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Jernau Morat Gurgeh is one of the best game players in The Culture, a space-faring society of advanced "genofixed" humans and artificially intelligent machines - he is such a gamer that he has taken the name "Morat", meaning game-player or player of games. But he's a little bit bored with his life-- nothing is that challenging or engaging anymore-- and his old family friend, the drone Chamlis Amalk-ney, offers to ask Contact to see if there might be something interesting he could do. When they do come up with an offer, it involves considerable travel, and Gurgeh is rather a home-body, preferring not to leave his home orbital, so he turns them down. However, not long after, he is manipulated by the rogue drone Mawhrin-Skel (who was intended for the Special Circumstances branch of Contact but then deemed unfit), and he is black-mailed and maneuvered into accepting the offered task that Contact had suggested, which involves traveling to a remote civilization where their society is obsessed with and run by a complicated strategy game called Azad.

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A young girl in a lonely part of Montana buries her younger brother, who had been the last living member of her family, says the prayer her mother said over the other family graves, and then sets out on horseback by herself fleeing from the rough young men her brother had been hanging out with-- in particular their leader, the man she suspects killed her brother, and who wants to claim her for himself. On her second day of travel, she sees another man on horseback pursuing her, and she flees him as well because her mother had told her all men are the same, dangerous drunks. While she sleeps, the man catches up to her-- but he is in fact a city boy who had come out West with some friends to get away from his troubles (the society girl he was in love with wouldn't have him), and he had gotten separated from his party and lost in the wilderness. She has some food and the survival skills to get them through to civilization, and when he hears her story of the man she is running from, he naturally wants to help and protect her. They travel together for a while, once even drawn to a Christian Endeavor meeting by the music, which keeps them hidden from the ruffians who go by while they are inside, and the girl is encouraged by words from scripture of the religion she had scarcely known anything of. They make it safely to a city big enough to have a train station and the young man, George, learns via telegram that his mother is seriously ill, so he sells his horse and returns-- he encourages his young friend, who he has come to admire, to come with him, but she refuses because she believes he is promised to another, and a kind woman at a farm where they stayed overnight had told her it wasn't proper to travel alone with a man. They go their separate ways, and he only knows her first name-- Elizabeth.

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Sir Tristram Shield comes to visit his dying uncle Sylvester, the Lord of Lavenham, and since it is Sylvester's wish, Tristram agrees to marry his younger, half-French cousin Eustacie. Tristram is a practical, unromantic kind of gentleman, so to Eustacie he seems completely unfeeling when he won't follow along in her flights of fancy at how sorry he should feel to see her going to the guillotine wearing a white dress (she was brought out of France long before there was any danger of that), or when she asks him to ride at full-speed to her deathbed when she dies in childbirth-- he replies quite practically that he wouldn't go out on such an occasion, but this doesn't suit Eustacie at all. Quite quickly, Eustacie convinces herself and her maid that she will be completely miserable married to Tristram (she's probably right-- and she would likely make him miserable as well), so she decides to run away and become a governess (her only qualification for such a job is that she speaks French). As she makes her way out in the night, she runs into a group of smugglers (or "free-traders")-- and their leader is, of course, her disgraced cousin Ludovic Lavenham, heir to Sylvester. Everyone assumed he had fled the country due to the suspicion that he murdered a man who took a family heirloom, a talisman ring, in payment for gambling debts and then would not return it. When Ludovic, Eustacie, and Tristram all end up together again and Tristram and Ludovic finally believe each other that neither of them killed the man, they set about finding the person who did-- and in particular, finding the talisman ring that will clear Ludovic's name.

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14-year-old Sophie Amundsen is a normal school-girl who discusses normal school-girl things with her friend Joanna-- until she gets an unusual note in her mailbox, which begins her on a course of studying the history of philosophy with her equally unusual teacher, Alberto Knox. The first few lessons begin with thought-provoking questions like who are you? and where does the world come from?, or why is the Lego the most ingenious toy in the world?. These simple questions get Sophie to wondering, and then are usually followed up by a lesson-- initially in written form, later on via in-person discussions with Alberto Knox. In addition, to the philosophy course, Sophie starts finding postcards and other things that belong to a girl she's never heard of, Hilde Moller Knag-- and something about the postcards doesn't quite add up (they are sent from Lebanon but apparently took no time to get to Norway, Hilde's birthday is the same as Sophie's, Sophie is being relied upon to deliver the postcards, etc.). About half-way through the book, when Sophie and Alberto are discussing the philosophy of Berkeley (who believed that the only thing we could be certain of were our perceptions and not physical reality, and thus we exist in the mind of God), they discover that they (Sophie and Alberto) are characters in a book that Major Knag is writing for his daughter Hilde-- so they exist only in his and Hilde's imaginations.

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I read this for church, which is a little weird to begin with (it's odd to hear sermons connected or organized based on anything other than the Good Book), and I found it so poorly written and edited that I really struggled with finding much of anything that was spiritually valuable. The basic premise is that Christians have gotten so accustomed to living in the day-to-day life of the world that we've lost sight of the larger Kingdom that we have been invited to be a part of. Tripp expresses this repeatedly by saying that we have shrunk "the size of our lives to the size of our lives", which doesn't work for me because it just seems like a nonsensical tautology. It finally occurred to me that the poor writing is, in part, due to the use of a rhetorical preaching style (which at times shifts into an almost colloquial, conversational style), so that the words on the page might actually communicate something meaningful if they were spoken aloud and accompanied by gestures and facial expressions.

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Mirasol was a beekeeper and woodskeeper until the Master and Chalice of the Willowlands were both suddenly and violently killed, without heir and apprentice. The land chose Mirasol to be the next Chalice, and so she had to step into the official role, second in the Circle, without any training or apprenticeship (and to the apparent dismay of the remaining members of the Circle). The Chalice is a magic user and a cup-bearer who mixes drinks to bind, or connect, or help make decisions, and is part of many rituals of the ruling of the demesne, and who works with the Master of that demesne to protect the land and the people. But the Master that Mirasol must learn to work with is the younger brother of the dead Master, who was sent away to become a Fire Elemental Priest six years ago. The Grand Seneschal sent for him out of desperation, and he returned out of loyalty and responsibility to the land; but he had gone far enough into the priesthood that he is no longer quite human, and certainly looks and moves very strangely, with blackened skin and reddish eyes. However, Mirasol is also different than any other Chalice; usually their magic runs in wine or water, or occasionally milk (and, in ancient, more violent times, occasionally blood); but the power of the Chalice manifests itself in Mirasol's honey and her bees.

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Every night in the small harbor town of Sealey Head, just as the sun goes down, an invisible bell tolls. It's happened every day for as long as any of the inhabitants can remember, and most of the inhabitants don't even notice it anymore. But a few of the younger people are fascinated, or perhaps even obsessed with it-- Judd Cauley, the innkeeper's son; the merchant's daughter, Gwyneth Blair, who sits at her little desk in the attic and writes story after story trying to make sense of the bell; and even a visiting scholar from the city, Mr. Ridley Dow. Emma, who works as a scullery maid at Aislinn House, also knows there is something magical about the place-- ever since she was a child, sometimes the doors in the house open onto a castle in some other place, where she sees a girl near her own age, a princess named Ysabo.

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In a post-apocalyptic California, with the U.S. in political and economic chaos, Lauren Oya Olamina builds a small community called Acorn, where people can live and survive and learn. But for her, this small community is also an opportunity to spread the ideas of the religion of Earthseed, which she created (she feels that rather she discovered it, as something that was already true)-- that "God is change", but change can be shaped and guided, and that humanity has a destiny to go out and take root among the stars, to spread the seed of Earth, which gives a much deeper purpose and a reason for learning almost any field of study, since it is a means to that destiny. Lauren Olamina is the daughter of an African-American preacher, and the novel is bookended with the Biblical story of the parable of the talents-- she remembers one of the last sermons she heard her father preach, on that text, and it ends by quoting the passage.

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