...in the past few days.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, by Bill Bryson. A memoir of growing up in 1950s Des Moines, Iowa. Sardonic humor characteristic of Bryson. He allows himself a lot of nostalgia, turning parts of it into a love song to the better parts of the 1950s - the story is told through the eyes of a middle-class white kid in a predominately white area, after all - but he doesn't lose sight of the not-so-good parts, either.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt. SF set in his Priscilla Hutchins series, a follow-up to the events in The Engines of God. An expedition sets for for the galactic core to discover the source of the omega clouds that destroy all civilizations. I enjoyed it, as I enjoy most McDevitt novels, and while the climax wasn't as thoroughly satisfying as I'd have wanted, it still held up better than I'd feared. :) Something I appreciate about McDevitt's books - even when the passages in question turn out a bit boring - is that his starship captains and heroes spend lots and lots of time doing fundraising and PR. That rings fairly realistically for me, even when other aspects seem a bit too close to 21st century American culture.

Mushishi volume 6. Much the same as Mushishi 1-5, which is good. There's a story in which we learn a bit more about the mushishi, too.

Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez. Nessy the kobold is a housekeeper for an evil wizard who lives in a castle surrounded by the curse-transformed forms of his enemies. When he dies, she finds that things start going to hell in a handbasket, and it's down to her to get things set right. I enjoyed this way more than I usually enjoy books of this sort -- light, humorous fantasy. Martinez almost lost me when he introduced a creature called a nurgax whose description was, basically, a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater. If something in a fantasy novel is too much of a cheeky reference to something in the modern world, it tends to bounce me out hard. Luckily, the strength of Nessy's characterization kept me. She's a born housekeeper - loves order and setting things to rights, has compassion for almost everything, is quite practical, and is good at what she does. Of course, she's thrown out of her element in the story, but she remains true to herself.

The Princetta by Anne-Laure Bondoux. A YA novel read immediately after Too Many Curses and seriously suffered in comparison. Princess Malva runs away from her kingdom when she's being forced to marry a prince - it's revealed later that she's being manipulated into that, so it's not quite so OH GOD CLICHE as it seems. Orpheus, a young man aspiring to be a ship captain, sets out to rescue her and discovers that she doesn't really want to be rescued. There are some interesting elements to this, enough to keep me reading to the end, and the end doesn't fall into a typical pattern. Problems: it's set in a world Not Quite Ours and signals that by naming the cultures and objects in a way that's Not Quite what it Really Is. Example: princetta instead of princess, Galnicia instead of Galicia, Gurkistan instead of Turkestan, Polvakia instead of Poland/Slovakia, etc. That drives me nuts. It also seems a bit like two different books - before Orpheus catches up with Malva, it's a fantasy-adventure book in which they're traveling through a real world that has a touch of magic to it, and afterward it becomes a book in which they're traveling through a fantasy world constructed to teach them things through metaphor and allegory. Also, it can't decide whether it's a book with a single protagonist traveling with a group or an ensemble-cast book. Malva's character arc doesn't seem dramatic or complex enough for a single-protagonist book, but the book is named after her and the ensemble doesn't get together until the middle of the books, which seems a bit more like a single-protagonist pattern. Also, in one section there seem to be a few racial issues that make me a bit uneasy, but not in a way I can articulate. (Interestingly, the cover on that link is not the cover on the edition I have. The edition I have has the cover to another edition with a different title - The Princess and the Captain)

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. Enjoyable history of personal cleanliness from Classical times to the modern day, but unfortunately it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process, by Irene Pepperberg. Story of Alex the grey parrot and his owner, who opened up a window into animal cognition. I enjoyed it, and was fascinated to learn how much on the budgetary edge Pepperberg and her research live.

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl by Stacy O'Brien. Back in the 1980s, before laws on the ownership of birds of prey got tighter, O'Brien worked in the owl lab at Caltech and was given the opportunity to raise a baby barn owl with nerve damage. He'd never be able to fly long enough to hunt and feed himself, but otherwise was a perfectly normal owl. It was a fascinating look into both the life of barn owl and the life of field biologists (hint: much like pilots and entomologists hi badnoodles!, field biologists are often stereotypically crazy. And I say this as the daughter of one). If you read the back cover quotes, they make it sound like it's a spiritual journey to God, but those reviewers put a bit too much emphasis on three paragraphs out of the entire book. And - pseudoscience alert! - there's a section near the end where she speculates a bit on animal telepathy, but overall I find it worth reading, because I love reading about animals, animal behavior, and their bonds with people.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter. Fascinating (well, if you're interested in linguistics) book on the evolution of English grammar. There's lots of popular-reading books out there about English words and how they came into the language, but almost nothing about the grammar. McWhorter convincingly argues that it's in large part from Celtic languages, most especially Welsh. And also warn others in the house that you're reading a book on linguistics, otherwise they may be startled to hear you make weird noises as you try to pronounce sounds you're not used to. :D