Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

This book came up in my library queue. It had been in a lot of end-of-year lists in December. The story follows three intertwined stories: one is about a high school senior who runs away with her teacher, one is about a man who didn't know his dad wasn't his biological father until college, and one is about a guy searching for his mentally ill twin brother.

The writing in this book is pretty good. I didn't really notice it which it think is a good thing - not too deliberate but not sloppy either. The characters were well-developed although the ways in which their stories intertwined left me with different opinions of them at the end than when I was reading the book. And the twists in the book - the way the stories come together -was definitely worth the read. While it wasn't one of my favorite books ever, it was well-done, unique, and certainly a modern take on identity.

Worth the read.

A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes

This was a delightful book.

I first heard about it from the NextReads email list. It was described as being about a young couple who leave everything they know to move to a small town in Idaho in the 1960's and buy a farm.

The book certainly starts there and details their difficulty in adapting to the new surroundings and some of the people in the town whom they meet and employ. Through a series of flashbacks, the couple's meeting and courtship is described as well. The second half of the book is the story of their daughter who grows up on the farm too.

I enjoyed reading this book for several reasons. First, the writing was spectacular. It was descriptive but not boring; the characters were complex and dynamic; the plot was at times surprising but never far-fetched. Another reason I found this book so good was that there were several incidents and family secrets that held significance throughout the length of the book. I liked how the author illustrated how a few events and choices made when the characters were young haunted/impacted them throughout their lives. Finally, I appreciated the story itself - one of sadness and of redemption for different characters in different ways.

Definitely recommended.

The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar

I received this book from Harper Collins as part of their online book club. I recognized Umrigar's name as the author of The Space Between Us, which I read last year.

The story is about two Americans who lose their young son to a sudden illness. In an effort to repair their marriage, they move to India for the husband's job. There, they meet the young son of their home's caretakers and form a relationship with him. While the theme and initial plot are familiar, even trite, the execution is excellent. And because as a reader I knew the father would try to take this boy on as a confusing replacement to his son, and because I knew that could not end well, reading this book was about how a marriage breaks and how a person deals with grief, without having to be as focused on a complex plot.

Umrigar also captures a few periods of time in the novel - the present, when the couple is living in India, as well as the past, both when they met and when their son got sick. I was rooting for the couple to work things out throughout the story, and found them both to be likable and fallible. I could really feel both the desperation and the hope they each feel throughout the book.

The climax could be ruined with too much commentary on it, so I will just say that this book in its entirety was incredibly well written and well plotted. Recommended.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

This book had been on my list for a while. It's about how most of our interpretation of events is wrong: we read meaning into things that are statistically explainable. Like Freakonomics and The Monty Hall Problem, this book sought to dispel myths about randomness. I didn't find it as eye-opening as someone might who thinks about this stuff less often, but I did enjoy the anecdotes and experiments that Mlodinow references.

While this was not a "math book" it did give a lot of historical background around the science of probability and statistics. With references to Galileo, LaPlace, and Bayes (to name a few) it did a good job of showing how long we have been thinking about these things and how unintuitive they are. Like The Monty Hall Problem, this book illustrated over and over how basic probability ideas are not native to how our brains work - which in my case is both true and infuriating.

He spends a reasonable amount of time on ideas around conditional probability (the chance that B will happen given that A has happened); I find this discussion key to understanding statistics I see in newspapers and magazines. He also discusses the idea of independent events quite extensively - explaining that a string of 10 heads in a coin-flipping series is not a freak event and does not necessarily mean that the coin is 'rigged'. This is a hard idea to understand and he does a good job explaining it. I particularly enjoyed his sections on the difficulty in creating a good random number generator, and what was or wasn't wrong with Ipod's original 'shuffle" feature.

I also liked how Mdolinow used great everyday examples to illustrate his points - from how statistics were manipulated in the OJ Simpson trial to how wine tasting is less of a science than you would think, these sorts of stories delightfully fill much of his narrative.

Mdolinow has a lot to say about psychology as well, which was both a highlight and lowlight of the book. In places, his visits to the social sciences are interesting and well-placed. In other places his family's history, which he seeks to tell through the lens of randomness, comes across as clumsily located. I got the sense he had a bigger, more serious point to make around randomness causing pain and joy with no rhyme or reason ... but I would have liked to see him either make that point more strongly here, or take it all out and write a memoir about how randomness has impacted his life.

That said, I would recommend this book as a good introduction or refresher to understanding how randomness plays into our everyday lives.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I was excited when my book club chose this as our monthly pick. It had been on my list for a while and was dauntingly long. As it turns out, it reads more like a quick spy or action novel than literature. Great read.

The story is about a few things - one is a newspaper publisher who is being sued for libel. It's also about a mystery involving a prominent family. And it also features an awkward and talented private investigator. The stories are all inextricably linked and all the plot lines kept me interested in what was going to happen. There was financial intrigue, corporate espionage, blood and gore, and an unusually high amount introspection and internal conflict for an action book like this.

The author is a Swedish journalist who died before his books became famous. It was interesting to read the story set in Sweden and see how some of the social morays were different from ours. There seemed to be a more relaxed attitude towards sex and infidelity. There also seemed to be an extensive amount of coffee served and ingested.

I definitely enjoyed reading this and am already looking forward to the two sequels, one of which is published and the other of which is due out any day. Word on the street is also that the author's partner has another half-finished manuscript that she is hanging onto until his family settles the estate with her.