#5: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. 3.5. I don't know whether it's that I got on this train late or whether a lot of the studies cited are just fairly well known, but I will admit that I wasn't that surprised by a lot of the content. If you're relatively new to this branch of psychology/economics, this book is a stunning tour-de-force revealing how very irrational we are, even at our most rational. The author organizes a lifetime of (Nobel prize-winning) research to show how our brains take shortcuts that do not always serve us well, and how hard it is to avoid those even when you know they're coming. At the same time, he offers suggestions for how to structure around our known faults. On the other hand, if you've kept up with the literature, at this point a lot of it is fairly old news. The back half gets rather needlessly repetitive in its statistics--the various experiments shown aren't actually that different. So, ground-breaking for its time, a little less astonishing now.
#6. Waistcoats and Weaponry by Gail Carriger. 3.5. More delightful fluff from Carriger. Reticules shaped like sausage dogs, stolen trains, and ridiculous love triangles. This suffers a bit, though, from being an interstitial book. Most of what happens is just to set up either the last book in the series or the series that this is prequel to. Fun if you're a fan, but not her strongest.
#7: Manners and Mutiny by Gail Carriger. 4. Much stronger on the action front than the previous installment, although not quite the sublime ridiculousness of her first series. I appreciated several late-in-the-series reveals, as well as some very sweet denouements.
#8: The Devil You Know by K.H. Koehler. 3. There's the bones of a great story here, but it really needed another edit. The wish fulfillment of the protagonist--son of Lucifer, ex-cop witch--is extremely heavy handed. (Was it really necessary to point out how well endowed he is? Repeatedly? And being repeatedly assured of the hotness of his new fling and their resulting sex also gets old, fast.) We're told instead of shown quite a bit. The whole book is a bit too brisk--we could have used a few more twists as well as a lot more character development. The relationships that are sketched out are intriguing, but that's all they are--sketches.
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