Lots of stuff queued up, so let’s do some fast reviews before I have to clean off the table.
Book Review: California Demon by Julie Kenner 
Sequel to Carpe Demon, continuing the tale of “What if someone a lot like Buffy the Vampire Slayer retired and settled down and had kids and had to start fighting bad guys again in her late 30s?” soccer mom Kate Conner. Pretty lightweight, frothy entertainment and reading, sometimes just a bit too cleverly evoking the life of a mother of a teenager and a toddler while tying in conspiracy, heartache, marital (un)happiness, and life in suburbia crossed with demon-slaying. Readable, entertaining, sometimes annoying, but never very intense in any of those categories.
Book Review: Variable Star by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson 
Talented sf writer (and Heinlein fan) Robinson takes an unfinished Heinlein novel from his juvenile period (no more than a detailed outline, and missing the last page at that) and turns it into an entertaining sf novel that reads like … well, Heinlein being ghost-written by Robinson. Many of the key characters and plot elements feel Heinleinesque, while the dialog and technological extrapolations feel more like Robinson. It’s less jarring than it sounds, and Robinson writes both an entertainingly readable novel and ties in all sorts of clever bits of Heinlein’s “universe.”
Book Review: Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero
Prothero (who also reads this unabridged audio-book) provides a history of religion and religious education in the US, building a case that while we cannot understand our nation’s history (social, political, or literary) or our current society, or even modern geopolitics, without knowing about the religion in general, and (for the US) about Christianity specifically. He also traces how religious illiteracy — lack of knowledge of this history, of doctrine and religious literature — has grown in the US over the centuries and decades, driven not so much by secularists and activists but by the growth of by interdenominationalism, nativism, and “civic religion,” where the differences between varying sects and denominations were intentionally downplayed in order to band together against other faiths (Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Moslems) or national threats. And that downplaying was furthered by populist preachers, who reduced religion to flights of ecstasy that only counted what you felt, not what you knew. And that ignorance now lets demagogues assert “God’s will” without challenge, make claims about what Scripture teaches when people don’t read it or remember it, and teach about what religion meant to the Founding Fathers without people understanding anything about what religion was then, let alone now. Prothero makes a strong, though only partially convincing, argument, that we need to teach religion — Christian and non-Christian — as required subjects in school (though from a pedagogical, not a proselytizing, standpoint). Usually interesting, though occasionally pedantic, it’s a useful alternative viewpoint to much of the debate about religion in the public square today.
Book Review: Nine Tomorrows by Isaac Asimov
This 1959 collection of Asimov shorts includes such sf classics as “The Last Question” and “The Ugly Little Boy.” They are are standard Asimov fare — somewhat-cardboard characters with odd names exploring technological advances in the present and future, usually with an twist ending to give it a bit of spice. It’s Golden Age sci-fi at it’s most Campbellian, and, for those who like that sort of thing, good entertainment.
Book Review: The Book of Vice by Peter Sagal 
NPR’s Sagal researches vice — after setting upon a reasonable working definition — to determine the truth behind the suspicion that we all have that “someone, somewhere, is having more fun than I am.” He checks out, and reports in detail, on swingers clubs, extreme minimalist cooking, strip clubs, lying and fraud, gambling, excessive consumption, and pornography. His conclusions, as someone who’s probably as “square” as I am, is that, yeah, all that sort of thing is out there, and the people in it are not particularly more depraved or special than anyone else — but also not necessarily any happier or fulfilled or having more fun (or more miserable or unfulfilled or having less fun) than the average joe. It’s a fast read, alternately droll, moving, and thoughtful. Recommended.
Book Review: The Gettysburg Gospel by Gabor Boritt
While subtitled “The Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows,” Boritt writes poetically about the entire Gettysburg event, starting the day after the battle and the long weeks of horror that was the small town of Gettysburg while the dead were buried and the survivors were tended with scant resources. From there to the plans to build a national cemetery for the battle dead (Union, of course), and the events at the site’s opening. Amongst the dignitaries invited, Edward Everett, who gave a long and well-received oratory about the battle and the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln, the president, whose exceedingly short speech providing a justification for the battle and the suffering the war had engendered, got a mixed reception, and was, for years considered by Lincoln’s supporters and the public as far less significant than Lincoln’s role as emancipator (and writer of the Emancipation Proclamation). Only in the decades to follow, as emancipation became less of a public rallying point, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech recast as something to unite the country, rather than as a war speech, did the Gettysburg Address become recognized as the literary and historical icon it’s become. Fascinating book, well read by Michael Kramer, providing details both personal and broad. I ended up not knowing much more about the speech itself, but a lot more about why it was written, how it was received, and how its meaning — and the image of its author — has evolved in the century-and-a-half since Gettysburg. Recommended.