Origin by Dan Brown

These books are my weakness. If I can find the time, I'll read it in a sitting. This one took me longer, but that's not the book's fault.

The world's leading computer scientist is murdered on the cusp of a world-altering announcement. His friend and mentor, symbologist Robert Langdon, is in the audience and immediately takes on the task of finding and releasing his friends legacy to the world before it's lost forever.

Religious subterfuge! Bullets flying! World monuments and astounding architecture!

Gulp: Adventures On the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

A humorous, informative book about the science and false beliefs about the internal system that runs from your mouth through your stomach and out your butt.

Roach has become famous for her snarky, hilarious approach to often icky nonfiction subjects. This one's got a lot of ick in it - spit, farts, poop, digestion, and more - but she makes it worth the time by dispelling falsehoods, researching history, and interviewing scientists on the cutting edge.

I picked this for book discussion and we circulated a LOT of copies, so I'll be interested to see if anybody shows up to talk about it. For me, the chapter on Elvis made the whole book worthwhile.

Incidentally, I listened to the audiobook, read by Emily Woo Zeller, which was awesome. She helped convey the tongue-in-cheek way the book is written and the glee with which Roach often imparts her research.

The Martian by Andy Weir

This is a tale of raw, basic survival in a rough terrain. One man, abandoned on Mars.

We read this for the library's book discussion, and many readers were surprised by how much they liked it. It's more about science than about science-fiction. There aren't ray guns and alien life forms; instead it's about one human surviving because he knows how to do advanced chemistry.

Mark Watney isn't about to give up, despite insurmountable odds. Not enough water? Chemistry! Not enough food? Botany! No communication? Rocks!

I have seen the Matt Damon movie, and it's very good. It's not quite the same, but honestly both stand up pretty well on their own (or even in comparison).

I highly recommend this one, even if you're not into advanced science and especially if you don't enjoy sci-fi. It's a captivating story, and you don't have to understand every formula to understand what a creative thinker the character (hell - the author!) is to persevere in these situations.

The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

A year ago Gottie was having sex with Jason, but it was a secret. A year ago her beloved grandfather was still alive and planning a big solstice celebration. But right now, time keeps slipping down a wormhole that spits Gottie out last summer, then rips her back to the present.

Gottie's a science and math genius, so the wormhole dilemma is a challenge she's attempting to rationalize. Is it possible? How? The part she's maybe overlooking is the Why? Additionally, her obsession with last summer means she's not really living her fullest life right now - there's a lot she's missing.

It's a story of shifting perspectives, with new information leaked out in drips and drabs. There's a delightful cast of characters in a loose, free-form hippy kind of household with minimal guidance and too many teenagers. I was captivated by the narrative - I couldn't decide if this was a story of magic realism, or science fiction, or some kind of psychological breakdown.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

An alternative to the epic, sweeping historical World War II sagas, this award-winning literary novel makes history much smaller and very personal - as seen through the perspective of a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy.

When you understand that no one is completely good and no one is completely bad - that life is much more nuanced and impacted by perspective - it's easier to see that WWII wasn't simply the Evil Nazis versus the Free World.

Werner's early aptitude for science and math are his salvation from working the coal mines that entombed his father. The conformity and cruelty of his instructors and schoolmates in the elite Nazi Wehrmacht school are tough for the boy to handle, yet he doesn't dare to rebel and destroy his chance for a future.

Marie-Laure goes blind as a young child, and her locksmith father finds fabulous ways to empower his daughter to independence. When they're forced to flee Paris upon invasion, the pair settle with her mentally fragile great-uncle in a towering house on the coast in Saint-Malo.

Many have been critical of the super-short chapters and constantly switching perspectives and timeframes, but I thought it allowed the book to move briskly without my attention flagging. It's not a book that's tied up in a neat bow at the end - some things remain a mystery - again, much like real life.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and understand why it won both the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Also, it made me want to read Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea!

Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience compiled by Shaun Usher

In this huge compendium of world history are collected notes, letters, and treatise from across the gamut of science, politics, art, and literature.

It's an interesting glimpse inside personal lives - most of these letters were never intended for the public to see. Elvis's letter to President Nixon offering to be a secret agent in the drug war, Kurt Vonnegut's letter home that explains his WWII POW experience (that later spawned the legendary "Slaughterhouse-Five"), Katherine Hepburn's agonized letter of loss addressed to her deceased beloved Spencer Tracy.

There's so much to learn here about the human experience and how similar we are, even separated by space and time: Leonardo da Vinci had to apply for jobs, and here is his letter of interest! She may be the Queen of England, but Elizabeth still has a killer recipe for scones. And a child advises Abraham Lincoln to grow a beard, and he takes her advice.

I read this book over the span of a couple weeks as my lunchtime enjoyment. It's perfect for reading a letter or two at a time (it's a really big book!) and it gave me plenty of mental fodder to accompany my meal.

The Alex Crow by Andrew Smith

What's worse than a cabin full of surly, tech-deprived teenaged boys forced into six weeks of rustic summer camp? Well, at age 15 Ariel has already survived a civil war, refugee encampment, and relocation. Camp can't be THAT bad.

I adore Andrew Smith's books, and this one is no exception. It's got 4 main storylines: Ariel's past, Ariel's present, an arctic exploring vessel circa 1880, and a crazy guy with a bomb. They're woven together and build toward a climax that you're never quite able to put your finger on, as a reader.

The cover is super creepy on this one - it's a black bird beak holding a bomb ... or is it an EYE watching you?! And it's filled with wonderfully unusual - and yet typically Andrew Smith - kind of characters: a suicidal pet bird, the kid who pretends he's listening to his iPod through wads of toilet paper in his ears, horny teenagers with a million euphemisms for masturbation.

And while it's very, very funny it's also quite dark, even a bit bleak. Business ethics, cloning, de-extinction, war, and more. Highly recommended.

Extraordinary People: A Semi-Comprehensive Guide to Some of the World's Most Fascinating Individuals by Michael Hearst

Not "famous" or "great" or even "best" - this book offers a bevy of people the author names as "extraordinary." And by using that term, Hearst allows himself to add some fascinating - but also nasty or controversial - people to his book of mini-biographies.

Many of the people in the book you've heard of previously, but there are sure to be a few surprises. I'd never heard of smokejumper Wag Dodge, and his story is extremely interesting. And I'd be scared to stand too near Roy Sullivan, who was struck by lightening an amazing SEVEN times during his life (even his wife got hit once!).

List books are always subjective, and the author of this one does a great job of turning his "authority" into a running joke. He inserts himself and his opinions into the book, daring you to disagree with him and offering contact info if you'd like to convince him of your viewpoints. It's a fun, casual book with lots of great info - I'll be recommending this one a lot in the library.

The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

Can a rigidly scheduled, highly prepared genetic scientist make his marriage work with a free-thinking, spontaneous wife? And what happens to Don's carefully calculated spreadsheets when an unexpected pregnancy adds another variable to the equation?

In this sequel to The Rosie Project, Australians Don and Rosie are married and living temporarily in America to teach and study, respectively, at Columbia in New York. It's a comedy of errors as Don tries (secretly, so as not to add stress and increased cortisol levels) to learn as much as he can about babies, pregnancy, and fatherhood.

Along with the return of the first book's supporting characters, this story adds a great new bunch of friends Don accumulates in New York. He's got a guy gang with whom he regularly schedules ballgame-and-beer nights, and they become his sometimes ill-advising support network as he tries to navigate Rosie's pregnancy hormones and some unfortunate legal concerns Don's hiding from his wife.

Overall it's a mad-cap fun story, and a lovely light diversion.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

When teenaged daughter Lydia dies, the hairline fractures in the Lee family shatter into insurmountable caverns between them. How did this happen? How many secrets do they each carry, anyway?

American-born Chinese James wants popularity and "common" experiences for his family, not the unique apartness he always felt. Marilyn wants her daughter to do everything she didn't. Nathan wants to reinvent himself at college, away from his family. Lydia wants to be free of the crushing expectations of her parents. And Hannah just wants to be noticed.

All this want, and no one's any good at expressing it. But that's true of many families, isn't it?

A strong theme in the book is the burden of expectations: what parents expect for and of their children, how children believe they should act to make parents happy, what we expect of others based on our preconceived notions. Ultimately it's that weight that wrecks them all.

I loved this book! While the book takes place in the 1970s, it's still a modern story with current themes and problems. You feel for each of the characters and the boxes they're trapped in; how can they burst free to really live? It's a familiar challenge.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

The Cooke family was irretrievably broken by something that happened years ago. And while Rosemary would like to tell you about what happened when she was five years old, she's going to have to come at it in her own way - from the middle out, and perhaps with the beginning at the end.

The story begins in the middle with Rosemary in college, the only child left in her family and anonymous at a school far from her hometown. She's proud that no one here knows about her sister or her brother, and she's decided to purposefully not speak about her family. See, the Cookes were a close-knit family until Fern left: but the FBI is hunting older brother Lowell as a domestic terrorist, dad drinks too much, and their mother's psyche is full of fissures. What happened to Fern?

Rosemary's memory is spotty (she was just a child), and we'll learn the story as she remembers it, one bit, one crisis, and one discomfort at a time.

I loved this book, and sometimes forgot it's fiction - it reads like the kind of pain-filled autobiography that is popular to press.

Sweetness #9 by Stephan Eirik Clark

Flavorist David Leveraux is a guy who makes the medicine go down, makes microwave popcorn taste so good, and makes diet soda sweet. And while that's a noble, necessary chemical trade ... he's also having moral pangs about the consequences of putting all these chemicals in our food.

No, this isn't the latest nonfiction food expose; it's a comic novel set in a slightly fictionalized modern day!

This is really a fun story with captivating characters. In his first job out of college, David was involved with product testing - and he's spent the rest of his career trying hard to forget about it. But when his daughter starts researching Sweetness #9 for a high school newspaper article and his red dye addicted son stops using verbs, David is forced to again consider that something's wrong with the way America eats.

There's plenty here to get you thinking, but it's put forth in a way that's funny and light with no black-and-white answers and lots of gray space. Even when David believes the junk is bad, it only takes a day or two for him to backslide into eating garbage again. His former-Nazi boss and mentor provides lots of history and a good many laughs, too. You'll learn about how food is produced, and also ponder a return to the fresh market.

Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk

When a legal assistant falls dramatically and gracelessly at the feet of the richest man around, her life suddenly changes. After a globetrotting-but-chaste month of dating, one of his ex's warns Penny never to sleep with C. Linus Maxwell - so she turns around and jumps him just like that. It's the beginning of a sex adventure that eventually brings about the complete downfall of humanity. Seriously!

This book is all about control, but it's not whips and chains. It's about the most primal forms of pleasure and the most advanced high-tech gadgetry: a modern satire on feminism, sex, and technology.

Despite the fact this book is about testing and creating sex toys, don't go into this one looking for a thrill - this is seriously the least sexy sex book I've ever read. It's clinical probing and medically specific anatomy with very little titillation. It's almost a relief when Linus and Penny's 136-day relationship is over - because that's when we finally see what's really going on.

It's a sci-fi, future-apocalypse kind of book, and I enjoyed the audiobook read by Carol Monda. There's a lot of  emotionless sex and perhaps a slightly thin plot (with several "Really?" moments) but it's also entertaining and offers some interesting thought-points on technology.

100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith

Finn's just a regular high school junior - he plays baseball, has a funny best friend, and gets along mostly fine with his family. He's had epileptic seizures since he was 6 and was hurt in a freak accident that also killed his mother, but he deals with it pretty well.

Oh ... and his father wrote a famous sci-fi novel that pissed off a whole bunch of religious people. And it may have featured Finn (characteristic scar and all) as one of the destructive carnivorous beings from another dimension bent on taking over Earth.

Not a lot happens in this book - it's more character-driven and deals with Finn's asserting his independence, falling in love for the first time, and trying to figure out his place in the world (without eating people and taking over, like in Dad's book).

I have LOVED every Andrew Smith book, and this one's also wonderful. Perhaps it's not so over-the-top like Grasshopper Jungle, but a great read and worth the time none the less. It's funny and heartbreaking, there are moments of suspense and mistaken identity, but mostly it's simply about becoming Finn.

How To Tell Toledo From the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer

Once upon a time astronomy, astrology, and religion were all the same thing - and to the characters in this book, sometimes they still are the same.

Irene is an astrophysicist working with particles to create miniature black holes in her lab. George is a cosmologist trying to prove the philosophical concepts of the universe as explained to him by the gods and goddesses who visit during his headaches. They couldn't be more different - except that when they meet, it seems the stars collide and planets realign.

Lydia Netzer does a wonderful job with scientifically geeky characters (see also her book Shine, Shine, Shine). This couple banters about physics and the cosmos in a way that truly makes it almost sexy. They're a great match; which was expected, because their mothers planned it so.

I had three different theories on what I thought might happen at the end of this book, and I was wrong. Satisfyingly wrong, even. What an odd, wonderful book!

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Don's more than a little set in his ways: he has a 7-day meal plan designed for nutritional needs and to perfectly offset his activity level, and his minimal wardrobe is calibrated to his activity level with no concern for fashion or style. He'll make allowances and adjustments as required, but why bother when the calendar is optimized for efficiency?

But Don's also beginning to feel lonely. After a couple disastrous first dates he begins to hone a complicated questionnaire to eliminate time wasted with unsuitable potential partners (smokers, picky eaters). And then a chance encounter and a giant misconception blow Don's whole schedule to bits.

This book is light, funny, and incredibly well written. Don could easily be a bore or a joke or a jerk, but Simsion makes him likeable and sympathetic. You root for him to figure things out, and his endearing challenges make the breakthroughs a glad triumph.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

What if you discovered a bit of your long-deceased mother was still growing in a lab? What if it was really that every single scientific lab in the world has been running complex medical experiments on growing, living pieces of your long-deceased mother and you never knew or received compensation?

That's where the core of this story begins: as the Lacks family learns that the same cervical cancer cells which killed Henrietta Lacks in 1951 are still growing and multiplying, providing 60 years of scientists with an endless supply of human cells on which to run experiments.

It's a deep subject with a steep ethical slope - but it's handled deftly and warmly by the author. She personalizes the story, weaves several historical and contemporary storylines together, and explains the complex science in an easily digestible manner. She also inadvertently became part of the story as her friendship with daughter Deborah Lacks spanned a decade of research, genealogy, and oral history.

This book makes you think, and the various moral, ethical, and medical opinions are presented in a nicely balanced manner. I still don't know what I think about a lot of it, and that's okay - if it was simple, the scientific community probably would have figured it out decades ago.

Punk Rock Jesus by Sean Murphy

In a near-distant future, reality TV producers clone DNA from the Shroud of Turin and the world tunes in to watch the re-birth of Jesus Christ. Newly released in book format, this graphic novel was previously serialized in six volumes under the same title.

This is an amazing book, gorgeously drawn with a fantastic story arc and lots of sticky questions to ponder along the way (and long after you've finished). The evils of reality television, religious ferver of all ilks and brands, the environment, and scientific ethics: it's amazing how much is crammed into these dark, hard-edged black-and-white comics.

Highly, highly recommended.

Me ... Jane by Patrick McDonnell

Jane's the kind of girl who wants to know about animals and nature and how the world works. With her stuffed animal, she explores the backyard and grandma's chicken coop. She dreams of helping animals.

And then Jane the illustrated girl becomes real-life Jane Goodall in the end. The champion of chimpanzees and a grown up who got to live the life she dreamed of as a girl.

I loved this picture book for its cute, universal story that doesn't seem like a biography - until it is.

Vampire a Go-Go by Victor Gischler

This is the kind of story that got me into vampires in the first place: contemporary, yet historical. Adventure and suspense, with a satisfactory ending. Plus, it's got vampires, zombies, an Indiana Jones-like storyline, and ass-kicking swearing warrior priests. (Although honestly, the vampire element is minor in the grand scheme of the story.)

A college-age research student is unwittingly drawn into the search for the fabled philosopher's stone. What power will it bring to the numerous supernatural beings fighting to acquire it? Will Alan survive the adventure?

The story's narrated by an ancient ghost and the history of the stone unfolds slowly, intersliced with the contemporary search and battles between witches, warlocks, priests and more. The crude, terrible secret our ghost reveals at the end made me actually snort out a laugh. Escapist fiction at it best!