I found that I couldn't relate to the characters--I didn't care about what happened to any of them. The writing was okay. A little sparse, but okay. The plot hung together, but I felt it's purpose was just to be a vehicle for Twelve Hawks' ideas about the role of technology, and about the sheeplike nature of humanity in general.

There are a few things I liked about this book. I think Twelve Hawks had some good points about how people are willing to sacrifice freedom and privacy for a sense of safety. I agree there, but I think Twelve Hawks is far too pessimistic about humanity. It's probably that Twelve Hawks is trying to wake people up to the dangers of sacrificing civil liberties for an illusion of safety, but I have two thoughts about this. 1) He's going to piss people off by portraying people this way and, 2) his solution to the problem--"living off the gird" (I hate that phrase)--is too much like Ludditism for most people.

So, final opinion--good premise, but philosophically pretentious and smug.

When I first started to read the first book, I started to dismiss this series as just ordinary genre fiction. But as I'm getting deeper into it, I'm finding that this series is touching on more important (and occasionally more interesting) issues than Good v. Evil. Plus, barring a few really convenient things where characters show up at just the right time, find just the right object of power, etc., the plots are really riveting and original.

All these good qualities are present in Stone of Tears, the second book in the Sword of Truth series. Again, deep ethical issues are covered in this book. Again, the issue of perspective comes up when two opposing political views clash in an ugly little war. One side is fighting for order in the form of an omnipotent government; the other side is fighting for the right of all groups to govern themselves--even if it means conflict from time to time. Another issue at play here is shorthanded as the Wizard's Second Rule. (The Wizard's First Rule says that people will believe anything they either want to be true, or that they're afraid might be true.) The Wizard's Second Rule says that good intentions can lead to death and disaster, no matter how much you thought you were doing the right thing. Though I thought there was a lot more talking in this book, and it did tend to bog things down at times, I thought that these issues were really well incorporated into the book. I really like that there's a lot more deep thinking here than you would ordinarily find in genre fiction.

The plot of this book still has some remarkably convenient moments (like they do), I thought it did a pretty good job of continuing the series. There were some times that I was itching for the book to just get on with it, and I thought that Richard's (one of the protagonists) half of the series tended to drag. I will say that Richard's part of the story did have a really great ending to it. I'd say more, but I'd probably ruin it for readers making their way through the series.

I am already looking forward to the next part of the series.

I had heard a lot about The Historian before I read it. I had heard that it was a great vampire book, a great horror classic. So that's what I was expecting when I read it. But The Historian isn't a traditional horror novel. Far from it. It seemed to me more like a literary mystery that was using Count Dracula to add a big dread factor to this historical chase. Personally, I think Kostova could have borrowed a few more pages from the horror play book, but as it was, this book is something new for me. I really enjoyed the characters in this book. And I particularly like how Kostova incorporated a lot of historical fact into the novel.

As anyone who has looked at the historical basis for the Dracula myth knows, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula was based on a Romanian prince called Vlad Dracul--Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was a fifteenth century warlord who was considered extremely bloodthirsty in a particularly bloody age in European history. The Historian digs deeper into this history, and presents Vlad as a patriot fighting against the invading Ottomans, who then became a vampire to fight the Turks even after his "death." The characters Paul, Helen, and Rossi track down traces of Dracul after his alleged death in 1477 in letters and folksongs. The bulk of the book is made up of this chase, with Dracula and his minions making occasional appearances to warn off Paul and his friends.

While this book is very well written and well researched, there are a couple of things that bug me about it. In order of magnitude they are: the structure of the book itself, the pacing, and not naming characters. So, first, the structure of the book. This book is told almost complete in retrospect. And there are layers of narration which Kostova chooses to write with all the proper punctuation, which is all very proper but means that there are quotations marks everywhere. My thought is, if you have to obviously mess around with grammar so much, maybe you should rethink how you're writing your story. The Historian is nominally narrated by Paul's daughter, but then she lets Paul narrate through her. And then Paul quote his professor's story. That's three layers of narration. Granted Stoker's Dracula was told in letters and diaries and such, but that was still first person evidence. I think the dread factor would have been much bigger if Kostova had let Paul have all the narration. I really think that would have helped pull me into the story. And, because Paul's daughter, who wasn't born at the time of Paul's adventures with Dracula, you know that things turn out all right. Jumping to the last item on the list (so that I can write spoiler in big letters before I discuss it), Kostova doesn't name certain characters. You pick up most of the major characters names only in the dialogue, when another character addresses them. I never did pick up the daughter's name. Not naming characters makes it hard to keep track of things in my head.

Okay, now for the pacing. SPOILERS AHEAD. SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT ANYTHING RUINED FOR YOU. While all the chasing Dracula through history is very interesting, and kept me reading late at night even though I had to get up early in the morning, I thought the pacing of this book was a little on the slow side. I mean, we didn't even get to meet Dracula face to face until the last two hundred pages or so. (The Historian is 642 pages long, by the way). Until that time, he's just lurking. Even his minions don't get much time on center stage. Like I've said before, this book is mostly the characters going from archive to archive or sitting around hashing out theories. Granted being a historian is not an action-packed profession, but look what Indiana Jones did for archaeology! This is fiction, go ahead a bend the rules of reality a bit. You've already stretched them for a vampire, you might as well go whole hog. :)

OKAY, SPOILERS DONE.

The Twelfth Card is the sixth and latest installment in the Lincoln Rhyme series. This series began with The Bone Collector, which got turned into a pretty good movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. In The Twelfth Card, Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs try to solve a mystery that has its roots in a robbery in the late 1860s.

If you're familiar with Deaver, you'll know that this book is full of twists and turns. There are the usual last minute saves and traps. New evidence, as usual, sends Rhyme, Sachs, and their team barreling down new avenues of investigation. If you're not used to Deaver's books, you may get whiplash. The Twelfth Card is a fun book. I always love how Deaver can turn science into these great mind-bending mysteries. Hist books are like CSI in print. I always have a lot of fun with his books.

I do have one problem with this book, though. Though I am probably the whitest person I know, I don't think Deaver has the black Harlem dialect down. Do Black Vernacular speakers still say "phat"? All the dialect work is soooo self conscious; it tends to derail the book for me. Apart of from that, though, I think this is another fairly well-researched book. I know Deaver has his science down cold, but I think he needs to study dialects a bit more.

I am always amazed at Evanovich's ability to come up with fun, original plots and characters after all this time. Eleven on Top is, obviously, the eleventh book in the series and I think the Stephanie Plum books are just getting better and better. Usually what I find is that series tend to start to collapse under their own weight, that there is so much emotion or unresolved issues hanging over from previous books that it tends to hijack the whole plot. And, while there is emotion and unresolved issues from previous books, it never gets in the way of new, fresh material. (Hurrah!)

Eleven on Top starts out with Stephanie almost back where she started at the beginning--unemployed and with few prospects. As she bounces from one crap job to another, she is chased by a bomb-building maniac from one of her past cases. As usual, hilarity ensues. The men in her life--Morelli and Ranger--put in great appearances. When I was reading this, it was late at night and I had to keep stifling my laughs. I love books that can make me laugh out loud. Sure, the Stephanie Plum books are brain candy, but I adore them. :)

When I read John Connolly's last books, Bad Men and The White Road, I kind of knew that Connolly was started to branch out into usually unexplored terrority for mysteries. While on the surface, both those books and this one, The Black Angel, are nominally mysteries (with detectives, missing persons, murders, etc., etc.), Connolly is starting to root the solutions in the supernatural. In his books, he refers to the preternatural as a "honeycomb world". He writes that this world is sitting on top of a fragile stucture made up of the past, and that evil lives in this world. Connolly's detective, Charlie Parker, has always had an ability to sense the bad things that come out of this world, and it looks like with this book, that knack is getting stronger.

The books starts with the disappearance of a girl, related to the lethal hitman Louis (who is one of Parker's best friends). Because she is a prostitute and a drug addict, no one except Louis and Parker gets really excersized about her going missing, prostitutes being traditional victims in life and in fiction. But when Parker et al go looking for Alice, they encounter something fantastic. In fact, I think who Parker and his friends encounter is a bit of a leap for what has been, heretofore, a really good, literary (but grounded) mystery series. It'll be interesting to see where things go from here.

From hits at the beginning of the book, I knew that Connolly was going to bring in something supernatural. What I didn't know was that Parker was going to get involved with fallen angels. yeah, actual fallen angels from before Genesis. Connolly took the stories of fallen angels from the apocryphal Book of Enoch and, I think a little bit, from Milton's Paradise Lost. In this book, the fallen angels are creature that are so pissed off at God and man that they've spent all of their time on earth bringing a little slice of hell to humanity. In addition to the fallen angels, I learned more about memento mori and ossuaries that I ever really wanted to. Ugh.

But while I thought this book was rather out there, I liked it. I like that Connolly is branching out into trans-genre land. :) As always, this Parker novel is well written and really well researched. It goes without saying that the material in this book is fresh. There is some baggage from pervious novels that might have intruded on the plot--but I think Connolly integrated the scenes where his first wife and daughter haunt his house. But that loose end is still loose. *sigh*

It's going to be interesting to see what Connolly comes up with after this.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep is back, this time to solve the strange murder of an American CIA agent. Mitch Turner is found multilated and very much dead. The last person to see him alive, as far as anyone knows is a prostitute that works in Sonchai's mother's brothel. (Interested, yet?) The investigation starts as a cover-up, then follows the red herring of Al Qaeda, and then ends up in the vicious world of the yakuza. And through it all we have Sonchai's wonderful voice and perspective. It's so refreshing to be taken out of the American world view for a while and see how people think and operate outside of the U.S.

I think that's the best thing about the Bangkok series. I am a long time reader of Western mysteries. So I've gotten very used to following a very linear pursuit for a criminal. I know about the magic three--means, motive and opportunity. It's eins, zwei, build a case, eins, zwei, build a case, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard. So I've started to approach every mystery like that. I've learned to trust physical evidence. Well, like I've said before, Sonchai is a Zen detective. He follows clues, but it seems more like he's interested in seeing that the culprit faces justice--either inside a courtroom or out of it. So, he's not terribly concerned with chains of evidence and such. And while he does interview suspects and witnesses and such, he's always ready to follow what his instincts tell him to do, even if it might not be supported by the physical evidence. This is not to say that he'll chase any old snipe--it just means that he has a gift for seeing what's really going on.

I always enjoy Sonchai's adventures. He has a light, ironic tone that makes me laugh. He addresses the reader directly, which makes me feel like I'm riding his shoulder as he travels Thailand. Burdett, too, is refreshing. All his characters are well drawn and, above all, unique. His plots are also one-of-a-kind. When I read the next novel in the series, I know I am going to see something I have never seen before.

For all you mystery readers out there who are looking for something new to read, I highly recommend these books. Though I will warn you, you will need to have a relaxed attitude about sex, prostitution, transgender/sexuals, and government corruption. If you have an open mind, these book will be a treat for you.

I am starting to revise my opinion of Tim Powers. I have said in the past that he's hard to understand, and that he leaves a lot up to the reader to figure out on their own. Well, I am finding that the more I read Powers the more I understand about his books. It's probably because, now that I know what's going to happen, I am not racing through the book to find out what's going to happen next. I can slow down and enjoy the journey, as it were.

So, my recommendation: Read him twice for the full effect. :)

Like most of Powers' other books, Declare takes an entirely temporal genre--in this case the espionage thriller--and adds a supernatural element. And it may sound strange but it really works. It makes the story fresh and unpredictable. This is probably why I read it so fast in the first place. I was having so much not being able to predict where the story was going. The story begins with Andrew Hale, the protagonist, being recalled to active duty nearly twenty years after the end of World War II. Then the book splits. The story of Andrew's career during WW II is told through flashbacks. The rest is Andrew trying to stop a traitor from giving Communist Russia the supernatural equivalent of the atomic bomb.

I finished reading this book at 3 a.m. last night. I had a lot more fun with this book that I thought I was going to when I was reading the first hundred pages or so. Wizard's First Rule is the first book in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series and, because it's the first book in a very long series (eight books so far and none of them is less than an inch and a half thick, I think), it has a lot of what I call "world building". So, in addition to telling a good story, it also has to create an entire planet in the reader's mind. It has to introduce you to culture, history, custom, as well as plot and characters. I think this is why most epic fantasy series first few hundred pages are hard to get through. But I feel that Wizard's First Rule has more than repaid me for my effort.

Wizard's First Rule is the story of Richard Cypher and his friends' quest to destroy an evil dictator. So far, pretty standard. There is quite a bit of bad genre cliches--the dialogue, convienient coincidences--but there is also a lot of unusual philosophizing. Generally speaking, novels in the fantasy genre set up the good evil conflict and then leave in unanalyzed. They're bad and we're good and that's the end of it. But this book, our hero Richard has to learn about the thorny issues of perspective and intent. There is a lot of gray area in this book. In this book, Good and Evil are a matter of perspective. But there is a minimum of Raskolnikovian agonizing about killing. Which is nice. I don't think I could hand 800 pages of that.

The Drawing of the Dark is another spectacular genre-bending book by Tim Powers. If you aren't familiar with this author, I recommend Last Call and Declare. They're all great. And they all take what might be an otherwise fairly good genre�-historical fiction, espionage thriller, gambler novel-�add a healthy dollop of the supernatural or fantastic and let it percolate until you get an amazing story that will keep you glued to its pages and then defy you to try and describe it to your friends. I always have a good time with Powers.

The Drawing of the Dark is one of Powers' first books. In fact, it's been re-released because of the popularity of his later books. The book opens as sultan Suleiman the Magnificent is preparing to conquer the west, and he is moving his armies towards Vienna. The Drawing of the Dark centers on an Irish mercenary in the sixteenth century, named Brian Duffy. When we meet Duffy, he is getting on in years and when an elderly Viennese innkeeper asks him to be the bouncer at his Vienna inn, Duffy thinks it�s the perfect job for the end of his career.

And then things get weird.

As Duffy travels to Vienna, he starts to see creatures out of myth�-demons, gods, trolls�-and some things that never made it into the story. This is where this novel starts to depart what would have been a fairly good work of historical fiction and starts to become something in a whole new genre. As the story goes on, we learn that the coming battle between the Ottoman Empire and the West at Vienna is really a battle to save the West's Fisher King and, with him, all that its good in the West.

This book is a great introduction to Powers' books. In fact, I really recommend that you start with this book before you try Declare, Last Call, or The Anubis Gates. It's not that these books are related to each other, it's that they all share what I've started to see as a hallmark of Powers' writing. Powers really relies on the reader's ability to pick up his very subtle clues about what's going on on the supernatural side of things. He's counting on what you know about myth and the preternatural to explain the background of the book. There's more explaining in The Drawing of the Dark than there is in his later books.

There's something about the way some Brits write that has me giggling every few pages. Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Bill Bryson (I know he's American but the 20 years he spent in Britain have given him a very English turn of phrase) all have my chuckling as I read. I've always been on the look out for author's who can turn anything into an original joke, originally expressed. And now I can add another author to my lamentably short list: Stephen Clarke.

I picked up Clarke's book, A Year in the Merde mostly because of the title. But what confirmed it for me was the phrase �cheese-eating surrender monkeys� in the book jacket. A Year in the Merde is the story of a young Englishman, Paul West, who has been invited to come and work for a French company that's going to open a chain of English-style tearooms around Paris. But the plot always takes a back seat to the comedy of errors that West lives through as he tries to make his way around Paris. There are hilarious linguistic and cultural misadventures as West tries to woo French women, order normal-sized food, and find a place to live.

This is, I believe, the first full length work of non-fiction Vowell has done. Normally, she writes essays. Her last two books, Take the Cannoli and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, were collections of really spot-on essays about life in America, the author�s childhood and relationships, culture, etc. I highly recommend both of these books.

Assassination Vacation is a book in about four parts. In it, Vowell travels that country visiting historic sites associated with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Along the way, I think, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about each of these three presidents and their assassins (Booth, Guiteau, and Czolgosz, respectively). After a while, I started to feel like A.J. Jacobs, the man who read the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica a year or two ago. I had so many facts crammed into my head over such a short period of time that I found myself reeling off trivia whenever someone I knew came �round.

I saw Vowell on The Daily Show last week, when she went on to talk about her book. She said that there was a lot of difference between essay writing and book writing. She said something to the effect that essays have to be so polished, with no unnecessary words in them. But with the book, she said that she felt free to explore whatever themes and ideas she felt like. (Or something like that. If I�d known I�d be quoting her a week after the fact, I would have taken notes. Tcha.)

Of course, the problem with this is that it tends to amplify something about Vowell�s writing to the point where it gets rather irritating. Vowell likes to cram in asides in her writing. There are complex clauses everywhere. Dashes and parentheses litter her pages. It�s like she has so much to say that she can�t wait to end the sentence to get it in. I kind of like this, because it�s the way I think and talk. I sometimes can�t wait to get the end of a sentence before I can stick in a funny little addendum. However, when you have infinite space to indulge yourself, it starts to get hard to keep track of each train of thought because this tendency to cram in words also translates to idea and concepts and theories. So it�s fun, but man, it gets exhausting after a while.

In Pope Joan, Donna Woolfolk Cross has taken the apocryphal story of a female pope and turned it into a very readable novel. I surprised myself by reading this 400-odd page book in about six hours. (And I even went to work that day!) Pope Joan is the story of a young girl blessed (or cursed) with a brilliant mind and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. She is also very naive. Her naivté Is always getting her in trouble because she will pursue an idea to the point of heresy, to the horror and dismay of others.

While the novel traces Joan�s life as far back as her birth, it really starts to take off after Joan disguises herself as her dead brother and takes his place at a monastery and then goes on pilgrimage to Rome when she is in her late twenties. Once there, naive Joan, called John Anglicus, finds herself in a very un-holy Papal Palace. The Holy See is basically a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. As I read it, I felt the last vestiges of Lutheranism in me start to go all righteous like they wanted to go pin a note on a church door somewhere.

Eventually, Joan becomes so popular with the people of Rome and significant part of the Church that she is elected Pope�and still no one has noticed that she is female, though she has spent the bulk of her life in the company of men. Cloistered men to be sure (�scuze the pun), but you would have thought that someone would have noticed something by this point.

I think what I really like about this book was Cross� exploration of medieval life, and medieval education in particular. Though it�s easy to pass off the medieval mind as superstitious, uneducated, a pale shadow of Roman and Greek minds, medieval students and monks were taught very sophisticated philosophy, rhetoric and theology. Though we may not think these subjects are terribly important today, they really taught people how to think, how to puzzle through things, and how to argue their point forcefully and coherently. It�s from the medieval education system that we have the concept of a liberal education (liberal meaning open minded). The first universities in Europe appeared in 1200s. I�m not sure if this was Cross� dominant point, but I think it�s a great lesson and a great issue for a novel.

Apart from my inability to accept that Joan could go so long as a man with no one discovering the truth about, there is one other thing I don�t like about this book. The thing I don�t like is the author�s note that�s at the end of the book. In it, Cross writes a very uneven historical note about the possibility of a female pope. She spends a lot of time talking about how we don�t know if there was one, if there could have been on and so on. She even brings up that fact that the whole story could have been made up by Protestants and other anti-Catholics. All this made me think that she was going to end with a few paragraphs about how this was a work of fiction, etc., but she didn�t. Instead she makes the somewhat ludicrous point that, even though it�s probably not possible that�s no reason that Joan or someone like her couldn�t have been pope. Despite it�s unlikeliness, it�s as though Cross might believe in a female pope right up until definitive proof that there wasn�t such a pope.

It seems to me that both of Laurell K. Hamilton�s series have turned into soap operas. Both the Anita Blake series and the Merry Gentry series have lost a bit of their edge. The Anita Blake books used to be action packed, wonderfully varied and imaginative. And the Gentry books, if they ever had an edge, have gone the way on the Blake books. The plots are stretched out over several books�with nothing much happening in any of them. The characters are stuck in ruts they created a couple of books back. Both series need to do something different. As it is, all that�s left is very clinical sex and a lot of politics.

All of this is particularly apparent to me in A Stroke of Midnight, the latest Merry Gentry book. The plot can be summed up thusly: a murder, some sex, an argument with the Queen of Air and Darkess, some more sex, a little more sex, another argument with the Queen, and then...a bloody cliffhanger. I didn�t know the book world had a sweeps week. Christ.

While the murder that kicked the book off does get solved, it still seems like nothing much has been accomplished in this book. There is so much left up in the air at the end that this feels like only part of a book.

I think that Bad Men marks another step towards the supernatural and horror for John Connolly. When I started reading him (four books ago), he wrote great, noirish mystery novels featuring Charlie Parker and his somewhat left of the law friends, Angel and Louis. But I noticed that as the novels progressed, what started as Parker�s intuition for things was turning into a kind of sense for the supernatural. The crimes in the books took on a more and more preternatural cast. Bad Men is a stand-alone book�and it is a full-blown horror novel.

Bad Men starts with a prologue set about 400 years ago. It described a massacre of settlers on the Maine (or what would become Maine) island of Sanctuary, also called Dutch Island. After the massacre, the island seems tainted by the violence. The landscape gets kind of warped by it. Bogs grow and shrink unnaturally and weeds overgrow and reveal trails. And it seems that the island has a way of getting rid of the violent, killing wife beaters and poachers and no-counts in bizarre, unexplainable accidents. At times, I think that the setting is more interesting that the plot.

As the story moves on, it becomes clear that the island is gearing up for a showdown with the evil that warped it 400 years ago. A man named Edward Moloch, who may be a reincarnation of the man who instigated the massacre (though this isn�t stated explicitly), escapes from jail and goes after his wife who now lives on Sanctuary. As Moloch comes closer to the island, the weirdness factor on the island increases. It builds and builds until the last forty pages or so, when the books comes to its startling and bittersweet end.

If Carlos Ruiz Zafón�s The Shadow of the Wind weren�t so well written, I would have said this book didn�t know what it wanted to be. At the beginning, I thought it was going to be another literary book mystery, with a vaguely described but strangely important book at the center of the plot, like Ian Caldwell�s The Rule of Four or Arturo Pérez-Reverte�s The Club Dumas. But from there, The Shadow of the Wind starts roaming across genres. It goes from literary coming-of-age story to mystery, to a war novel, to a thriller, with brief stops at love story along the way. While the beginning is kind of sedate, the ending is a fantastic and suspenseful climax. I never saw that kind of ending when I picked this book up.

This book begins with a bookseller taking his son to the Cemetery of Lost Books and tells him to choose one book to adopt. The boy, Daniel, chooses a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Julían Carax. He takes the book home and falls in love with in. So the next day, he goes out and tries to find more of Carax�s books to read. But he discovers that someone is going around destroying Carax�s books. Daniel then starts to try and find out more about Carax. He starts to track down people who knew Carax and along with Daniel, we get more and more pieces of the puzzle of why someone might want to destroy a well-written, but otherwise ordinary horror novel. As we travel with Daniel through the streets of Barcelona and Carax�s past, we learn what really happened to the author and what created the monster that is destroying his books.

The Last Kingdom is the first book in a projected series by Bernard Cornwell about the earliest days of Britain, the invasion of the Danes in the mid-800s, and the establishment of the Danelaw. Cornwell takes pains to recreate the world of the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes. He even goes so far as to refer to all the city and town names by their Anglo-Saxon names. Bath becomes Baþum (or it would if it were spelled right, but I�ll get to that later), York becomes Eoferwic, and Devonshire becomes Defnascir.

The Last Kingdom is narrated by Uhtred, a Northumbrian heir who spends most of the novel going back and forth from the Norse side to the English side. Uhtred travels the length of the land, fighting, falling in love, fighting, avoiding priests, fighting, and learning about Norse and English culture. It�s kind of nice that Cornwell is doing his best to give us both sides of the story, but we get to see so much of the good and the bad of both sides that it�s hard to find a side to root for.

One of the interesting things about this book is its portrait of Alfred the Great. Alfred the Great is the only British monarch to get �the Great� tacked on to his name. After reading Cornwell�s account of him in The Last Kingdom, I really have to wonder why. In this book, probably because of Uhtred�s prejudices, Alfred gets portrayed as an über-pietist, always going to �wear out his knees� in prayer. But Uhtred also acknowledges Alfred�s talent for politics and war. It�s a little contradictory, and it makes it a little hard to see how Alfred managed to save Wessex (his kingdom, as well as the one this book is named for) from Danish control.

On the whole, I thought this was a pretty good read. The plot moves fairly quickly and you don�t get bogged down. The characters are a little flat, but the book jerked around a little too much for me to really get a fix on anyone. This book also does a good job of the history. The Danes do not wear horned helmets, for one, and the Englishmen only rarely pray to be delivered from �the fury of the Northmen.� Cornwell, while he doesn�t create really deep characters, doesn�t rely on stereotypes for characters. With the except of two problems that really bugged me, I think this is a perfectly serviceable work of historical fiction�though it�s not a classic.

I don�t know about other readers, but I have a pet peeve when it comes to historical fiction. If I spot an error�a verifiable error�it r eally bothers me and makes me start to question the other historical facts that show up in the book. And when those errors are repeated... it starts to make be angry. There are two such problems in this book. Both are language problems. And both could be remedied by looking in any book about either Old English or the history of the English language. The first problem, which is repeated throughout the book, is the use of ð for þ. Both are two extra letters that English had before the Norman invasion. They are both the �th� sound, but they are pronounced differently. The ð �th� is pronounced like the �th� in there, them, the, etc. The þ �th� is pronounced like the �th� in bath, three, and theater. In fact, the name of that character is �thorn.� Throughout the book, Bath�s Anglo- Saxon name is constantly misspelled as Bathðum. The other language problem is minor. It�s just one character mispronouncing another character�s name when he shouldn�t have mispronounced it in the first place. (The name Kjarten is mispronounced with a �j� sound like in �just� instead of a �y� sound.) I maintain that the �j� sound and letter didn�t show up in English until after the Normans.

Okay, end pedantic mode. Sorry. It�s just that it really bugs me that Cornwell messed up this kind of minor thing when he clearly spent so much time researching the Anglo-Saxon and Norse worlds.

Whew. I feel like I just had a semester�s (or even year�s) worth of Russian history crammed into my head over the last week. Actually, it took me nine day�s to finish the 945 page behemoth, Russka by Edward Rutherfurd. Like all of Rutherfurd�s novels, this novel followed three families through history in a particular place, using them and their setting as a microcosm of an entire nation and people. He�s done this for Salisbury Plain in Britain (Sarum), London (in an eponymous book), the New Forest in Britian (The Forest).

Russka spans about 1900 years of Russian history. It begins in 180 A.D., before there were really any Russians. It covers the Tatar invasion and empire, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars and, naturally, the Russian Revolution. Come to think on it, 945 pages is probably not enough for that much history. Rutherfurd manages to cram all this history in by breaking things down into short(ish) stories at key points in Russian history. And in each story, you see another piece of Russian culture fall into place. I have noticed that Rutherfurd tends to sum up what I think are really deep issues in the Russian psyche a little too neatly. It�s like he wants to tell the reader this is where X idea comes from. It�s just too neat for me. Afterall, Winston Churchill called �a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.� No offense to Rutherfurd, but if Churchill can�t figure them out...

A strange thing I noticed was that I what I would have though were fairly critical periods in Russian history were skimmed over here. Napoleon�s invasion only got a few pages. The Crimean War got a few more, but only because plot stuff happened there. The civil war that followed the Revolution was not discussed in depth. And World War II only got mentioned when a character returned home from it. That was it. It was kind of like Rutherfurd was making a sprint for the end when it came into view. And those where the parts of Russian history I would have really liked to know more about. Natch.

Another thing that bugged me about this book is the way that the march of history tends to hijack the character and plot part of the book. Constantly. Now, I probably should have seen this coming, but it irritated me the way the Rutherfurd would jump out of the narrative to point out what�s coming or to explain some point of language or philosophy. I wanted to tell Rutherfurd to write fiction or write non-fiction, but please don�t try to do both the way he�s doing it here. Maybe it�s just Rutherfurd�s style, but I would have liked a more subtle approach.

Every time I read Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible I get something new from it. In the past, I have been left with ideas about family dynamics (especially parent-child relationships), the causes and effects of guilt, the contrast between the Western and post-colonial worlds, the gender dynamic and so on. This time, the two ideas that have stuck with me are: the seeming inability of people to really understand other cultures, and the possibility of forgiveness.

But before I get into all that, here is a little plot synopsis. I've often referred to this novel as the white people's version of Things Fall Apart, a novel by Chinua Achebe. In 1959, an American family from Georgia moves to the Belgian Congo to do missionary work. The father, Nathan Price, is a very religious Baptist who uses the Bible to punish his children. The mother, Orleanna, is a woman who has lost herself to her family. In a chapter near the end, she says that she has been conquered by her husband and his dream. There are four daughters. The oldest, Rachel, is a wannabe beauty queen who remains amazingly ignorant and naive all through her life, no matter what happens to her. Leah, the second oldest, is strong and vulnerable at the same time. She wants to please, but she resents the people she most wants to please sometimes. Adah, Leah's twin and my favorite character, is a strange, mostly silent commentator on the situation. To use Emily Dickenson's words, as Adah does, she tells the truth, "but tells it slant." Ruth May, the youngest, is so young that it's hard for me to get a fix on her. But she is a critical character. You're going to have to take my word for it because if I tell you more, I'll give away important parts of the plot.

The Price family is assigned to the small village of Kilanga. Things go from bad to worse and Nathan tries to force his religion onto the villagers and his family. The family endures famine, revolution, disease, and death. Sounds kind of plot heavy, doesn't it? But there is an amazing emotional depth to this book. It will make you laugh and it might make you cry. It will probably make you angry. Like all good book, The Poisonwood Bible will give you a lot to think about after you're finished.

This time, when I read the book, two things have stuck with me, as I've said. The first issue is the one of cultural understanding. Linguistic understanding kind of falls under things. But one of the things that starts the downward spiral of this book is the fact that the Price family can't ever really understand the people of the Congo or the land. This books is full of not only mistranslations, but culture clashes. Though Adah, Leah, and Ruth May do make efforts to join in village life, they keep hitting obstacles when they discover a cultural idea or custom that they just can't understand. Rachel and Nathan just barrel through the book, trying to reshape things without even bothering to learn about the other cultures around them. The second things that struck me is the nature of forgiveness. Guilt and forgiveness and atonement are big issues in ths book, and one of the great things about this book is that you get to see the whole life cycle of forgiveness and how the different characters deal with wrongs.

Like all the other books about child abuse I've read, Greg Iles' Blood Memory is a hard book to read. As well as being a really hard subject to deal with, I really thought that it overwhelmed the story in places. Apart from this probably unavoidable problem, I really enjoyed this latest book from Iles.

Blood Memory is really two stories, I think. It's about a series of grisly serial murders that the protagonist, Cat Ferry, is helping to solve. And it's also about the twenty year old murder of Cat's father. But that's an oversimplified way of saying it, really. The book starts with the first plot, with Cat being called in to examine so bite marks. But when she passes out over a body, the people in charge of the case send her home. In retreat, Cat goes all the way home, to her childhood home. When she accidentally discovers some twenty year old blood stains, she starts her own investigation into her fathers death. As the novel moves along, we�and Cat�get more pieces of these two stories, until we get the whole picture. We and Cat have to discern who is lying, who is telling the truth, what the evidence means. I've always enjoyed books like this, where you feel like you're in the book this way.

However, as I said earlier, this second plot, which centers around child abuse takes over the book at times. It's the more dynamic, deeper, interesting plot I think. And, because of the way the novel played out, we ended up spending a lot more time with this second plot. It was easy to forget about the first plot because we were so removed from it. There were point in this novel where it felt like I was being jerked back and forth between the plots.

Another problem I had with this novel was that I had a hard time being sympathetic to Cat sometimes. SMALL SPOILER COMING UP. Near the beginning of the novel, Cat reveals that she's pregnant. But she's also an alcoholic and she has this very dangerous hobby called free diving. So, she's constantly craving alcohol and sometimes she indulges. Then there's the free diving. It's basically diving under the power of your own lungs�no respirator, no snorkel, no nothing. At one point, she spends five minutes at the bottom of a pool with a rock on her chest. I'm not a gynaecologist or a pediatrician, but that can't be good. I have always found it hard to be sympathetic to self-destructive characters that know better. Sure, I know alcoholism is a disease, but that's just how I am. OKAY, SPOILER OVER.

I first read Good Omens when I was in high school. I have read this book at least once ever year since then. Every time I read it, I get something new from it. And it always makes me laugh. This time, I kind of read it to cleanse my palate, as it were, after I read Greg Iles' Blood Memory. I needed a laugh after I read that book.

The first thing I have to say about this book is, who would have thought that the Apocalypse could be funny? When a friend first handed me this book, back before I had read any of the Discworld books or Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, I had no idea what to expect. I know that I wasn't expecting the runaway metaphors and analogies, the multitude of cultural references, and I wasn't expecting the silliness and chuckle-inducing funniness of this book. And, I also wasn't expecting such a different take on the question of good, evil and humanity. You might pick this book up expecting a laugh, you'll get a lot of questions about religion and human nature along with it.

This is a spectacular book. It's very well written. Gaiman and Pratchett's voices blend together very well. If you're familiar with both author's personal styles, you might be able to pick up who's idea was what. This book is so good that I really wish that Pratchett and Gaiman would team up again.

The Egyptolist is a wonderfully constructed story. I think the last book I read that was written in letters and diaries was Dracula. You just don't see that very often because it's so hard to write action convincingly that way. But here it works. The Egyptologist is told primarily by two characters, Harold Ferrell, an Australian detective, and Ralph Trilipush, the Egyptologist, who each get to tell the story from their own perspective. It's like two stories in one. And neither of the narrators is very reliable.

The thing about this book is that you, the reader, have a job of work to do in reading this book. Because there are two first person perspective narratives going on here, you have a lot of filtering and evaluating to do. You have to keep asking yourself, what is really going on? You have to add these two stories together and try to come up with four, which at times is really hard. I noticed a lot of times when I thought I was started to get a handle on what was really going on and who was lying, about what, and why�and then someone would say or do something and it would completely throw me off track. Rest assured, though, all will be revealed at the end. Thank God for those last two dozen pages or so. I would have been pissed if the book ended without a complete resolution.

When I first started reading this, I thought I was going to be annoyed and/or disappointed with it. It was hard to get a handle on the characters and the plot, but I got completely sucked into this book. I was amazed at the talent that Phillips displayed in writing this book. Not only are the characters great and the plot well thought out and quick paced, but it was skillfully written. I can only imagine how hard it is to write a novel in letters, diaries and telegrams. In addition, it's one of the most intellectually interesting and stimulating book I've read since I graduated from college. :)

A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All is great mind candy. It's an easy, entertaining read about Jacobs' attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in order to stop his perceive decline into idiocy. In addition to little facts that he gleans from the encyclopedia, Jacobs also shares what is happening in his life in the year and several months it takes him to finish the dictionary.

There are two things that I really like about this book. The first is the humor that Jacobs has about himself and the things he learns from the encyclopedia. He made me laugh out loud several times. I love a good joke that involves a cultural reference. Some of this book was so funny that I just had to quote it to whatever friend or family member was closest. The second things that I like about this book is Jacobs' thoughts about intelligence and knowledge. Whenever the information overload seems to be getting to Jacobs, he'll pull back and reflect on his quest. He talks about the difference between book-learning and learning from experience, Mensa, and so on.

This is a fun, well written book. If you get the humor behind this, I think you'll enjoy this book.

Prince of Fire is a return to the first book in the Gabriel Allon series, The Kill Artist. Gabriel is again pulled out of a peaceful retirement to once again chase down and kill Palestinian terrorists. (The three books between The Kill Artist and Prince of Fire form what Silva himself calls an accidental trilogy about the "unfinished business of the Holocaust" ("Author's Note" in A Death in Vienna, p. 397). In this book, Gabriel must track down the man who blew up the Israeli embassy in Rome and, at the same time, blew Gabriel's cover. Gabriel and his team must find the man behind the attacks before another, bigger attack takes place. In addition, the terrorists kidnap Gabriel's wife and threaten to kill her if Gabriel refuses to play their game.

In this novel, the Arab-Israeli conflict plays a central role�as you'd imagine from the above paragraph. As well as following the plot, the reader also gets to see both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict get their say�something I really like. Too often, I feel, we get one side or the other of this story. I think you need to hear and consider both sides before you can even begin to understand what is being fought for and died for in Israel. Even then, I sometimes wonder if you have to have lived in Israel to understand. In this book, Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers get their say. Palestinian terrorists and refugees get their say. In places, you really get a sense of despair because there just doesn't seem to be a peaceful solution to the problem of Israel.

There was one weird things in this novel. Yasir Arafat is a major supporting character in this novel, which came out February 22. Arafat was alive when Silva wrote this book, but I'm sure that Prince of Fire had been sent to the publishers before or around the time Arafat died. It's strange, to read a book when you know for a fact that this person is now dead. Talk about bad timing.

First, I need to say that you need a really well developed sense of the absurd and the silly to really appreciate this book. If whimsy is your thing, then I really recommend this book. If you don't like silliness, then you should probably skip it and the three other books in this series.

The Well of Lost Plots is the third Thursday Next novel. It takes place in an alternate world were policemen travel through time, the Crimean War was fought until the late 1970s, dodoes are common pets and authors are like rock starts. (See what I mean?) The plot of this book takes place mostly inside of books. Characters from Dickens, Shakespeare, and Romance novels all take part in the plot. I'd talk more about the plot, but I know from experience that it would take me longer to explain in than it would for you to just read the book.

This is, I think one of my favorite books of the series. I got completely wrapped up in the action and laughed every couple of pages. One of the things I love about this series is the number of jokes mixed into the plot. In order to get the jokes though, you need to have a very good knowledge of literature�characters, plots, conventions. You also need to know about the mechanics and peculiarities of the English language.

Sometimes I think this series was tailor-made for me. :)

Tom Robbin�s Jitterbug Perfume is a book that will leave you with a lot to think about after you�re done with it. There are a lot of ideas in those 342 pages. They range from the importance of fragrances, Buddhist philosophies, immortality, sex and more. In addition to this barrage of ideas, the plot shifts from ancient Bohemia and India to modern New Orleans, Seattle and Paris. There are millennia-old characters, voodoo perfumers, monks, kings and lesbians. This is novel gumbo.

At first, I wasn�t sure if I liked this book. I mean, can you really write a novel where so much of the plot depends on a smell? I�ve been thinking about it since I finished the book (see what I mean about this book?), but the only way to really describe a smell is in terms of another smell. What does it smell like, well it�s...lemony? Think about it. How often do you describe a smell by comparing it to another smell? This book should have been a scratch-and-sniff.

One of the best features on this book, I think, are the ideas. I particularly like the opinions the character Alobar has for Buddhism. I remember thinking some of those thoughts when I took an Asian Philosophy course in college. This book moves wonderfully from idea to idea. They just run right into each other. But I found myself thinking at some points, how the hell did we end up here? The plot moves the same way as the ideas in this book. They run right into each other and you end up in some totally unforeseen places.

Robert Harris' Pompeii is one of the best works of historical fiction that I have read in a long time. Often, I find little anachronisms or historical errors that cause me to completely lose faith in the author and the narrative. It's unfortunate, but really, if you're going to write historical fiction you should take the time to get it right. In my opinion, historical novels are so much better when they're carefully and thoughtfully researched.

Of course, now someone is probably going to find something wrong with something I've written here and feel the same way towards me that I have felt towards those authors. Natch.

That being said, I find Pompeii to be very well researched. This account of the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius is very well done. Not only does he get the facts right, but he describes them in such a way that you almost feel like you�re there in Pompeii or Herculaneum, dodging ash and rock. In addition, the portrait Harris paints of Roman life at the time is wonderful. The characters are very well-drawn--three dimensional and very accurate, historically. They don�t feel like pawns that the author put in the way of the mountain just to make things interesting. Another great thing about this book are the very helpful quotes at the beginning of each chapter that Harris took from various geology and volcanology texts. In addition to explaining what is happing under and in Vesuvius before and during the eruption, but they also help to add to the tension of the novel.

One problem I do have with the book is the plot. It�s not that the plot is bad. It�s actually quite good. The plot of the novel centers on a lot of missing money and a damaged aqueduct. In any other setting, this plot would do quite well. It�s just that we, the readers, know that Mount Vesuvius is going to erupt and wipe out the whole area. For those who know their history, this is more than enough tension. At times, the plot feels like something Harris gives the characters to do while we�re waiting for the volcano to erupt. So, while the main character, Marcus Attilius, is trying to find out why the aqueduct that runs across Vesuvius isn�t working, you kind of feel like shouting at the characters, �Run for it, idiots!�

Tami Hoag is one of my favorite writers. I have all but one book I have read by her. Sure, it's brain candy but I really enjoy that you get two books in one. You get a mystery and you get a love story. Okay, a romance. But the plots usually wrap around each other in such a way that they enhance each other and improve the quality of the whole book. They might not be able to stand on their own, but together they're a lot of fun.

Well, after reading Kill the Messenger I am going to be a little leery about picking up the next one.

Kill the Messenger felt like half a novel to me. I kept waiting for the love story to show up, and it almost did a couple of times, but it never kicked in. Now, I understand that authors often want to try new things with their books, that they don't want to do the same thing over and over. But that�s not really the problem here. The problem is that the mystery plot wasn�t good enough for me to make up for the lack of the love story. It didn�t interest me. It was convoluted. I couldn't really identify with the characters. I thought the messenger character was a whiner and an idiot and the detective was oh so close to being a good hero-with-a-flaw but he never quite make it. This just didn�t seem to work.

Is it just me, or is Pratchett getting a little darker with each book he writes? I started to notice it in Night Watch, and I really started to notice it in Monstrous Regiment, his two previous books. Normally, Pratchett is known for his hysterically funny style and viewpoint, but it seems like lately, the humor has kind of fallen by the wayside.

Going Postal is, as you'd expect, a novel about the mail. And, like all of our mundane systems and services, it gets warped when Pratchett gets ahold of it an transports it to the Discworld. (Those of you who are familiar with Discworld know what I'm talking about; those of you who don't I advise to go buy Jingo or The Truth for a great introduction to what this world is all about. Essentially, these books are satire that doesn't sting as much as it normally does.) In this novel, not-so-young criminal and con man Moist van Lipwig (you just can't make these names up) is offered the choice of running Ankh-Morpork's mail service or hanging. He chooses the mail. Thus begins a bizarre adventure in which mail talks, the postal service is resurrected, and a con man reluctantly becomes a force for good.

This is the fourth book in the Jack Reacher series and this time Reacher has to confront two enemies, one an extremely clever serial murderer and the other his own wanderlust. One the one hand, this is another great episode in Reacher's story, but on the other hand I think that Child is stretching his reader's credulity a little far.

The wanderlust conflict develops slowly over the course of the novel. Reacher feels committed to his girlfriend, loves her a lot, and really wants her to stay. But he feels confined and he wants to "escape." At the end of the novel, he is forced to choose between the two.

As for his conflict with the serial murderer, Reacher has to discover the identity of a killer who uses the bizarrest method of killing someone I have ever come across, and I have read a lot of mysteries. I don't think it's possible to kill someone the way the killer did. I also think it's way over the top. Normally, Child's plots are very logical and very plausible. But this one is just out there.

This book is Bryson's written documentary of his last grand tour of England, which he took just before he moved his family to America. Bryson is an American, but he's lived in England for about 20 years. He though he would take one last tour around Great Britain before he said good-bye.

I really like this book. It's filled with a lot of genuinely funny accidents and observations about Britain and life in Britain. It's clear that Bryson loves his adopted country, and is somewhat reluctant to leave. Personally, I would recommend this book to people who are looking for something funny to read, as well as to people who would like to read travel books about England.

There is one big problem with this book. And I've noticed that the same problem comes up in his other travel books, like In a Sunburned Country (about Australia) and Neither Here Nor There (about Europe). The problem is that Bryson tends to rant about the architecture of the places he visits. He despises modern style buildings. Every dozen pages or so, it seems like he's on another rant about "ugly buildings" and historical buildings being knocked down to make room for these new buildings. I think part of the problem (if not a major part of the problem) is that, as a travler, Bryson starts to view places like a big amusement park that is only there for the benefit of travelers. It's like he expected everyone to make things look "authentic" and only build things that fit the "theme."

It's not that I don't buy Cornwell's theory that artist Walter Richard Sickert was Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer of 1880s London, it's that I'm not totally convinced he was. I think she wrote this book the wrong way. Maybe if she'd presented the information in a different way, I would have bought it. I do think that Sickert is a very likely suspect, but I don't think Cornwell built her case very well.

I found several things to be wrong with this book. The first thing that struck me was how un-chronological it was. She was all over the place, time-wise. She'd jump back and forth between the murders, took verbal side trips and then wander back to the point. A couple of timelines would have helped. A timeline of the Ripper murders and another of Sickert's life would have really helped me keep track of what was going on. The second thing that struck me was that Cornwell seemed to rely a lot on Sickert's personality to condemn him. Okay, I think he was an eccentric, arrogant bastard, but does that mean he was the Ripper? Sure, it makes it possible, but it doesn't convince me. The third thing that struck me is that Cornwell spend a lot of time blaming the Metropolitan Police of the era for things that are obvious--in hindsight. Another related problem is that she took a couple of detours to, I hate to say it, brag about what a modern police force would have done. It's a pointless and irritating exercise. These three major problems made this book much less convincing than it could have been.

I think this book could have been a lot better if Cornwell had built her case step by step, going from more circumstantial evidence to more and more damning evidence. As it was, she jumped around so much it was hard to see the facts in all the speculation.

This book is the first in the Jack Reacher series. It sets up that pattern that the Reacher books follow for the first few books. We meet Reacher, something totally unexpected happens, and then Reacher gets caught up in a mystery where he delivers his own brand of justice.

In this book, the mystery starts with Reacher being arrested for murder part way through breakfast in a town he's just passing through. This book is kind of two stories in one. One plot is Reacher dealing with his brother's death. The second part of it is Reacher figuring out what is going on in the out of the way town of Margrave, Georgia--a town where people are being murdered every few dozen pages.

This the second Jack Reacher book. In this book, Reacher is kidnapped along with an FBI agent by a radical militia group who want to secede from the United States. Reacher is just caught up in the action and has to stop the militia and save his fellow kidnappee's life. Like all of Reacher's opponents, the leader of the militia is a crafty, original thinker and the tension this produces in the plot is fantastic. Like the other Reacher books, this one is hard to put down until the end.

This is the third Jack Reacher book. In this book, Reacher is dealing with two issues that don't become related until near the end of the book. Effectively, this book is structured around multiple plots that on't meet up until the end. You have to bear with it and trust that it all becomes relevant. (It does. :) )

In this book, Reacher has to protect the long lost love of his life from men who want to kill her for unknown reasons. He also gets involved in tracking down a Vietnam MIA who may or may not have died in Vietnam. Along side this is a plot involving an extremely sadistic, unscrupulous, and intelligent moneylender who shares the name of the MIA Reacher is tracking down. These plots run concurrent to Reacher until they intersect spectacularly near the end of the book.

Persuader is the seventh book in Child's series about a wandering, ex-MP (Military Policemen) named Jack Reacher. And this book made me fall in love with Reacher all over again. While the mysteries Reacher encounters are always stellar, it's Reacher that really makes these books worthwhile. He's a force for good, but he doesn't always play by the rules. He's one of the few vigilantes that I root for.

Persuader is another great addition to the Reacher series. The mystery is well-developed, plausible, suspenseful and interesting. It builds and builds into a violent but just showdown between Reacher and an old enemy. The solution to the puzzle is laid out in clues along the way, and Reacher has to put them together in order to find and kill his old enemy.

The Enemy is the eight book in the Jack Reacher series. It does something different than all the other Reacher books. All of the books to this point are parts of Reacher's life after he left the army. The Enemy is the first book that deals with a case that takes place while Reacher was still in.

For someone who reads mysteries from the Western world, Bangkok 8 is a completely different experience. The closest you might get to Sonchai Jitpleecheep (the detective protagonist) in Western mysteries is Nick Fourcade, Tami Hoag's Zen detective. Thailand and Bangkok are a completely different world, and the people have a completely different way of experiencing the world. This was a plus and a minus for me. It was exotic enough that I was fascinated throughout the book. But it was hard to understand motives and the plot sometimes.

Bangkok 8 is about Detective Jitpleecheep's attempts to find who purposefully killed an American Marine and who also unintentionally killed his partner. Jitpleecheep doesn't just want to see them punished--he wants revenge. He gets partnered with an American FBI agent and the two of them follow the clues and puzzle out the very strange killing. (The murder weapon is snakes.)

Along the way, Jitpleecheep ponders karma. Karma is everywhere in his world. While his American partner is looking for physical evidence, Jitpleecheep stays mostly in his own head and tried to think his way through the motive.

The ending of the book is brilliant. It turns everything on its head and still manages to bring all the loose threads together.

I didn't like this book nearly as much as I thought I was going to. I'd seen the movie a while ago and, apart from muting the bits where the characters were singing Peking Opera, I liked it. A few years after that I bought the book, but I am quite disappointed in the book.

Farewell My Concubine is the story of two Peking Opera singers. As in early English drama, all the parts are played by men. The two men in this story are trained to play the male and female leads in the operas. The female lead player, Cheng Dieyi, falls in love with his co-star, Duan Xiaolou. Duan is married, however, and isn't homosexual. The story follows this lopsided triangle through the history of China in the twentieth century. Cheng and Duan met ten years after the Qing Empire fell, perform through the Nationalist period and World War II, and up to the Cultural Revolution. The book ends in Hong Kong, when the men meet again after been sent to labor camps.

While the story is interesting in concept, it didn't have near the depth it might have had. The story seems very shallow to me. It's like it just looked at the surface of things. It jumps from event to event with minimal linking and without really exploring the characters. The ending is extremely abrupt. It was so abrupt that when I went to turn the page I was surprised to see I had already read the last page.

Motherless Brooklyn is the story of a man, Lionel Essrog, who suffers from a severe form of Tourette's Syndrome who is trying to solve the murder of his mentor, Frank Minna. Though he is not officially a detective, he follows the clues, interviews the suspects, chases people, and so on.

That is the core of the book, but most of the book deals with Lionel's living with his Tourette's, which makes him bark, curse, manipulate words, and compulsively touch things. Motherless Brooklyn is also, in part, about people learning to live Lionel's Tourette's, too. This extends to the reader, as well, I think. Throughout the book, I kept asking myself, do I ignore it? Can I laugh? How would I react to a person with Tourette's if I met them outside of a book?

This book is wonderfully written. Lethem can be sensitive and sweet one moment and then ruthless and fierce the next. Like Jeffrey Eugenides' , this book is multi-tonal. It's a fast read, too. Nothing in this book dragged it down.

Like Sedaris' other books, this book is a collections of autobiographical essays. He talks about his family, about his boyfriend, and about the differences between Europe and the United States. There aren't any short stories here, but I liked that, as I often have a hard time distinguishing Sedaris from his narrator. His fiction sounds like reality and vice versa.

I found Dreamcatcher to be a fascinating read. I was hooked from almost the first page I read. It did take a while to get used to the shifting viewpoints, settings and chronologies, though. The book just flew by. It's a 600 page book, but it didn't seem like it when I was reading it.

Dreamcatcher is really two equally important stories. One story involves five boyhood friends, their semi-magical powers, and their history together. The other story is about an attempted alien invasion that goes wrong. The friends-plot is the heart of this book, I think. It's what builds tension and sympathy for the protagonists. The second is gruesome, enough to put you off foods with tomatoes in them for a while. But it does bring up interesting questions about what it is to be human, and about the architecture of the mind.

There are a few things I don't like about this book. (These are probably SPOILERS, so if you don't want to know details about the book, STOP HERE.)

It's interesting to me that you can read two books with similar plot structures and hate one, but love the other. Middlesex has a structure similar to Midnight's Children--with a narrator telling his life story, starting with his grandparents. But I like Middlesex much, much more than I did Midnight's Children for two reasons. The first is the wonderful narrator, and the second is that Eugenides' prose is much more restrained than Rushdie's.

Middlesex is a coming-of-age story where the narrator, Cal Stephanides, has more fundamental and difficult problems than most teenagers. Cal was raised as a girl, but is a genetically male hermaphrodite. (He's XY, but has both sets of parts). The story flashes between Cal's present and his past, beginning with the romance between his grandparents. This is a sexually shocking book, so reader beware. It's not that it's explicit, because it's not. It's just that the sexual and gender issues that come up in this book are ones that are rare and beyond the pale for most people.

As I said earlier, there are two things to recommend this book--the narrator and the prose style. The narrator has a wonderful voice all through this novel. He'll make you laugh and he might make you cry. Though he problems are very unusual, I didn't have much of a problem being interested in him and sympathetic to his problems. He never whined about his fate and, if victimized, never wallowed in it. Cal serves up great food for though. He makes you think about what makes us who we are and about the difference between choice and fate. Middlesex is a book you think about for a long while after you put it down.

I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as I thought I was going to. It may be that I didn't understand quite what it was trying to achieve. But I maintain that what was advertised on the back of the book was not what I got when I read the book.

Midnight's Children is essentially the memoirs of Saleem Sinai, a man born at the exact moment of India's independence from Great Britain in 1947. He is supposedly born with magical powers that let him communicate to other Children of Midnight--magically-gifted children born in India's first hour of independence. This synopsis is pretty much what you get on the back of the book. However, this thread in the novel (the most interesting thread in the novel, in my opinion) takes a back seat to the rest of Saleem's life. It pops up periodically, and only becomes prominent again in the last 40 or so pages of the book. It's crammed in with a bunch of other wrapping-up-the-book plot elements.

The plot of the book is basically Saleem's life (even though the memoir element starts some thirty or so years before Saleem is even born). Along with Saleem's life you get the history of India's first thirty years after its independence from Britain. You get the highs (few) and lows (frequent) of his life.

There are some interesting ideas that come up in this book, which arise from the way the story is told. (I'll come back to style in a minute.) In his role as narrator, Saleem feels that it is necessary to start with his grandfather's life to tell his own life story. The pacing of the book gets faster and faster as you near the end. But for the first 400 pages of the book, the pacing is very slow. Saleem, at first, thinks everything is important and necessary in order to tell his life. Throughout the book, the reader is reminded that, in order to know someone, you have to know everything that went into the making of them. Normally, I would agree, but I think there is a point where further detail is irrelevant.

Another interesting idea that is repeated is causality. Frequently in the novel, Saleem pulls back and gives a little recap. The recaps always follow the pattern of "If this hadn't happened, then this wouldn't have happened and that wouldn't have happened..." and so on. These recaps nearly always end with Saleem taking the blame for the bad things that happen.

Style-wise, the novel is written as a literary novel, where the way the story is told is more important (I think) than plot pacing. It can probably be best read as a long narrative poem. It is a challenge to read and to understand. If literary novels aren't your cup of tea, I would stay away from this book. Time is fairly fluid in this book. Its slows and speeds up with little warning. The biggest challenge, though, is perspective. While it is told from one point of view the whole time, you are taken in and out of objectivity all the time. There are sections where the narrator is fevered and incoherent and you get to read all that incoherence. Most of the problems with the narrator come from being so close to the action that its hard to tell what exactly is going on. There are also language and culture problems. If you aren't familiar with Indian customs and language, I don't think you'll fully understand what the significance of some things are. I certainly missed some things, I know I did.

I don't know how Jasper Fforde got away with the plot of this book. I tried to explain what the book was about to a friend and I couldn't explain it coherently. :) There is just too much going on in this book and a lot of it is weird even for an absurdist book. I counted four major plot threads in this book, and there are probably more that I'm missing right now. The major plot threads involve cloned Shakespeares, a croquet tournament, the ongoing manhunt for a Pagerunner (a character who has fled his or her book). The last thread is the main character, Thursday Next's, attempts to get her husband back--he was murdered at the age of two. See what I mean about weird things crowding this book?

This book is the fourth Thursday Next book (and, amazingly, the second book in the series that came out this year). The story began in The Eyre Affair and was continued in Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots. The books take place mainly in two locations, one is an alternate Britain where the Crimean War was fought well into the 1980s, and partly within the world of fiction. Literally, part of the this series takes place in other books like Great Expectations and Sense and Sensibility. I am fascinated by how Fforde plays with the rules and boundaries of fiction. If you decide to read these books, start at the beginning or you will be totally lost.

Fluke is a wonderfully absurd novel. Like all Moore's books this novel starts normally enough--with marine biologists studying whales in Hawaii--and then promptly takes a left turn. This story gets stranger and stranger. I'd say more but it's hard to talk about the plot without give things away.

Fluke is very well written. I love that the dialog is littered with chortle-inducing one liners. The metaphors and similes that Moore uses to describe things are all original. Moore seems to go out of his way to avoid cliche lines. I had to read a couple of them twice to make sure of what I was reading, it seems so odd. This is part of what makes Moore one of my favorite humor writers. He is a joy to read.

Whether or not you'll enjoy this book has a lot to do with what kind of sense of humor you have. If you have a taste for the warped and the absurd, you'll like this book and any thing else written by Moore. If not, this book will probably just seem silly.

Ironfire is a historical novel set on the island of Malta in the mid-sixteenth century. It's a book that successfully shows the intersection of Catholicism, Judaism and Islam through its characters. A lot of what happens in the book actually did happen. Ball includes a Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the book that tells you who the fictional people are and which characters really existed.

Malta is a crossroads, and a land that has been invaded and re-invaded since antiquity. A lot of Ball's book is exposition that explains Maltese history and sets the stage for the very bloody battle between the Ottomans and the Knights of St. John at the end of the book. (If you want to know who won, read the book. ;) )

Not only does Ball set up the history of Malta, but he similarly sets up the characters for the battle. And it takes him 494 pages (of 664) to bring all the characters back full circle. Yeah, this is one of those books that splinters at the beginning into multiple view-points and keeps them running more or less concurrently for most of the book. For the most part, he's successful. But the story starts to drag in the middle. But I think the last 200 pages make up for it. There is a lot of action packed into those 200 pages.

The best thing about this book is that it does a great job of showing both sides of a conflict. It was so successful that I didn't know who to root for in the big battle, the Ottomans or the Christians. Generally in a book like this, someone gets villainized. It's almost like reading George R.R. Martin's books, with so many different players and so many different viewpoints that it's hard to know who the hero is. At any rate, it's a great way to show the Christian/Islam conflict.

A word of warning to the squeamish. The sixteenth century is one of the bloodiest in world history, and the battle for Malta is among the bloodiest engagements of that time. Ball has no qualms about abusing his characters in graphic and permanent ways. If you have a vivid imagination or a weak stomach, you might want to skip some parts.