Most of the stories in this collection are explicitly tied together by the presence of an apparently immortal narrator named Qfwfq. Many of the stories involve space, but they take place in many times and many settings — with Qfwfq in many different incarnations. In one, he describes life before the Big Bang, with everyone and everything coexisting in a single point. In another, he and another young friend play games with atoms and fly around on galaxies. In yet another, he is a third-generation land dweller with an embarrassing still-aquatic great uncle. Even within these fantastical narratives, Calvino often manages to add a further level of surreality: a dinosaur catches the first train and gets lost in the crowd, cosmic beings transmute into ordinary humans, playmates get locked in an endless spatial loop. These stories are quite good, although they’re not my favorites among Calvino’s works. My only real objection is to his use of intentionally unpronounceable names. Qfwfq is actually a relatively tame example; other characters have names like (k)yK, Granny Bb’b, and Rwzfs.

Paleontologist Robert Bakker has written a number of books, but Raptor Red is his first (and so far as I can tell his only) novel. His characters are all Cretaceous dinosaurs, with a female Utahraptor (Raptor Red) as the protagonist. The story follows Red as she loses one prospective mate and finds another; encounters various other species of dinosaurs and other animals, many already known to her but some not; and meets up with her sister and her two chicks. Aside from other animals of various sorts, Red and her fellow raptors also must deal with strange new plants, bugs, weather, and natural disasters as they travel through present-day North America in search of food.

Throughout, Bakker provides a wealth of information about the anatomy and behavior of the dinosaurs and other animals in his story. The behavior is, of course, educated guesswork. He makes the Utahraptors very social creatures, which he argues for based on their relatively large brains and close ties to birds. As Bakker wrote this book in the mid-1990s, I’d be interested to know if any new discoveries have been made in the intervening years that might change his characterizations.

One quote from a review printed on the back cover of the paperback edition proclaims that “Michael Crichton may be a good storyteller, but even he wouldn’t have the nerve to write a dinosaur novel from the dino’s point of view.” I might counter by saying “Robert Bakker may know an awful lot about dinosaurs, but he’s no master storyteller.” Not that the novel is the worst I’ve read — far from it. But, it’s far more interesting for its dinosaur information than for its narrative arc.

Journalist Bill Smithback, a recurring Preston/Child character, is killed in a brutal attack in his Manhattan apartment (this happens on page 7, so it’s not really a spoiler). Eyewitnesses and building security footage make identifying his killer easy, but a bigger problem appears almost immediately: the man is thought to have committed suicide ten days earlier. There seem to be connections between Smithback’s murder and a story he’d been working on about a strange religious sect at the northern tip of Manhattan that has been accused of practicing animal sacrifice. The deeper FBI Agent Pendergast, NYPD Lieutenant D’Agosta, and Smithback’s wife Nora Kelly get in their investigation, the more it seems that the cult is not only sacrificing animals, but also turning people into zombiis.

Sigh… yet another Pendergast novel. I was hoping that Preston and Child would give their eccentric FBI agent a rest after six books in a row, the last four of which were increasingly Pendergast-centric. I long for a return to their earlier unconnected (or at least only tenuously connected) novels, like Thunderhead and Riptide. But, this book does bear some similarities to the authors’ first collaboration, Relic: it takes place in New York, involves the Museum of Natural History (about which Douglas Preston knows a great deal), and for the most part doesn’t involve Pendergast’s personal life or family history. For me, Cemetery Dance ranks not among Preston and Child’s top five books, but I liked it better than that last few they’ve written.

This volume of short stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle (who just goes by “T.C.” these days) is slim, but it contains fifteen tales. Most of the stories are dark or depressing to some degree, involving death, fighting, adultery, theft, swindlery, obsession, and other less than savory actions, feelings, and attitudes. I found some of these to be rather thought-provoking, but I’m not sure I’d say that I really enjoyed most of them. Notable exceptions are “On for the Long Haul,” in which a paranoid city-dweller gets sucked in by propaganda about the threat of imminent nuclear war and moves his family to a secure compound in Montana, and “Overcoat II,” which involves a Soviet bureaucrat and his first foray into the black market.

I also enjoyed some of the lighter stories like “Ike and Nina,” which describes a short-lived affair between Eisenhower and the wife of Nikita Krushchev, and “A Bird in Hand,” which tells of both a man’s futile attempts to get rid of starlings and the (true) story of the man who introduced the birds to North America. Overall, this isn’t my favorite collection of short stories, but still worth reading. It has not, however, yet inspired me to pick up any on Boyle’s other works.

The Egyptologist opens with a letter, dated 1922, from archaeologist Ralph Trilipush to his fiancée Margaret Finneran. In it, he tells her that he and her father, Chester Crawford Finneran, will soon leave Egypt and return to her in Boston. He also tells her that he is sending all of the journals and research materials relating to his recent discovery of the tomb of XIIIth dynasty king Atum-hadu, and gives her detailed instructions about what to do with them should some accident (or attack) befall him on his journey home to her.

Phillips allows the rest of the story to unfold in a similar way: through letters and telegrams between Trilipush and the two Finnerans, Trilipush’s journals, and letter dated more than thirty years later from retired private investigator Harold Ferrell to a descendant of Margaret Finneran. Ferrell’s letters recount a strange case he’d had years earlier that began as a hunt for an Australian-born illegitimate son of an English businessman, became a double murder investigation, and eventually led to his becoming involved with the Finnerans and Ralph Trilipush. As the story progresses, it becomes evident that at least one — and possibly all — of the correspondents are lying to some degree. Trilipush and Ferrell each write about wanting to turn their tales into books, so a the very least it seems like they embellish their stories a bit.

Phillips’s epistolary narrative style is quite interesting, largely because it becomes clear early in the book that you can’t be sure which narrator(s) to trust. The interplay of conflicting narratives keeps the reader on his or her toes. Even in the end one isn’t quite sure how much of the story’s climax actually happened as described. This ambiguity might be annoying to some, but I found it intriguing and thought-provoking. It also, more often than not, leads to humorous situations, as the reader begins to see through the narrators’ lies to what is really going on. The Egyptologist, published in 2004, is Phillips’s second novel, and he now has four total. If the others are as inventive and well-written as this, then I would quite enjoy them.

In most of the world today, common salt (sodium chloride) is taken for granted; salt shakers sit on every home’s dining table and restaurants offer it for free, sometimes in convenient single-serving packets. But salt has not always been so inexpensive or so plentiful. Humans, like all other mammals, need to consume salt to survive. Furthermore, until the invention of canning in the 19th century, salting (or the related process of pickling) was the primary method of preserving meat, fish, and vegetables. The ability to produce large amounts of preserved food has long been a prerequisite for staging extended military campaigns as well as sea voyages of exploration or conquest. Thus, the production and control of salt have done much to control the course of human history.

Mark Kurlansky details the changing relationships between people and salt around the world and throughout recorded history. He discusses how salt figures into various mythologies and rituals. He talks about methods of salt production ranging from simply scraping crystals from desert sebkhas to refining the material with sophisticated vacuum evaporators. Particularly interesting are the historic recipes he weaves into his narrative, including a bevy of salty sauces: Roman garum, the Chinese ancestor of soy sauce, Tunisian charmula, and even Louisiana Tabasco. Kurlansky also devotes considerable time to the salt-related events and policies that have directly shaped history: discoveries, taxes, and monopolies. Along the way he points out how many of our place names — Salzburg, Halles, Gaul, innumerable –wiches — and words — salad, salary, soldier, salami — have roots meaning “salt.”

This is the second of Kurlansky’s books that I’ve read, the first being Cod, which shares some subject matter with Salt. He does a very good job of extracting exciting narratives from what at first glance might seem like mundane topics. He at times seems to ramble a bit from one thing to another, but always in a charming — rather than distracting — way. I recommend this book highly, alongside many of the other single-word-title materials histories that I’ve read.

In Thunderstruck, like in his earlier book Devil In the White City, Erik Larson follows two men — one a visionary and the other a cold-blooded killer. In this case the hero is Guglielmo Marconi, the first man to create a successful method of wireless communication. The villain is Harvey Hawley Crippen, a sometime doctor and seller of patent medicines who was to all outward appearances a kind, gentle, upstanding citizen. Larson follows the lives of the two men from their births in the third quarter of the nineteenth century until their paths (although not the men themselves) met in a very public way in 1910.

Marconi became fascinated with magnetism and electricity at an early age. By his early twenties, he had become an obsessive experimenter, spending days at a time in the laboratory he had put together in the attic of his parents’ villa. Marconi had a basic idea of what he wanted to do — transmit a message using invisible waves — and how to do it — he had read descriptions of earlier experiments by Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge — but he worked almost entirely by trial and error. It was this approach, that of a practician rather than a theorist, that would later make Marconi the subject of other scientists’ derision. Marconi’s method of working would also prove costly for his wireless telegraphy company, as he built ever larger and more complex installations on the coasts of England, Canada, and the United States, trying to perfect wireless trans-Atlantic communication without having a firm grasp on the underlying laws of physics.

Harvey Crippen, trained in homeopathic medicine at the University of Michigan, worked in a variety of medical professions. He had a private medical practice in San Diego and was employed as an optometrist in St. Louis, but spent the bulk of his career working for various patent medicine companies in Philadelphia, New York, and London. Crippen worked hard to support his wife, Cora, whose exotic tastes in clothes, furniture, and jewelery, along with the pursuit of her unrealistic ambitions of becoming a famous singer, proved very expensive. The Crippens presented the front of a happy couple, but mistrust, betrayal, and Cora’s controlling nature lurked beneath the surface.

Larson does a wonderful job of setting the scene for his two stories. Edwardian London is the chief setting, as both Marconi and Crippen spend fair amounts of time there. But the other side of the Atlantic — and indeed the ocean itself — also serve important roles, as ships and radio waves travel back and forth. My complaint about Larson’s previous books has been that his use of dialog and descriptions of individuals’ thought and feelings strains historical credibility. Larson does a much better job in Thunderstruck, using less dialog and more explicitly citing his sources within the text itself.

I found the two stories fascinating — especially that of Marconi — but through much of the book I felt that the connection between the men is tenuous at best. By the end Larson makes a pretty good argument for combining the two, but I’m not sure that I’m convinced. Still, he knows how to tell a good story, and Thunderstruck makes for a compelling read.

Mining engineer Philip Mercer attends a Paris rare book auction, charged by a friend with buying a nineteenth-century journal written by Godin de Lepinay. Lepinay explored Panama during the planning stages of the Panama Canal, and Mercer’s friend Gary Barber thinks that the journal might offer some clues to finding a fabled Incan treasure. At the auction, a mysterious Chinese bidder buys everything associated with the Panama Canal. Luckily the auctioneer is an old friend of Mercer’s, and sets aside the journal for him. But, Mercer doesn’t make it very far from the auction house before he finds himself being pursued by three Chinese assassins. He leads them on a chase through the catacombs and sewers of Paris, eventually managing to escape with the journal intact.

Mercer then travels to Panama as quickly as he can, intending to meet up with his friend. He arrives at Berber’s base camp deep in the jungle only to find the whole team dead. Mercer and Captain Lauren Vanik, a U.S. Army officer stationed nearby, scope out the area, and are nearly killed by another team of Chinese mercenaries. Realizing that they have stumbled into the middle of some sinister plot, they set out to investigate further. Along the way, they are joined by a team of French Foreign Legionnaires, a former canal pilot, and a retired sea captain, and reveal an impending Chinese power-grab on the world stage.

I picked this book up because I was curious what one of Clive Cussler’s “co-writers” writes under his own name. Unsurprisingly, Cussler and DuBrul seem to be cut from the same cloth. River of Ruin contains many of the elements that make up the standard Cussler formula: a rugged scientist/adventurer, a gorgeous and very capable love interest, an archaeological puzzle, water-based action sequences, and a nefarious plot to take over the world. DuBrul’s tale comes across as a bit more grounded in reality than do many of Cussler’s, however; River of Ruin is still a thrill-a-minute adventure novel, but it is lergely free of the “oh, come on!” moments that abound in Cussler.

Sock is, at its heart, a mystery novel; a woman is murdered and the protagonist, a policeman, sets out to find her killer. But, as one might expect from the self-described “larger, louder half” of Penn & Teller, this is far from your standard detective novel. The story is narrated by Dickie, the main character’s sock monkey. Dickie’s owner, who we only know as ‘the Little Fool’ for most of the book, is a cop, but he’s not a detective. He’s a police diver who spends most of his time pulling bodies out of New York’s East River; he doesn’t normally solve cases. But, when one of the bodies he retrieves turns out to be that of Nell, one of his ex-girlfriends, the Little Fool decides to try his hand at detective work.

He has to do so in a completely unofficial capacity, of course, and he enlists the help of Tommy, Nell’s best friend and pedicurist. The unlikely partners spend all their free time trying to reconstruct Nell’s last days and figure out who might have murdered her. They get a break in the form of a note from the killer. But, as the Little Fool finds the note pinned to another body he pulls out of the river, it also means that they’re dealing with a dangerous psychopath who will almost certainly kill again.

Penn’s sock monkey narrator certainly provides an interesting twist, but I found Dickie’s stream-of-consciousness narrative style to be somewhat distracting. I could get used to it after awhile, but it made for a slow start every time I picked up the book. Also, although Penn has a fairly interesting story to tell, he does it in a very vulgar manner. I’m not easily offended, but I found the sheer quantity of cursing and descriptions of sex acts to be a bit much. I read some of this book while traveling, and at times I felt the need to cover chapter titles so that people around me wouldn’t see them. I can’t really recommend this book; I’d say that your time would be much better spent watching some of Penn & Teller’s wonderful magic or their in-your-face skeptic series “Bullshit!” on Showtime.

In The Chase, Clive Cussler for the first time strays from his usual nautical focus (although the book’s opening scene does take place on a salvage boat) and his interwoven casts of existing characters. His new protagonist, Isaac Bell, does take seom cues from the Dirk Pitt/Kurt Austin mold, but he also seems to take some inspiration from James West (of The Wild Wild West as well. Bell is a young man from a wealthy family who, just after the turn of the twentieth century, is the best detective at the private Van Dorn agency (modelled after the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

Bell is called to Denver to help in the investigation of a particularly brutal bank robber known only as the Butcher Bandit. The Bandit hits banks when they have large amounts of cash on hand, kills all witnesses, and always manages to disappear completely. Bell and his fellow Van Dorn agents hunt the Butcher Bandit and his beautiful accomplice throughout the western U.S., involving a train vs. car race through California and culminating in a steam locomotive chase over the Sierras, through Nevada and Idaho, and into Montana.

I enjoyed this book more than Cussler’s last few novels. It’s fresh subject matter for him, and The Chase has no co-author. I hope that he’ll Write more Isaac Bell novels and that he’ll do them himself, rather than farming them out to his growing stable of collaborators.