental illness; life in the United States, 1967 - 1969; or health care in the same time and place, and now; but I do think the prose is astonishing. If Diana Wynne Jones' prose is a very workmanlike basket for holding story, if Lois Bujold's is a yellow brick road of practicality and flippant whimsy, then Kaysen's is a lens or a prism, catching the light and forcing your eye to follow it where the lens-creator intended.

Related link: Girl Interrupted in her Music, a painting by Vermeer. There is a connection between the book and the painting.

The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy): This is not a fixer-upper novel. It's an expanded novella! I think expanding previous works is the worst idea ever, and submit for consideration Asimov's "Nightfall", Card's "Ender's Game", and Kress's "Beggars in Spain", as well as "Once Upon a Matter Crushed", which was expanded for this novel. ( After you get past that, it's pretty fun. )

I also reread great swaths of the graphic novel version of Stardust, a pretty little fairy tale written in Neil Gaiman's comptetent fashion and brought to life by Charles Vess's illustrations. I think the words-only version is much inferior, and strongly urge you to hold out for the graphic novel for many reasons, including the Vess panel on the very last page, which works magnificently with the concluding written paragraphs.

Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): A 208 page political polemic I managed to miss in my feckless teen years. Papa Heinlein, educate us all on how life as the infantry is the best way to train hot-blooded men to value their electoral franchise.

( I thought I didn't have much left to say about this, but apparently not! )

Polio: An American Story (David M. Oshinsky): Entertaining account of the creation of the polio vaccines. Oshinsky juggles the glut of characters and their agendas very nicely. This is more a book about the social side than the science side; I was hoping for tangents into the biochemistry of polio, but this is more about the whos and whys than the science. But what a story. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis very conciously manipulated the public to wring donations "for the children" from them, through tactics like the March of Dimes and FDR's involvement. It's disturbing to read a level-voiced account of fundraising, but that may be a personal quirk. Three cheers for heavily footnoted histories!

I could do a knee-jerk reaction to Dr. Isabel Morgan's contributions to polio research, and how they came to a screeching halt when she married and Dr. Morgan got sidelined by Mrs. Mountain, but if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the story of women's careers getting shafted by their gender and marriage.

Today - yesterday, technically - I finished reading Starship Troopers, and I feel the need to mention my ongoing wish for novels where more than half the cast is female, and it is no big deal. Our protagonist Juana does lots of plot-related stuff and interacts on a regular basis with her coworkers Danielle, Desiree and Beth, as well as Ryan and Miles, and this has almost zero effect on the plot, which is about FTL physics or is a murder mystery set in (22nd century) LA or something. It just so happens that about 55% or more of the people Juana works with in this book, or who she has strong connections to, happen to be - gasp! - women, in much the same way that there are almost no women in Starship Troopers, and the plot-important characters happen to be 100% male. And no one says anything, because it's completely irrelevant to the physics or the crime scene or what have you.

Consider this my response to the WisCon posts showing up on my f-list. I'm still mulling over how to address how radically my opinions diverge from Heinlein's on a number of topics, but it helps to remember that I am reading this as a 23-year-old in 2007 and the book was published in 1959, when Heinlein was 52. What author and reader would consider normal would likely make a pretty set of contradictions.