I recently finished the last of a nine-volume fantasy series by Robin Hobb, a trilogy of trilogies all set in the same medieval-like fantasy world, the Realm of the Elderlings. This is a tremendously popular milieu for fantasy writers and readers ever since Tolkien, so much so that there is an embarrassment of riches out there on the bookshelves. Also, let’s be honest, an embarrassment of junk that recycles the same two-dimensional tropes. Understanding the difficulty in finding truly valuable fantasy fiction, then, let me assure you that if you’re going to invest in a nine-volume series, this one is worth it.

I’ve had my Kindle for almost four months and have read hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages on it, from blogs and newspapers to magazines and books both short and long, both classic and fresh. And now I must rant to the world about the surprisingly low quality of digital print. Not the font—the Kindle’s display is so much like paper, visually, and the font so smooth and clean, that I relate to it like paper print, and judge it like paper print. Because I do, I’m much more aware of the fairly severe and systematic typos that seem to slip past whatever digital proofreading process is in use, if any. Here are the worst problems, and some possible solutions:

Rebuilt, by Michael Chorost, is the story of the author’s own experience with his bionic ear. The cover image is an x-ray of his head, the cochlear implant showing up bright and geometric against the misty, swirling bone of his skull. For someone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman with great attention and envy as a kid, this story was irresistible. What made the book even more entertaining is that Chorost is only three years older than me and was watching the same shows at about the same age, with the same fascination. It’s like finding out that an old elementary school friend had become bionic, both of us knowing its significance. He knows what it is truly like to be Steve Austin, at least at this point in history.

“Another book on happiness?” grumbled my wife. “It’s kind of hard not to take it personally.” Well, yes, I suppose technically it is, and it’s true that I read it right on the heels of Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. But neither of them are self-help books for glee addicts looking for a fix. The first one, as you remember, is about how the brain works, and this one is comparative cultural anthropology, and entertaining coursework at that.

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, isn’t the self-help book it sounds like, although there are a few tips you could pick up from it that would probably make your step a little springier. It’s primarily a book about how the mind works, a topic that always interests my own mind, narcissistic neocortex that it is.

Let me get this out first: this is a weird book, and I’m telling you this as someone who has read more than his fair share of weird books. A Voyage to Arcturus, written by David Lindsay, was first published in 1920, and was described to me as an early classic of science fiction. It is not what most sci-fi fans would call science fiction, and yet it accomplishes what some the best science fiction does, asking and answering deep questions about what it means to be human.

Last year my friend Erik sent me a copy of the book The Shack by William P. Young. It’s a story about a man who loses his daughter to a serial killer and what happens afterward, from a spiritual perspective. While I was reading it was hard not to compare it with The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; what follows is that comparison.

Accelerando is the title of a science fiction book by Charles Stross that follows an extended family as they live through the extraordinary event known as the Singularity. For those who don’t know, the Singularity is the apocalypse for the evangelistic digerati: rapturous translation to glory and everlasting life for those who embrace it, and banishment to irrelevance, disconnection, and death for those who refuse to accept.

If you haven’t read the Harry Potter series, and in particular Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you may want to skip this entry. I want to write about a magic potion in that book which confers on its quaffer a power that, in my opinion, is one of the scariest and most unique powers in the series.

This summer I finally finished the book Galileo’s Mistake, by Wade Rowland. The editorial reviews of this book on Amazon are so good that this blog entry is very nearly unnecessary. If you read through the vehemence of the user reviews, though, you can see that the author has hit some nerves, whatever you finally think of his thesis.

I heard this as an audio book, in 15-minute segments as I drove my kids to and from school. It was a strange way to experience a book, as if it were serialized as a tiny daily radio program. I don’t think this detracted too much from it, however, as the structure of the book lent itself to this sort of presentation.

Yesterday I finished Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. It’s an entertaining and thought-provoking read. At roughly 200 pages it’s a quicker read than you might think, due to the flowing editorial style in which it is written. It claims to have no unifying theme, but it does; it’s that the world doesn’t work the way we think, and they can prove it with numbers.