Furiously Happy, by Jenny Lawson

Summary: a series of essays about Jenny's adventures, strange thoughts, and struggles with depression and other mental illnesses.

Thoughts: a lot of the book is incredibly amusing. It's hard not to laugh about attempts to get a taxidermied raccoon to ride cats, for example. But the subtheme about the value of being open and honest about mental illness because it affects a lot more people than you realize is also very important. The two parts tie together well to make a book everyone should read and most people would enjoy.

The Quotable Cyclist, by Bill Strickland

Summary: As the title might imply, this is a collection of quotes from a wide assortment of people about various topics related to biking.

Comments: This was a really interesting book. The parts related to racing aren't necessarily things I can relate to, but it was kind of a glimpse into a part of the world I know little about. And there was plenty besides that. Quite possibly the most interesting part is that the quotes don't just come from people in the cycling world but also people such as Albert Einstein and Shaquille O'Neal. This book has the advantage of being something you can put down, pick back up, and skip ahead without losing track of what's going on since each chapter is fairly self-contained and only sort of has a thread going (though there does seem to be a decent amount of organization to the quotes).

How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere, by Larry King

This is another of those books about how to talk to people in a variety of situations, this one written by a talk show host and, to use his words, professional talker. Much of what he says is sort of common sense, but common sense is easy to lose sight of in stressful situations. Some of the big tips are be prepared and be yourself. I'm not sure how much I actually learned, but the reminders of things I ought to already know were helpful, and the anecdotes made the book interesting and kept me hooked.

The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce

Summary: In a nutshell, this book is a collection of snarky definitions interspersed with some poetry relevant to those words.

Comments: A number of the definitions are incredibly amusing, some aren't, and some probably made more sense a hundred years ago before some of the context was lost to the mists of time. I marked some of my favorites so that in the future I can skim the book looking for the amusing parts as opposed to read it cover to cover as I did over the last couple months. I'm not sure what the hit to miss ratio is for how many of the definitions I actually found amusing, but I think it was worth getting for the good ones.

Night Signals, by Cynthia Wall

Summary: After Marc falls and breaks his leg while hiking in the mountains, his chances of survival are grim unless Kim and the search and rescue operation manage to find him.

Comments: This is very much an emotional rollercoaster of a story, particularly the heartache of the people trying to find Marc. A few more things that it shares with Hostage in the Woods, besides the multiple viewpoints, are the author's love of adjectives, and the fact that rescue comes at basically the last possible second - any later, and it would have been more of a cleanup mission. I rather enjoyed reading this book again, but damn does it mess with my head.

The technology changes over the last 20-some years are less noticeable than in Hostage in the Woods, since cell phones and so forth probably wouldn't have helped much - I would guess that the area where Marc was doesn't have very good cell coverage even now, so it wouldn't have helped him any. And I can't really picture him saying much about the hike on twitter or facebook, so it's hard to say if the search and rescue operation would have had any additional clues as to where to start looking.