Every interesting email forward you’ve ever received — the Monty Hall problem and the origin of “savant” to the first ever gambling theory and its associated follies to how humans process words based on context or letter order — is covered in this book. At times a bit geeky, Mlodinow tries his hardest to keep the math to a minimum and the phenomenon at the forefront. The Drunkard’s Walk takes the mystery out of simple occurrences, but also reveals when our intuition is wrong with statistics in the same vein as Malcolm Galdwell’s many books.

If you grew up despising double lab science period and rid yourself of math courses as soon as you fulfilled the requirements, The Drunkard’s Walk might get tedious at times. I assure you, the information you’ll glean along the way is well worth the literary bushwhacking you may have to endure, for it’s filled with all sorts of fodder for every cocktail party in your future.

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I doubt I’ll ever grow tired of picking Atul Gawande’s brain. His writing style is smooth, his openness refreshing, and his point of view so beautifully human. It’s hard to write medical books for the lay and still come across as engaging, but Gawande’s second discussion of the Hippocratic world and how to improve it does just that. Providing more hard suggestions and more research to back up his claims, Better doesn’t just raise questions, as did his first book Complications, but aims to solve them by example.

You’ll learn not only what’s working and why in fields as varied as the Indian subcontinent’s fight against polio, American childbirth death rates, and soldier care on the front lines, but you also won’t be spared the somewhat inexplicable or undiscussed: why the best doctors aren’t always desirable and how the insurance system affects patient care. Gawande doesn’t claim to be an expert, but he does a fantastic job of translating complicated and long-standing medical problems into plain English for the rest of us. Once again, I’ll never look at medicine in the same way again.

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I was actually very impressed with this book. Firstly, the subject matter, structure, satire, and literary allusions are all refreshingly adult for a novel billed in the YA genre. Secondly, author Libba Bray denies you all the tired trappings of an issue book and instead plays by her own rules and manages to get her point across all the same, a feat worthy of attention. In short, Going Bovine is hardly your average read, and I found myself confused and unsure of my opinion, but more than willing to plow on to the end.

Aside from the plot, and away from Bray’s voice, the writing itself is brilliant. Bray uses protagonist Cameron Smith’s demise into BSE/nvCJD madness to comment on modern-day society, and she uses Cameron’s unwavering personality to shed light on what really matters in life, revealing the truth about him and his family without telling you outright through a series of seemingly incidental anecdotes and coincidences. Cameron, denied the luxury of adulthood, does not simply roll over and give up, but puts on a sardonic face and goes on a road trip through loopy land, making stops in Eubie’s version of New Orleans, the tabloid version of Mississippi, his sister Jenna’s frat-tastic spring break in Daytona, and the unravelled Disneyworld of his own childhood before making an Ingrid Bergman-esque revelation. Don’t be mistaken: the line between reality and insanity is fairly clear to the reader, if not the characters. Yet in true Quixotic fashion, Cameron’s skewed visions and loose grasp on the present moment allows him to hallucinate windmills as monsters yes (or, as the case may be, angels as sugar-addicted punk rockers), but also to see a bigger, truer picture revealing the blemishes of American society, proving that being put out to pasture does not mean you have to go a dull and senile virgin.

Arguably the ending is the best part for how lightly it treaded. The bit directly preceding it, set in Disneyland, cut a few too many strings. But, love the style or hate it, not once did Bray give us more than a fleeting glimpse into reality. We never find out if any of it was real (not that it matters), nor do we see what happens to the Smiths or their versions of the story, and in doing so Cameron’s fate goes unemphasised, making it all the more heartbreaking and all the more meaningful. Tiny little touches give you huge insight into his progress, while the dialogue and Cameron’s inner monologue is genuine enough to keep you going through the dreariest of chapters and the most overplayed of devices, Star Fighter and snow globes alike. The biggest criticism Going Bovine faces revolves around suspension of disbelief. But Bray puts it all on the line early on, and if readers have trouble swallowing any part of the book, it’s a sign that neither the course of Creutzfeldst-Jakob’s disease nor the escapades of Cameron and his faithful knight’s attendant Gonzo are fully appreciated. The question stops being will Cameron recover and instead becomes will he die as Alfonso Quixote did, depressed but clear-headed, or will he find a different fate, and will it be redeeming?

Read Going Bovine. Read it for the witty allusions, or for the zany journey’s tangents, or even for the deeper message. Read it to have your heartstrings pulled and your funnybone tickled. Read it to see what dementia is like or what high school can be. Read it, because not too many books say this much so effortlessly and in such a unique and, well, maddening way.

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Finally got around to reading Cloud Atlas. It isn’t bad, but it didn’t look good at the onset; the first story “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” was so boring (despite being about vampires) I nearly put the book down then and there. But it got better. My favourite was the clone-wrought future of Somni~451 in ultra-consumer Korea. And the book’s six different tales are told in ascending, than descending order, which is a really nice touch.

My biggest qualm? It dragged in places, the writing was (purposefully) inconsistent, and “Sloosha’s Crossin’” was too difficult to read for me to stick with it. But the interweaving of certain elements — the comet birthmark, “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” and each narrative showing itself as literature in another — kept me pushing through to the end. And Luisa Rey and Timothy Cavendish are highly entertaining characters.

The constant flag of Buddhism and a few nagging hints make it clear the six stories are the tales of the same soul reincarnated in different eras. If you believe that, it becomes twice as intriguing. Otherwise it’s just six disparate stories that never interact.

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I knew Zafón would be a good read, full of a different, brooding Barcelona, but I was pleasantly surprised by the completeness of his story. There are a few soft spots in The Shadow of the Wind but they are more or less forgivable. The characters are just the right amount of maddening but still human enough for us to root in the right direction. The plot is masterfully intricate, and touches like The Angel of the Mist are nice flourishes to see in a modern piece.

People will undoubtedly claim it’s a mystery, and while that’s not exactly far from the truth, it isn’t exactly the right word. There’s no trying to figure out who’s lying, or trying to thwart another murder, and though there is a mystery-typical denouement there is none of that “now we know” satisfaction. Instead The Shadow of the Wind interweaves two lives closely together so by withholding from us one character’s history, we want to complete protagonist Daniel’s life story, which does not end with a lengthy six-chapter explanation but instead just begins.

My biggest criticisms are the unsympathetic side story of Inspector Fumero doesn’t really move anything forward and is there just to tie up ends (which I feel isn’t always necessary). Nuria Monfort’s letters are a bit too convenient, and some of the turns along the road become almost too unreasonable. The end? Mixed. But don’t read it for the conclusion. Read The Shadow of the Wind for the read, for the world Zafón reveals in post-war Barcelona. Read it for endearingly rough around the edges characters like Fermín, with an equally grandiose history. Read it to be reminded that other people too can not only get lost in a world of forgotten books, but can be moved to risk everything in the name of good literature.

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Christopher Buckley, perhaps best known for Thank You For Smoking, has managed to produce another social-critical satire this time targeting Social Security reform and the view we have of the Millennial generation as simultaneously apathetic and violently activist. The plot you can read about anywhere — Amazon blurbs, the back of the book, Boomsday’s goodreads page — but you won’t realise how well-crafted this political satire truly is until you start reading it.

Buckley starts out criticising the under-thirties, or as protagonist Cass calls them, U30s, but ends up mocking the US political system of backhanded signatures, under-the-table dealmaking, and unnecessary political targeting, not to mention how outlandish and impossible the bill-passing procedure is, taking something that was at its heart a well-intended call to action and turning it into a docile lamb. He picks at the armed forces, at congress, at George Bush, at California tech wealth, at big-mouthed bloggers, at PR firms, at the House of Representatives, at the Baby Boomer golf generation — in short, at a whole lot more than just capitol hill. Sure he tries too hard to seem current, hipster, and witty, and yeah the end is abrupt, under-developed, and unsatisfying, but the premise is just intriguing enough to follow through on.

At times hard to tell if Buckley’s handiwork is a call to action or just another cynical diatribe, it’s fresh enough to pick up, but convoluted enough to put down. Brilliant? No. Entertaining? Thought-provoking? Sure. Worth reading? Probably. And for a book about politics, that’s probably the best you’re going to get.

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