Ambigrams to the rescue!

Last review for today - as promised, it's Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.  Brown has made a huge splash over the last year with his phenomenally successful The Da Vinci Code, and while that one is still awaiting my attention, if it's up to the level of this one it's sure to be a good read.  My mother reviewed Angels and Demons for The Mystery Reader when it was just going to press, and ever since she's been badgering me to read it.  I would have gotten to it sooner but she kept lending it out to other people!  She's not a big fan of this type of book but she loved it - knowing that I love this sort of thing, she's been pushing me to read it.

While the plot is much too dense to fully recount here, here's a brief synopsis:  A scientist at CERN, a Swiss research facility, is murdered and one of his inventions is stolen.  That invention?  Antimatter, which has the destructive capability to level a large city.  The head of CERN calls in Robert Langdon, an American symbology professor, to investigate the murder.  Why?  The inventor's body is branded with the ancient symbol for the Illuminati, an order dedicated to the destruction of the Catholic Church.  Landgon joins forces with the murdered scientist's daughter and travels to Rome to retrieve the antimatter and save the Church from ruin.  Oh, and did I mention that all the cardinals have convened for the conclave to elect the new Pope?

The book obviously requires a significant suspension of disbelief, but it's a testament to Brown's talent that he's able to keep you engaged even at the plot grows more and more outlandish.  It's true escapist fodder - the literary equivalent of a smartly done summer movie.  I don't care that it can't happen; I just care that I'm entertained.  I devoured the book in about a day and found it to be the perfect summer brain candy.  Not every book needs to be highbrow fare - who among us hasn't struggled through a "modern classic" for a college course and wondered how anyone ever managed to finish it, much less decide that it's deeply worthwhile?  Give me a swashbuckling, wild-and-crazy thriller any day - at least I'm having fun.

Southern Pickins

Second up today is another recommendation from my friend Barbara - this time it's Mary Kay Andrew's Savannah Blues.  I'm not ordinary a fan of fluffy chick lit, but this one was worth the time I spent on it for the info on antiques that suffuses its pages.  Mary Kay Andrews is a pseudonym for Kathy Trochek, a noted mystery who's one of my mom's favorites.  I can see why my mom enjoys her work - she writes with a clever, breezy style that's instantly appealing.

Savannah Blues follows Eloise "Weezy" Foley in the aftermath of her divorce from upper-crust Savannahan Talmadge Evans III.  As a result of their breakup, Weezy is exiled from the townhome she loving restored to the carriage house in the backyard while Tal lives it up in the main house with his new fiancee, Caroline Santos.  Needless to say there's ill will between Weezy and Caroline, but Weezy is slowly adapting to single life.  She's immersed herself in her antiques-picking business and she adopts a lovable dog with a delightful habit of piddling on Tal and Caroline's flowers. 

Unfortunately, things go south for Weezy at an important estate sale just outside Savannah.  When she sneaks into the estate the night before for a bathroom break and a "sneak preview" of the goods, she makes a gruesome discovery - Caroline's dead body stuffed in a closet.  Soon Weezy's the prime suspect in her murder, and she enlists the help of her uncle, the closeted ex-Catholic priest/lawyer and her best friend, restauranteur Be-be.  To further complicate things, an old flame is back in town and wants to give it another try with Weezy.

Overall, it's an enjoyable read and perfect for summer - enough tidbits of info to be interested but still appropriate for the beach.  Good light-hearted fun.

Oh Mozart, you little scamp you!

I'm so far behind on my posts lately it's not even funny.  Hey, you try juggling wedding planning, two jobs, your masters, and review writing and see how well you do!  Sorry - I'm a little edgy these days.  Stress is at an all-time high right now, but thankfully the world of fiction provides a much needed escape.  The new season of The Amazing Race also helps, but that's only on once a week.

First up today is a book a good friend loaned me, Harrison Gradwell Slater's Night Music, which introduces Mozart musicologist Matthew Pierce.  After purchasing a bundle of documents at an auction in Venice that he believes to be the work of a young Mozart, Pierce is mysteriously summoned to La Favorite, an enclave owned by Vicomte Ren that is devoted to the study of all things Mozart.  However, our hero soon finds himself embroiled in a deeper mystery as other members of the enclave are attacked and murdered.  Fearing that his possession of the Mozart diaries makes him a target, Pierce throws himself headlong into solving the crimes and authenticating his documents.  With an enormous cast of characters that could be suspects, Pierce has a long and difficult road ahead of him.

Night Music is clearly in the vein of Dan Brown's hugely popular The Da Vinci Code (which I have not read, but look for my review of his preceding book, Angels and Demons, later today), as it spans multiple countries in a frantic race to unravel a historical mystery with ties to modern murders.  While the premise is intriguing and the historical details well-researched, it lacks the polish and sophistication of the better books in the genre.  I certainly enjoyed the book, but it probably could have benefited from being edited more aggressively.  While Slater tries very hard to make his protagonist likeable, it's hard to do when you're reading his lascivious thoughts about every single woman in the book, with the exception of the wizened grandmother with narcolepsy. 

Slater also has a tendency to let his story run away from him, allowing sections of the book to dead-end without satisfactory resolution of the plot thread.  It's not a huge flaw, but a judicious edit here or there would have made for a much tighter, more cohesive story.  In the same vein, Slater would be well-served to exercise more restraint with the number of characters as well - it quickly becomes tiresome to try and keep the endless parade of attractive young women straight. 

Overall, a decent first effort, but Slater definitely needs some tough love from his editor before his next book makes it to print.

Forgot to mention...

In my odyssey to get to the courthouse yesterday, I happened to go by an independent bookstore that I didn't even know existed - Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park, IL. While I didn't have a chance to go inside, their website is now linked in the sidebar.

I'm not a hooker, I'm following the Messiah!

While having to schlep my ass out to the 'burbs to do my jury duty was not how I'd hoped I'd be spending my day, it at least gave me a chance to finish my latest book, Margaret George's Mary, Called Magdalene. At least I didn't need to be there the whole day (since they dismissed everyone at 11:30am, yay!), so I have some time to post my review before the fiance gets home from another long day assisting gyne surgeries.

I'm a big fan of Margaret George's books - she's carved out a niche for herself as the grand mistress of hefty fictional biographies of historic figures. Past subjects have included Cleopatra, Henry VIII, and Mary, Queen of Scots, weighty figures all. In her latest she turns her attention to a famous figure whose life is virtually unknown - Mary Magdalene, one of the first followers of Jesus. She's only mentioned a handful of times in the Bible, although there is a gospel attributed to her in the Apocrypha, a group of writings that for various reasons were not included in the Bible proper.

Despite being over 600 pages long, the book reads quite fast and the story is engaging. It follows Mary's life from her early years through to her death in Ephesus at the age of 90, covering a wide range of events in that span. Most formation among them includes Mary's possession by demons, an affliction which is only lifted when Mary meets Jesus in the desert and he drives them out. From that point forward, Mary becomes his loyal disciple, following on his inevitable course to crucifixion, a decision that forces her to give up everything she's ever known and loved, including her young daughter Elisheba.

I certainly won't claim to be a biblical scholar, but I definitely find reading about the genesis of a religion fascinating. I think that a large part of how religions can be misinterpreted is found in the lack of consideration for the historical context the religion was born into. As much as a great many people believe that the Bible is the word of God, it's worth remembering that the Bible as we know it is at best a distillation of the word of God through human hands, and those human hands are guided by the prevailing opinions and attitudes of their owners. When the first Christians put the teachings of their most holy man into writing, they did so with a particular intent to accomplish a particular end - the dissemination of Jesus' words. That intent introduces a slant into the text that could be positive or negative depending upon your perspective. It's not unreasonable to assume that the authors did some editing and made changes, even if the changes were merely aesthetic. Translations of the text also have a huge effect - the King James version of the Bible was a translation commissioned with the express purpose of producing a Bible that supported monarchy, in direct opposition to the more "democratic" versions then emerging from Switzerland and Germany. (For more on that subject, I definitely recommend Alistair McGrath's In The Beginning).

Anyway, back to the book. A huge part of why the story seems so resonant and believable is George's depiction of the society in which Jesus and Mary lived. Having that perspective goes a long way towards enriching our understanding of the religious teachings that emerged from that time. George also does an amazing job of giving life, feeling, and attitudes to those that are only known to us through religion. Like any believer today, Jesus' followers were not abstract, idyllically holy beings, but rather humans tied to the human world by human emotions and human trappings, like material goods and family. Religion is a human product, and books like George's serve as a reverent but pointed reminder of that fact.

A Lifetime movie with an identity crisis

Pretty much my latest review book in a nutshell. I guess it was inevitable that I'd run across my first stinker for The Mystery Reader, and P.B. Ryan's Murder in a Mill Town is it. It reads like a bad Lifetime movie starring Valerie Bertinelli, but now with 100% more hoop skirts! Yuck. Complete and utter drivel - I feel like I need to go read something terribly educational to clean my brain.

Yeah, so look for my eviseration (or review, depending on your take) over there soon.

The "My mom was a failed writer and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" Club

What? I can't resist the snarky titles.

My final review of the day is for Carol Goodman's The Seduction of Water. I'm a big fan of her previous book, The Lake of Dead Languages, so it's only fitting that I see how she does in her sophomore outing.

The novel centers around Iris Greenfeder, the daughter of a Catskills hotel manager father and a writer mother who never published the final book in a planned trilogy of fantasy novels. Iris's mother Kay died when Iris was just a small child, killed in a fire at the Dreamland Hotel in Coney Island. However, the circumstances of her death were mysterious: Kay checked in to the hotel as another man's wife, and the body of that man was never recovered from the remains of the blaze. As is to be expected, Iris still suffers from the strain of not knowing what her mother was doing in that hotel, and why she never completed the book that would have cemented her reputation.

Many years later, Iris is living a mediocre existence, working a variety of odd teaching jobs to support herself, including teaching writing in English to recent immigrants and working with convicts at a nearby prison. Her love life isn't much better, as she coasts along with a rigid schedule of Wednesday/Friday/Sunday dates with her artist boyfriend. But all of that changes when Iris assigns a project about fairy tales to her classes, and she's inspired to find out the truth about what happened to her mother and reshape her own destiny.

While not quite up to the level of her previous work, The Seduction of Water is still a well-written and evocative book. The ending has a heavy-handed, swelling-violin-music feeling to it, but otherwise it's a solid effort. I got sucked into the story almost immediately and it moves along at a swift clip. It's good reading for summer - deep enough to be interesting, but not so intense that you can't overcome sunshine-induced ADD long enough to get into it. 4 stars from me.

Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here

My senior English teacher in high school wanted to paint this phrase over the door of her classroom, but she could never decide if it should be on the inside or the outside. In her shoes, I doubt if I could either. As Joss Whedon so elegantly proved in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, high school really is hell.

Anyway, this well-known quote comes from Dante's Inferno, the tale of the author's journey through the afterlife with the poet Virgil as his guide. Dante wrote one of the most brutal depictions of Hell and its miseries to ever see publication, and he made no bones about describing the suffering of his enemies in great detail.

The Inferno is the jumping-off point for Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a mystery about the real-life Dante Club, a group of writers and poets who undertook the first American translation of Dante in the late 1860s. The group included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Lowell, among others. The mystery begins when a prominent judge is found murdered and covered with maggots and flies. Soon after a priest is discovered buried upside-down in a vertical grave with his feet charred to a crisp. The Dante Club quickly realizes that the murders are horrific reenactments of the punishments doled out by Dante and they spring into action to try and bring an end to a vicious murder's killing spree.

I've had my eye on this book for a while, and I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint. Pearl's style is tough to get into at first because of his historian's devotion to preserving the tone of the era he writes about, but after 50 pages or so you don't even notice. Red herrings abound to keep the action interesting - I for one didn't figure out the whodunit but believed it when it was revealed. The historical depth and accuracy are truly astounding and are definitely a model worth emulating for historical writers everywhere. I'm very picky when it comes to anachronisms, but my critical nature found nothing of note in that regard, which is always a good thing in my opinion.

The Dante Club is a fine entry into the burgeoning genre of literary mysteries and Pearl definitely deserves to take his place amongst Umberto Eco, Arturo Perez-Reverte, and Iain Pears as a leading light in the category.

Self-help that's actually kind of helpful

I'm really really behind in my reviews, so you're getting a three-fer today. I was away at my fiance's family reunion over the weekend and got a bunch of reading done in the car on the way. Thankfully we didn't get grilled with a ton of questions about why our wedding is so small, when are we having kids, why are you having the wedding in Chicago, etc. But in the spirit of familial improvement we gave my future brother-in-law a Queer Eye-style makeover that he desperately needed. He's looking so much better it's sick. He still needs to fix that unibrow though - I'm afraid that the only one who can get away with that is Bert from Sesame Street.

Anyway, it leads me to a nice segue for my first review today - Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, which is the selection for my alumni book club this month. It's one of the first self-help books ever published, with the first edition appearing in the late 1930s. As an elder statesman in the genre, it's become something of a classic and is often imitated.

I'm not the type of person who reads self-help/advice books, generally speaking. The only book on my shelves at the moment that would even remotely qualify for the category is Jeanne Martinet's Artful Dodging (which happens to be a personal favorite of mine). Books in this genre strike me as so fuzzy and nebulous that trying to live your life in line with these books is a lot like letting your life be dictated by your horoscope.

This book, however, really does have some genuinely useful tips for making a success of your life. It comes at an opportune time for me, considering that I'm job-hunting and I've gotten the big goose-egg in results so far. The core of the book is centered around the idea that if you don't believe you can succeed, you probably won't. Being a person who discourages easily, the constant admonitions of confidence, persistance, and faith are the type of thing I need to hear these days.

Some of Hill's theories are a little loopy (the most sucessful people have strong sublimated sex drives?), but overall his arguments are solid. I don't think it's the type of book that would change your life overnight, but it would definitely serve as a good swift kick in the ass as needed.