Robert Hellenga, Snakewoman of Little Egypt ** 1/2

This novel has an intriguing premise, with a middle-aged academic at a crossroads in his life renting his extra room to a woman just released from prison for shooting her husband, a snake-handling minister. They are drawn to each other despite their very different backgrounds.

My major complaint is that the woman, Sunny, doesn't seem to come from a different background at all. Her ideas, her interests, and her manner of expressing herself all give the impression of a slightly naive middle-class college student. Her young life in rural Illinois as the straying wife of a pastor seems not to have shaped her world view at all. The man, Jackson, doesn't fare much better as a believable character. He has some mysterious rough edges in the first chapter, but after that he's a two-dimensional anthropology professor. His existential crisis doesn't last beyond the first two pages.

Jackson and Sunny find themselves drawn not only to each other, but each to the other's former life too. Over the course of the book, it's almost as if each of them is taking over the expected future of the other. That would be an interesting development if I cared about either character.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter's Guide **** 1/2

A beautifully packaged, engagingly written introduction to "the science, history, and culture of clouds." I learned a lot about how clouds form and what types of clouds there are, but just as importantly I learned about the seedy world of sixteenth-century cloud pornography and about William Rankin, the only man to have personal experience of the interior of a cumulonimbus cloud (aka a thunderhead).

There is a cloud identification quiz in the middle of the book, and it asks you to differentiate between cirrus and stratus clouds, but it also identifies one cloud as "an Abominable Snowman who is upset that his pet seahorse is ignoring him." Very enjoyable and informative all around.

Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me ****

It surely says something about me that I enjoy books whose protagonists struggle to keep their regrets and disappointments at bay. I like to think of myself as having a fairly optimistic outlook, but my literary tastes suggest an undercurrent of dissatisfaction.

You Remind Me of Me alternates between three characters who suspect their lives could have been better. The relationship between them is revealed gradually: a young mother and her two sons, one of whom she gave up for adoption. The most interesting character is Jonah, the son who stayed with his mother. As a young adult, he tracks down his adopted half-brother in the hopes of learning how his life might have turned out.

I discovered the author Dan Chaon a couple of years ago when Evelyn gave me his most recent novel, Await Your Reply, for Christmas. Like You Remind Me of Me, Await Your Reply is concerned with questions of personal identity. The books are similarly constructed too, with separate stories that slowly come together. (Chaon started as a story writer.)

Chaon's writing style is quietly vivid and his characterizations nicely subtle. His books will stand up to re-reading, because the complexity of the characters is more important than the surprises of the plot.

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder ****

The Age of Wonder is a history of the Romantic period in England, which Holmes defines as the period between Captain Cook's first voyage in 1768 and Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle in 1831. Conventional wisdom says that the Romantic poets staged a rebellion against science — a view I most recently encountered in The Master and His Emissary — but Holmes aims to show that Romantic literature and science developed together.

He states his thesis in the Introduction, then leaves it implicit during the rest of the book. The main characters are the major natural philosophers of the period: Joseph Banks, William Herschel, and especially Humphrey Davy. The Romantic writers Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats make prominent appearances as well. The scientists write poetry and the poets add scientific footnotes to their poems.

An enjoyable read and a fine corrective to the simplified vision of the period.

Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command ****

I enjoyed the fourth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series just as I have the previous three. The way O'Brian works sailing lingo into the story without stalling the plot remains unparalleled.

In The Mauritius Command, Jack Aubrey serves as the commodore for a squadron of ships trying to wrest a pair of islands in the Indian Ocean from the occupying French. Aubrey expresses ambivalence about the fact that he is overseeing the battles rather than fully participating in them, and as a reader I had a similar ambivalence about the battle scenes which didn't seem as vivid as in previous books. Partly that's due to Aubrey's position and partly it's due to the sheer number of different ships involved in the campaign. It wasn't always easy to keep track of them all.

As compensation for the weaker fight sequences, the book has interesting subsidiary characters in the captains serving under Aubrey. Captain Lord Clonfort and Captain Corbett were possibly painted a bit too broadly, but it was fascinating to see how their personalities affected their command styles, and how those command styles affected the functioning of their ships.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary ** 1/2

I can sum up the theme of this long-winded 500-page book in one paragraph:

Human experience involves the interplay of two fundamentally opposed modes of reality, which we can refer to as rationality and mysticism, Apollonian and Dionysian (as Nietzsche would call it), scientific and religious (as Bertrand Russell says in A History of Western Philosophy), or analytic and integrative. The structure of our brains reflects this fundamental opposition, with the left hemisphere corresponding to the first mode and the right hemisphere corresponding to the second mode. Over recorded history, and especially in the past century, the left hemispheric version of reality has taken on undue precedence.

Thinkers throughout the ages have commented on the basic opposition; McGilchrist's novel contribution is the claim that it maps to the asymmetries between the brain hemispheres. It's an interesting claim, and the early chapters where he describes the neuroscientific results are the most compelling — although even in these chapters, he seems to beg the question (in the traditional meaning of the phrase) of whether each hemisphere has its own worldview. Starting a few chapters in, he simply substitutes the terms "left hemisphere" and "right hemisphere," without further argument, in places where other philosophers would use one of the other pairs of terms. He piles on the "evidence" in a repetitive and not very original fashion. He doesn't really argue for his position so much as provide a mountain of facts that are merely consistent with it.

In the end, I was left to wonder what difference it makes whether he's right about how the distinction maps to the structure of the brain: as he carefully points out in the introduction to Part II, he's not claiming that the structure of the brain has changed over the course of recorded history, so how is his view different from a purely cultural explanation of our tilt toward scientism?

I think McGilchrist has an intriguing idea, but I found his presentation of it exhausting and unconvincing. The longer the book went on, the more it seemed like a mere plea for recognizing the importance of mysticism in opposing the sterility of a purely rational world.

Jack Pendarvis, Your Body is Changing ***

I picked up this collection of stories at Red Lodge Books in Red Lodge, Montana, based on a cover blurb from George Saunders. Pendarvis has a humorous narrative voice similar to Saunders' although his plots hew closer to reality. The greatest strength of the stories is the dialogue, especially the ways in which people take pride in the things they claim to dislike about themselves.

"Isn't that funny, I don't even know what Jay Leno looks like," said Mandy. "That's just how little television I watch.... Isn't that just dreadful of me? People become intimidated when they realize that my opinions are so uninformed when it comes to television."

My favorite story is "Outsiders"; it consists almost entirely of this type of dialogue.