Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

May 2013
Pages: 294

Yet another in a series of "work books" that I've read in the last year or so.  This is another good one, despite or perhaps because it could also be classified as a self-help book.

Switch talks instead about to make change happen either personally or professionally, using a very generic framework.  Basically, you need to align your intellect, your emotions, and your environment to enable changes to happen and to stick.  In the words of the central analogy of the book, to make changes you need a rider (the intellect) directing an elephant (your emotions) along a smooth path (the environment).  If any one of these elements is out of sync, you may fail to make the change you plan.

And that's it really, except for an explanation of how to effectively direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path, along with a number of illustrative stories.  For an example of how to direct the rider, consider the fact that we're all prone to analyzing failures when we're thinking about how to move ahead.  But that can lead to paralysis....try  "following the bright spots" instead.  That is, what has been going right, and is there a way to replicate that?  The authors give an example of a researcher trying to figure out how to attack child malnutrition in Vietnam.  It was obvious that poverty was the root problem, but were there poor children who did better than others? As it turns out, yes, some poor children were much better nourished because their parents fed them in non-traditional ways.  It was far easier and faster to get those parents to educate the others about preparing yam greens and rice-paddy caught shrimp than it was to raise all of the children out of poverty.  Following the bright spots allowed an immediate solution to a pressing problem.

The book is filled with similar striking examples, as well as guidance about which kinds of situations lend themselves best to an approach that leads with emotions, the intellect, or the environment.

I liked the book.  It is simple, and practical, and appears to be based on sound research.  I've already started using the framework at work, and so far it seems to be working.  Weird:  a change management book that might actually be worth reading!

To love and be wise by Josephine Tey

June 2013
Pages: 223


This is my second mystery by Josephine Tey.  And like Daughter of Time, this one is hard to discuss without giving spoilers.    But if you enjoy classic British mystery fiction, read this one.  It both exemplifies and violates the conventions of the British country house mystery in an entertaining way.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

May 2013

Pages: 564  (unfinished:  bookmark at page 422)

How did this happen?  It's July, and I've just realized that I haven't blogged about a single book since April.  Yow.  I *thought* I was going to continue....but then again, I also thought I was going to finish this book.

I started this book in April, but didn't take it along to Saskatoon with me when I visited my Mom in early May, and forgot all about it when I returned.  Does that mean that I didn't like the book?  Or that I'm not going to book-blog anymore?

First, the book.  This is the third book by Alan Hollinghurst that I've read.  He's very well known in Britain, and won the Man Booker prize for The Line of Beauty in 2004.  The one line summary of The Stranger's Child is that this book is not a second Line of Beauty...that was a stunning, subtle dissection of the moral decay at the heart of Thatcherism.   This book explores some of Hollinghurst's favourite themes: class, gay life, family history, and memory.  And it's beautifully written.  But it didn't grab me in the same way.  Perhaps it would have all come together if I'd have finished it, as The Line of Beauty did, and I'd now be writing a rave.

As for the book blogging, we'll see.  I have great plans to finish a backlog of blog entries.   We'll see how that goes!

Book blog, part II

Well, I spent a year blogging about every book that I read over the course of a year:  Feb. 2012 to Feb. 2013, roughly.  And then I stopped.

Why did I stop?  Well, it was good discipline to write about every book and I found it interesting to try to think of something to say about all of them.  I was also interested to see how the totals of book numbers and types would come out, and it was fun to record the page counts and dates so that I could do that.  But.... as silly as it is, I found the whole process a bit inhibiting too.  More than once I found myself hesitating at the bookshelf or the library, thinking..."oh, I can't read ANOTHER one of those".  Or "I guess I HAVE to finish this one so I can blog about it."  I even found myself turning to video games or Netflix to avoid the issue.  So, at the end of February, I finished my "last blog book", wrote a summary blog post, and had done.

Except that I wasn't.  I enjoy reading.  I enjoy writing.  And my blog gave me a little place to share what I was reading and what I was thinking about those books with the interwebs.  So, I've decided to continue, but on a more casual basis.  Rather than committing to writing about every book that I read in 2013, I'm going to write about every book that inspires me to write, for whatever reason.  I'm also considering other writing projects.   But we'll see how that goes.

If you were following my blog before my "concluding post", you can catch up by reading about Sing the Warmth, Sussex Drive, and Naked Brunch.

Naked Brunch by Sparkle Hayter

April 2013

Sparkle Hayter is funny, and she writes with an insider's knowledge of the media industry.  Her Robin Hudson mysteries (like The Last Manly Man and The Chelsea Girl Murders) are actually laugh-out-loud funny -- and how often does that really happen?   Not to mention that they are categorized as "Tart Noir".  Who could possibly resist?

So I'm always happy to pick up a Hayter when I run across one.

Naked Brunch didn't disappoint, although it's not a mystery and is not laugh-out-loud funny like some of her previous work.  But it's an entertaining tale of some crazy-mixed-up werewolves and their werewolvian evisceration adventures in modern New York City.  Note to self:  if you wake up naked, covered in blood, and with disturbing nightmares, don't just shrug it off and assume that you had one too many drinks at that art opening last night.   That dog fur caught on your fire escape is your first clue that there might be Something Going On that you should be paying attention to.

Sing the Warmth by Louse Marley

Finished:  Sometime in March
Pages:  xx

ABC Books and Comics closed for good in January of this year.  RIP ABC.   They had the best SF and fantasy selection of any bookstore I have ever visited, anywhere, any time.  And yes, it was better than any of the specialist SF bookstores that I've ever had the fortune to visit too.  But when their lease was up their landlord decided to more than double the rent, and ABC was no more.

I restrained myself, and only bought a few armloads of books during the sell-off,  mostly buying books by authors I'd read before.  The whole process was kind of random, so I'm never sure what I'm going to find when I visit the bookshelves that I filled with my plunder.

Which is how I came to read "Sing the Warmth".  I'd previously read  Marley's "The Maquisarde", and while it wasn't a stunningly good book it was interesting enough that I thought I'd try some more.  But what I didn't notice is was that I'd purchased books 1 and 2 of a trilogy, and that this was book 2.

Book 2 of any trilogy is problematic.  Book 1 is the introduction.  It introduces the characters, sets up the conflict, and launches the plot.  Book 3 concludes the story.  Book 2....is all of that stuff in the middle.  If you're going to read ONLY book 2, you have to take a Zen approach....I see and appreciate the slice of life in front of me.  Be here now.  Don't regret the past, and don't anticipate the future.  Live in the now.

Apparently the trilogy is about cultural change in a closed medieval society whose very existence is made possible by the talents of a caste of telekinetic singers who protect the human population of the planet from its extreme climate.    Or so I gathered from the slice of story I had.  How the story began....how the story ends...  Well, I could make a pretty good guess in both cases.  The plot line wasn't stunningly original.  But it was reasonably well told, except for a fundamental flaw.  The ECOLOGY OF THE PLANET MADE NO SENSE!!!!  Whew, had to get that off my chest.  I could be generous and assume that either the beginning or the end of the story explained how it was possible that native plants and animals survived a year with a 1 year summer and a 4 year-long fierce and snowy winter, and why it was that hunger and food shortages never seemed to be a problem for the non-native human population.  Or I could be irked that the author wasn't clever enough to see this gaping hole in the story she was trying to tell.

Ommmm.....Oooommmm...Nope.  I'm not that good at Zen.  I'm afraid that I mentally picked door number 2.  :-)

Sussex Drive by Linda Svendsen

Started: 9 Feb 2013
Finished: not finished
Pages: 350

No, I didn't finish this one. I only read the first 50 pages or so before giving up.

The problem is that the book was supposed to be a comedy but wasn't remotely funny.  The comedy consisted of the"naughtiness" of writing about Steven Harper, Lauren Harper, and Michelle Jaen using characters with different names but unmissable parallels with the real people and the real events around the prorogation of parliament.  And by making the people and events just a little more extreme than real life.   Umm...so?  

Maybe it improved afterwards, but I lost interest.

Last post?

I have been very, very lazy when it comes to this blog.  About a month ago I realized that it had been a year since I started writing it.  Which meant that it was time to wrap things up, or at least write a wrap up post.  And hey, maybe I could take a break from writing something up about every book that I read while I was doing it!   That decision was fatal, of course.  I've spent the last month on an undocumented reading binge.  And on having a cold.  I'm sure it was the energy drain of the cold that really stopped me from finishing this blog article....;-)

Ahem.  At any rate, how did it go?

I thought I'd start by sharing some stats.

Over the course of the year I read 63 books and 20,323 pages.  I took on average 15.68 days to finish each book.  But that average is pretty deceptive.  My median time to complete a book was only 8 days.
The average was driven up by a couple of books that took forever to finish (Remember Thinking Fast and Slow? 138 days to completion.)  And while I was too lazy to calculate separate average times for fiction and non-fiction, as I was doing the sums I noted that I read nonfiction much more slowly than fiction.

What did I read? Twelve books of nonfiction, three books of poetry, and forty-eight works of fiction.  Hm...that comes out nicely.  One book of non-fiction and four works of fiction monthly.

Did I ever manage four books at a time?  I was too lazy to go back and chart how many books I was reading at any given time over the course of the year, but I did note that over Xmas I was reading (drum roll please) FIVE books simultaneously:

• Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 
• Sibleys' Birding Basics
• Snobbery with Violence
• Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
• Second Chances

Tah dah!  Two books leaning to the serious side, and three leaning to the ....less serious side.  All at the same time. Apparently it is possible for me to read four books at a time, plus or minus one.

And finally, did I keep my commitment to blog about every book I read over the course of that year, and did I admit when I didn't finish something?

To answer the second question first: no.  I started out with good intentions.  But I didn't end up blogging about books I didn't finish.  I started several that I lost interest in and I wasn't interested enough to keep track of them and write about them.

And did I blog about everything I read?  Well, no.  I deliberately omitted one or two.  But that was just to maintain an aura of mystery.

In conclusion:  thanks for reading.  It's been fun.  I hope that any of you who followed this blog found it at least moderately interesting.

Sibley's Birding Basics by David Allen Sibley

Started: 26 December 2012
Finished: 3 March 2013
Pages: 149

You have to admit that I've hit a record on the pages/day rate with this one.  Even Thinking Fast and Slow went more quickly than this one overall. (Thinking =481 pages/137 days = 3.51 pages/day, Birding = 149 pages/67 days = 2.22 pages/day)

The difference is that I've been studying this one.  You could read this book straight through in fairly short order.  But it's more interesting to read it chapter by chapter, spending  some time observing after each one.  For example after reading "Using behavioural clues", it was interesting to observe the way that finches tend to stay and eat at the feeder while other birds like chickadees consistently dart in and out.  When you're trying to figure out if that yellow bird in the treetop is a goldfinch or a warbler, that could be a valuable clue.  The one that's flitting about is unlikely to be a goldfinch.

A World on Fire by Joe Jackson

Started: 10 Feb 2013
Finished: 23 Feb 2013
Pages: 357

Two men share the credit for the discovery of oxygen:  Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoiser.   And while in many ways it's hard to imagine two more different men, both won great honours and then suffered greatly as the 18th century wound its way to its turbulent end.  The world on fire in the title is the world of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the fallout from the American Revolution, and only secondarily a world set on fire by the discovery of the sources of combustion.

This book is a joint biography of Priestley and Lavoiser, and draws many contrasts between them.  Priestley was a brilliant experimentalist:  Lavoiser a brilliant theorist.  Priestley was a religious radical and one of the founders of Unitarianism.  Lavoiser was an atheist.   Priestley came from a lower middle class family, and lived and worked in Birmingham alongside the striving classes who owned, ran, and worked in factories.  Lavoiser came from the upper middle classes, and used the money he earned as one of Louis the 16th's tax collectors to buy his way into the aristocracy.  Priestley fled for his life from a conservative mob bent on upholding the rights of the King and the (Anglican) church.  Lavoiser died during the Terror at the hands of a radical French Revolutionary mob.

Overall, an interesting read.  The one disappointment was the debunking of a myth.  Lavoiser did not agree to advance the cause of science by blinking post-guillotin to establish whether and how long consciousness persists  after decapitation.    Apparently, no contemporary records of this story exist.  And given how the executions were organized it wouldn't have been practical for onlookers to observe his head closely at any rate.  :-(

A three pipe problem by Julian Symons

Started: 12 feb 2013
Finished:16 feb 2013
Pages: 192

It's funny, but although I wouldn't normally think of something written in the mid 70s as being a " period piece"' this one feels that way.  Not so much because its so much of its time, as because it isn't.  The respect shown by the " little people" for the peer who hits them with his car, the bereaved middle class wife who's mostly shocked because she's now going to have to earn her own living, the seamy gambling club frequented by the actress who's no better than she should be....I honestly thought this one was written in the 1950s or 60s, and might have placed it earlier if the protaganist weren't an actor in a television series.

Interesting...did this seem old-fashioned when it was published?  Or was the daily texture of ordinary life so much different from now, so recently?  I suspect the latter, actually.  I was a kid in the 70s, but I remember our neighbours initially considering it shocking that my Mom was mowing the lawn after my parents separated in 1974.  Mowing was for males in suburbia.  And don't get me started on her struggle to get credit in her own name.

I sometimes think that the most disconcerting time travel might be a time trip to an era earlier in our own lives.

But that's kind of bye the bye.  What about this book?  As a mystery its unusual, as it features both a professional and an amateur detective.  And although they don't work together,  precisely, they are both essential to the solution of the mystery.  The twist in this one is that the actor-detective has an obsession with Sherlock Holmes, lives on Baker Street, and plays Holmes on TV.

Watery Grave by Bruce Alexander

Started: 6 Feb. 2013
Finished: 9 Feb. 2013
Pages: 305

Okay, you know that feeling you get when you have chocolate for breakfast or chips for supper?  Oh so good, but after a while, really not so good?

I am on a junk book binge.  More or less.  Yes, this is another mystery.  And I can't even claim that I'm reading much else in the background for balance.  (Just Sibley's Birding Basics, and that's more of an ongoing study than a read-through kind of book).

But at least this is quite a good historical mystery, set in Georgian England.  The hero is an orphan boy who assists Sir John Fielding.  Fielding was the blind magistrate of Bow Street who founded and led the first professional English police force, the Bow Street Runners.

In this book Fielding and Jeremy encounter the rather more quixotic justice system of the Royal Navy as they attempt to assist in the investigation of a murder at sea.  The Navy comes off rather the worse than it does in Patrick O'Brian's books.

House of the Vestals by Steven Saylor

Started: 30 Jan. 2013
Finished: 5 Feb. 2013
Pages: 260

How to earn your living if you have a Classics degree?  Write mysteries, apparently. Steven Saylor,
Lindsey Davis, Ruth Downie....all three have published multiple books that have meticulous attention to historical detail, while also being entertaining stories with convincing characters.

House of the Vestals is a book of short stories, each of which illustrates some aspect of Roman culture.  For example,  "Saturnalia Silver" is the story of an investigation that happens during the mid-winter festival,  while "King Bee and Honey" involves a mysterious death linked to Roman bee-keeping practices.

How successful are they?  Frankly, they felt a bit didactic.  Because these stories are so short, the educational/informational content of each one seemed to overwhelm the character and the plot.  But perhaps I'm not the best judge:  in general I find short stories unsatisfying.  They're over before I can really engage with the characters, and they're too short to investigate their themes very extensively.  So I suppose I shouldn't single these out as being any less successful than the ordinary run of the genre.

Memory by Linda Nagata

Started: 25 January 2013
Finished: 30 January 2013
Pages: 416

"We have been so very fortunate to have so wild and reckless a daughter as Jubilee.  Obviously she was sent to teach us wisdom."   So says her mother as we begin to follow Jubilee's adventures in their very strange and artificial world.

The book is Jubilee's "hero's journey" but also an SF story of world exploration:   almost as if Ringworld were told from the point of view of one of its residents.  And what an odd world it is.   Perhaps three nights in ten a silver fog rises in the valleys, a fog that destroys every living thing it touches.  But the silver also leaves behind gifts:  veins of metals that can be mined, or follies like gazebos or machinery seemingly plucked at random out of history and deposited on low hilltops or valley bottoms.  The only protection from the silver are the kobold wells:  eruptions in the earth from which small mechanical insects crawl, each with a specific and catalogued purpose like exuding a chemical which repels the fog.

Learning about the world and its history is just as much the point of this novel as is Jubilee's quest, so I won't tell you more other than to say that the book is nicely done.  And that no pet puppies are harmed in the course of bringing the adventure to its conclusion.

Blah Blah Blah: What to do when words don't work by Dan Roam

Started: Dec. 18, 2012
Finished: Jan. 28, 2013
Pages: 331

This book has two characters:  the hummingbird and the fox, who we met in the recent past when we read Thinking, Fast and Slow by David Kahneman.  But in that book the quick-thinking, visual, and reactive hummingbird was called "System 1", while the verbose and analytic fox was called "System 2".

Why a hummingbird and a fox?  Because Dan Roam has a different aim than Kahneman.  Roam isn't explaining how brains work.  He simply wants to help us convey our ideas more effectively, and the fact that he switches the non-informative terms   "System 1" and "System 2"to something more immediately graspable is a perfect illustration of the kind of thing that Blah blah blah is trying to teach you to do.

This book was recommended to me by a "Visual Literacy" initiative at work that is intended to encourage us to include more graphical content in our writing.  The book is a perfect tool for that purpose.  It talks a little bit about why doing so is useful, but mostly focuses on describing a variety of heuristics that can help you transform your blah blah blah to combinations of graphics and text that will have a greater impact.

I'm planning to photocopy a few summary pages so that I can keep them handy while others on my team read the book.

Time Traders by Andre Norton

Started: 20 January, 2013
Finished: 24 January, 2013
Pages: 220

Andre Norton wrote the very first SF novel that I ever read:  a boy's own adventure novel set in space.   I was.....11, 12?   I don't remember it exactly, but it had a big influence on my reading.  I've been reading SF ever since.

Why?  Well, that's an essay for another time, but the short version would be something like "entertainment and ideas".   Like most popular pulp fiction, you can argue about what's entertaining.  But Time Traders has a strong plot with lots of action. It's easy to get caught up in the story of the misfit bad boy who starts life on the wrong foot, but makes good through his cleverness and courage.   As for ideas:  how captivating is the idea that you could somehow travel to another time?  And that the people there would have different religions, and customs, and skills and traditions? Pretty heady stuff when you're twelve.  

Time Traders isn't that first SF book that I read more than 30 years ago.  It's one of a very similar set of novels that Norton wrote in the 50s and 60s.  As a kids book of that era I can no real fault with it, and mocking it would just be mocking the social conventions of that time.

 But although I can credit Ms. Norton with introducing me to a lifetime's worth of interesting reading, I do have a beef.  Norton was an American.  She wasn't very cosmopolitan, and she wasn't necessarily very smart.  And along with authors like Poul Anderson she inculcated me with the subconscious belief that somehow learning a language with native fluency was something that anyone could accomplish with a few weeks' concerted effort.  Fie!  You blighted my language learning efforts, when I first had an opportunity to study French in high school in my unilingual Prairie city.  Somehow, I felt that something was terribly wrong with both my instructor and me when I could barely communicate and hardly understand anyone in Paris after three years of As.  :-)

Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Started: 12 Jan 2013
Finished: 16 Jan 2013
Pages: 206

I'd never heard of Josephine Tey until I picked up this book in a second-hand bookstore.  But she's apparently also one of the classic authors of the British golden age of detective fiction.  Daughter of Time was published in 1951, the last of her 10 or so books.

This is an unusual mystery:  the detective spends the entire novel flat on his back in a hospital bed and never meets the criminal or any of the principals in the case.  How could he?  Everyone involved has been dead for more than 400 years.

The detective's day job is at Scotland Yard.  But he needs something to do while he recovers from an injury, and ends up investigating the story of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower with the help of some history books and an assistant with time to kill in the British Library.  He approaches the historical puzzle using the same techniques he would in reviewing a modern case.

The end result is a very entertaining read that will have you googling for additional information about the Plantagenets and Tudors.

Are you my mother? A comic drama by Alison Bechdel

Started: 26 December, 2012

Finished: 8 January, 2013

Pages: 290

First things first:  this is not a picture book about a baby bird searching for its mother and finding a SNERT.  

Or, maybe it is....kind of.

Have you heard of graphic novels?  Well, this is a graphic memoir:  that is, a memoir written in the form of a comic.  And this version of Are you my mother? is about the author's struggle to make sense of her relationship with her mother. It's by Alison Bechdel,  the creator of  Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running serial comic that you could hardly have missed if you read feminist newspapers in the late 80s and 90s.  

 I started it at the inlaws over Christmas and puzzled my partner's mom.  She wanted to know why I wasn't chuckling while I was reading.  Wasn't it comics?   Well, yes.  But it's a natural question.  Although there are now"serious" comics, our collective default assumption is that stories told with pictures are stories for children. (Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, really.  After all:  movies.)

So why don't we think of pictorial stories written on paper as serious?

I don't have an answer to that.  Constant advances in printing technology throughout the 20th century made printed pictures ubiquitous.  And other than a few 19th century political cartoons, comics really began in the 20th century.  But for the most part using pictures as well as text to tell a story was only done when the subject matter of the story was something that was hard to imagine otherwise:  when the characters in the stories were talking mice, say, or the story was about a extra-strong flying man.

Which brings us to the book at hand. What is added by telling Bechdel's story in comic form?

Well, I guess the most obvious thing that the pictures add is emotional impact and immediacy.  Being told that her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was 7 years old is different than watching a small and vulnerable girl pretend not to mind that her mother is walking away from her bed.

Using drawings also permits Bechdel to use compression and inference to tell parts of her story. There is a sequence of frames that recounts a year that she spent in therapy by showing her and her therapist facing each other across a room, while a tree visible in the window behind them cycles through the seasons.

Drawings also allow her to give information that would be difficult to convey otherwise.  Being told that Bechdel has been in therapy for her entire adult life is different seeing a timeline that simultaneously shows both the duration of every love relationship she's ever had and the duration of every therapist she's ever had. (wow:  I can't even imagine therapy playing that kind of role in my life.)

So....Bechdel could likely have told her story in text alone.  But telling it as a comic definitely gives her additional tools.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Started: 31 December 2012
Finished: 5 January 2013
Pages: 422

"Ivan you idiot!" is a recurring refrain throughout the Vorkosigan series.  Now, Ivan gets his day in the sun, and we get to see how he manages for himself when his hyper-active, hyper-intelligent, and hyper-successful cousin Miles is busy elsewhere.

How does it work?  It's nice to get a different angle on the Barrayarian universe. Frankly, I found the last two Miles books sub-par.  Lois McMaster Bujold has a living to make of course, and the Miles series is both a familiar haven and a sure way to make a few bucks.  But now that Miles is grown up, through his career crisis, and safely married, the zing has gone out of his adventures.

Does a book focused on Ivan revive the series?  Well, if you weren't already a devotee, I don't think this one would inspire you to read all of the rest.  But Lois McMaster Bujold can still write a more entertaining story on her bad days than most can pull off on their good days, so I'm not sorry I picked it up.

****If this entire review is entirely puzzling, it just means that you aren't a devotee of science fiction adventure series.....  Dont' worry, there's "Nothing to see here" .....****

Snobbery with violence by M.C. Beaton

Started: Dec. 25, 2012
Finished: Jan. 4, 2012
Pages: 248

Thanks for the plane book Jennifer!  It was also a great insomnia book.  You also need something entertaining and unchallenging at 3 am when you just can't sleep. A British cozy mystery was just the ticket.

One interesting point:  the heroine is an Edwardian debutante, but I was initially confused about the time period.  All of the talk of girl's "seasons" and husband-hunting seemed more suited to a book set a century earlier, and inconsistent with electricity, telephones, and motor cars.  But we just started watching Downton Abbey last night.  Both are set in about 1912, and the television show also showed just the same kinds of very formal traditional social conventions in place.  Interesting.  I guess that's why the British aristocracy feel that the First World War ended an era.

Best books?

I started this blog last February, so it's too early to summarize my year's reading and the experience of blogging about it for a year.  But now that the New Year has come and gone, it does seem like it's time to summarize the books of 2012.

Best books so far?  Yes, it needs to be plural:

• Best nonfiction:  Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemen.  Thought-provoking.
• Best fiction:  The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.  She's matured so much as a writer since she wrote The Bean Trees.
• Best SF: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  Dark, unlovable, and brilliant.
Runners up:
• Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts.  Well-written period piece, with more than a soupcon of irony.
• Ready Player One by Eric Cline.  Just fun, even if the last third of the book was a little disappointing.
• Best poetry: Memory's Daughter by Alice Major

I could pick out more "bests".  But I don't really think of mysteries in that way.  And I didn't read enough of any other type of book to really judge a category.

Second Chances by Susan Schwartz

Started: Dec. 13, 2012
Finished: Dec. 30, 2012
Pages:454

"Don't judge a book by it's cover".  There's a dictum meant to be ignored, particularly when you're reading SF.   Covers are marketing.  The cover is the brand.  This one looks like it could be authored by David Weber, and true to the cover it's military SF.

But Susan Schartz isn't David Weber, and this is not a rousing tale of daring do and heroism.  It's about idealism, dishonour, shame, and the search for redemption.  Note I said "search".  Not all searches are entirely successful, after all.  

I can't whole-heartedly recommend this book. Unlike (at least my memory) of Silk Roads and Shadows, the writing is sometimes quite wooden.  But I won't condemn it either.  The character of Jim is drawn with some sophistication, and if it's a little hard to believe the actions that lead to his downfall, well, he finds his own actions inexplicable.  And somehow that seems more real than otherwise.