Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

In 1996 a bomb explodes in a crowded New Delhi marketplace.  I am not giving anything away as the bomb detonates in the first pages of the book.  Although a dozen or so people die, two of them, a pair of young brothers we will get to know very well, the book is not nearly so tragic as you might expect.  Almost as if we are following bits of shrapnel from their emplacement in the exploding car through their airborne trajectory, the stories of everyone involved on the fateful day are observed as they hurtle through space and time. Mahajan's skill is to mix comedy and pathos in near equal proportions.  The bomb makers make bad bombs that fail to go off and we can feel their frustration.  One would-be bomber is all talk, no action, and cites Ghandi as a supporter, before landing in prison where he goes from all talk to complete silence.  The father of the murdered brothers is so self-obsessed that our sympathy for his plight wains.  A childhood friend o...

Anne Hillerman's father, Tony Hillerman , wrote 18 mysteries set in the Navajo nation of the American southwest.  His stories were respectful of Native American culture, strongly evocative of the landscape of the southwest, and award-winning mysteries.  When he died in 2008, he and his lead characters were sorely missed.  It is no small feat, therefore, for his daughter Anne to continue the series, but she does so, in this the first in her series, with aplomb.  The Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn (he is always referred to by the Navajo Police force as The Legendary Lieutenant), around whom so many of the elder Hillerman's mysteries circulate, is shot in the opening scene.  Spider Woman's Daughter is a mystery about who shot the author's father's main character.  Elevating Detective Jim Chee and his now-wife Officer Bernadette Manuelito to the lead allows them to find their own footing in the tribal detective world now that the aging Leaphorn is not on...

Sy Montgomery makes a very strong case that octopusses (that is the correct plural, not ocotopi) are so intelligent that they have both cognition and consciousness.  Montgomery's case is not built so much on biology, though there is plenty of evidence to go on.  Octopusses have both central brains and individual brains in each of their eight arms.  That means an octopus can work its arms in concert or independently and that simultaneously an octopus can do eight different things.  It can unscrew a bottle cap with two arms, feed itself with a third, while it explores, tastes, and touches additional items with its remaining arms.  In some ways, a human ability to walk and chew gum at the same time pales in comparison.  Mostly, Montgomery argues that octopusses have feelings, curiosity, personality, and moods and convinces us by interacting with octopusses on a weekly basis at the Boston aquarium.  She lets the aquarium's Giant Pacific Octopus tas...