Cos­mi­comics Italo Calvino
Har­court Brace Jovanovich 1976World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

Rap­tor Red Robert T. Bakker
Tan­dem Library 1999World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

Ceme­tery Dance Dou­glas J. Pre­ston
Vision 2010World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

Greasy Lake & Other Sto­ries T. Cor­aghes­san Boyle
Pen­guin 1986World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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 A NovelArthur Phillips
Ran­dom House Trade Paper­backs 2005World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

River of Ruin Jack Du Brul.
New Amer­i­can Library 2002World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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 Penn Jil­lette
St. Martin’s Grif­fin 2004World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

The Chase Clive Cus­sler
Put­nam Adult 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

Fool Moore, Christo­pher
William Mor­row 2009World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Fool is Christo­pher Moore’s retelling of King Lear, told from the per­spec­tive of — who else — Lear’s court jester. The jester, who Moore names Pocket, may be a fool by trade, but he is cer­tainly no dunce. He has free run of the cas­tle, friends in both high and low places, and with Lear’s pro­tec­tion is free to make fun of who­ever he wants. He is also very close to Lear’s daugh­ters Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. Pocket is most loyal to Lear and Cordelia, and through­out Moore’s take on the tale, it is his behind-the-scenes schem­ing that serves to pro­tect their inter­ests and lives.

Fool opens with a tongue-in-cheek warn­ing from Moore that “This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gra­tu­itous shag­ging, mur­der, spank­ing, maim­ing, trea­son, and hereto­fore unex­plored heights of vul­gar­ity and pro­fan­ity…” In other words, Shake­speare prob­a­bly would’ve loved it. Moore acknowl­edges that tak­ing on one of the most famous plays by the best known Eng­lish writer of all time was a daunt­ing task. But, then again, this is from the same man who wrote a novel about the lost years in the life of Jesus (and his best friend Biff). He retains basi­cally all of Lear’s com­plex plot, although he of course makes Pocket and his machi­na­tions more inte­gral to that plot. The end­ing is dif­fer­ent, though — you can’t have a comic novel with a truly tragic fin­ish. Moore also brings in dia­log and char­ac­ters from other of the Bard’s plays, most notably the trio of witches from Mac­beth.

I’ve read all of Christo­pher Moore’s nov­els, and I think that Fool is one of his best. I read most of the book dur­ing a stint in a pit orches­tra (coin­ci­den­tally for a pro­duc­tion of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard, which also fea­tures a jester), and I had to be very care­ful not to laugh out loud at inop­por­tune moments. A famil­iar­ity with King Lear is help­ful but by no means a require­ment for read­ing Fool; read­ing the syn­op­sis on Wikipedia is prob­a­bly suf­fi­cient prepa­ra­tion. I can’t rec­om­mend Moore’s writ­ing highly enough, for those read­ers who enjoy a twisted sense of humor. Start with Fool, Lamb, or Blood­suck­ing Fiends: A Love Story, then check out some of his other novels.

The Bro­ken Win­dow A Lin­coln Rhyme NovelJef­fery Deaver
Simon & Schus­ter 2008World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

The Bro­ken Win­dow pits Lin­coln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs against a mys­te­ri­ous and devi­ous crim­i­nal whose M.O. is to care­fully frame inno­cent peo­ple for his thefts and mur­ders. His frame jobs are so per­fect that he has gone com­pletely unde­tected for years. His exis­tence only comes to light when Rhyme real­izes that the evi­dence in a mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion is too per­fect. Soon, the police find a num­ber of past cases that bear the same signs, in which inno­cent peo­ple may very well have been convicted.

With very lit­tle to go on, Rhyme et. al. set about learn­ing more about their quarry. But, he always seems to be a cou­ple of steps ahead of them; the closer they get, the more he seems to know about them and their plans. It quickly becomes appar­ent that this crim­i­nal can some­how find out any­thing about any­one — and in his hands, knowl­edge is cer­tainly power.

As is his wont, Deaver packs plenty of twists and red her­rings into his tale. In his last Rhyme/Sachs novel, The Cold Moon, the detec­tives were too good at antic­i­pat­ing the twists, which sucked some of the sus­pense out of the book. I think that Deaver han­dles his sur­prises bet­ter in The Bro­ken Win­dow; he keeps both the reader and the pro­tag­o­nists guess­ing. I also like that Deaver basi­cally sticks to a sin­gle plot in this book, rather than the inter­weav­ing of numer­ous sub­plots that he uses in some ear­lier books.

The only annoy­ance this novel holds for me has to do with Deaver’s dis­cus­sions of com­put­ers (which play a cen­tral role). His use of tech­no­log­i­cal terms and jar­gon feels slightly off in places, although he has improved a great deal sine The Blue Nowhere, his hacker mys­tery. This is a minor fault, though, and prob­a­bly wouldn’t bother any­one who isn’t some­what of a com­puter nerd.

Codex Lev Gross­man
Arrow 2005World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Edward Wozny is a hot­shot New York invest­ment banker who is about to assume a pres­ti­gious posi­tion at his firm’s Lon­don branch. At the begin­ning of what is sup­posed to be two weeks off to pre­pare for his move, Edward is sum­moned to an apart­ment owned by impor­tant clients of his com­pany — a British duke and duchess. He is charged with cat­a­loging their library, which had been sent to the United States for safe keep­ing dur­ing World War II and then promptly for­got­ten about. Edward is told to keep a sharp eye out among the old tomes for a cer­tain book by Ger­vase of Langford.

Lack­ing any train­ing in librar­i­an­ship or par­tic­u­lar inter­est in old books, Edward is ini­tially annoyed, but finds him­self strangely drawn in fol­low­ing an after­noon with the dusty vol­umes. He vis­its the Chenoweth Rare Book and Man­u­script Repos­i­tory, where he serendip­i­tously encoun­ters Mar­garet Napier, a Ger­vase of Lang­ford scholar. Although she (and most every­one else) con­sid­ers the book Edward is look­ing for to be a myth, she agrees to help with the cataloging.

Mean­while, a pro­gram­mer friend gives Edward a copy of a com­puter game called MOMUS. The game is hyper-real and some­what enig­matic; no one knows exactly who cre­ated it. Edward quickly becomes immersed in MOMUS, spend­ing more and more of his free time in the vir­tual world.

While exam­in­ing the con­tents of the library, Mar­garet becomes increas­ingly con­vinced that the mys­te­ri­ous book does exist, and was once a part of the col­lec­tion. She and Edward embark on a hunt to find the book. They dig up infor­ma­tion about the library’s his­tory, sneak into the Chenoweth’s mas­sive archival facil­ity, and unwit­tingly become embroiled in the schemes of British nobles. As they pro­ceed, Edward begins to notice eerie sim­i­lar­i­ties between MOMUS and their real-life quest.

The premise of Codex, with its for­got­ten library, myth­i­cal man­u­script, and eerily rel­e­vant com­puter game has poten­tial. But, the book itself turns out to be some­what lack­lus­ter and dis­ap­point­ing. MOMUS is set up to have impor­tant par­al­lels to the search for the Ger­vase book, but there are only ever a few of these. The whole com­puter game suplot seems under­de­vel­oped and out of place. Also, the book’s end­ing isn’t very sat­is­fy­ing. The plot gets increas­ingly com­plex, then just seems to peter out.

A cou­ple of errors (that should have been caught by an edi­tor) early in the book soured my opin­ion some­what, as well. One is a ref­er­ence to tree sap turn­ing into amber over a few thou­sand years (amber is formed from tree resin over mil­lions of years). The other is a men­tion of illus­tra­tions of “vivi­sected corpses” (“vivi-” mean­ing “liv­ing”; a corpse can be dis­sected, but not vivisected).

Codex is okay, not great. If you find it (as I did) at a used book sale for a buck and want a quick, largely mind­less read, go for it. Oth­er­wise, don’t bother.

Pacific Vor­tex! Clive Cus­sler
Ban­tam 1994World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Dirk Pitt, Spe­cial Projects Direc­tor for the National Under­wa­ter and Marine Agency (NUMA) is sum­moned by the Navy to aid in the search for a top-secret sub­ma­rine. The sub, Star­buck, has gone miss­ing in an area called the Pacific Vor­tex, a coun­ter­part to the Bermuda Tri­an­gle. The searchers not only fail to find the sub, they are unable to find any trace of any of the almost forty ships known to have dis­ap­peared in the Vor­tex dur­ing the pre­ced­ing thirty years. Pitt’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the Star­buck — and the Pacific Vor­tex in gen­eral — leads him to van­ished sci­en­tists, leg­ends of a sunken Pacific civ­i­liza­tion, and a mys­te­ri­ous crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind known only as Del­phi.
Pacific Vor­tex! was the sixth Dirk Pitt novel to be pub­lished, but it was actu­ally the first one Cus­sler wrote. Indeed, its events take place before those of The Mediter­ranean Caper, Cussler’s first pub­lished novel. In a brief pref­ace, Cus­sler states that he was reluc­tant to pub­lish Pacific Vor­tex! because, among other rea­sons, “it does not weave the intri­cate plots of his [Pitt’s] later exploits.” Maybe I’m just get­ting sick of the for­mu­laic nature of the more recent books Cus­sler has “co-written” (what­ever that really means), but I liked this book because the plot wasn’t ridicu­lously intricate.

Invis­i­ble Cities Italo Calvino
Har­court Brace Jovanovich 1978World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Italo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities revolves around con­ver­sa­tions between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The pair sit in the Great Khan’s gar­dens, and Marco Poli tells of all the cities he has vis­ited on his trav­els. Many — if not most — of these cities lie within the Khan’s empire, which is so vast that the ruler him­self has never seen much of it.

The cities Polo describes all have women’s (or at least fem­i­nine) names: Octavia, Despina, Hypa­tia, Sophro­nia, etc. Polo presents fifty-five cities, each as an almost poetic vignette. Some of these con­cern a city’s his­tory — or future. Oth­ers describe a city’s lay­out, arrange­ment, or archi­tec­ture. Still oth­ers tell of the effects a city has on a trav­eler, either dur­ing or after his visit. Nearly all of Polo’s descrip­tions are fab­u­lous: one city is built on tall stilts over dry land, another mir­rors the goings-on in a sub­ter­ranean ver­sion of itself, yet another con­sists of per­ma­nent car­ni­val rides and tem­po­rary mar­ble buildings.

Calvino arranges Polo’s fifty-five vignettes into nine chap­ters and cat­e­go­rizes them: five each of cities and mem­ory, cities and desire, cities and signs, thin cities, trad­ing cities, cities and eyes, cites and names, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, con­tin­u­ous cities, and hid­den cities. Each chap­ter begins and ends with an exchange between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The pair pon­ders to what degree the Great Khan can ever truly know his empire, the nature of cities, and even the nature of existence.

I enjoyed Invis­i­ble Cities quite a bit. Calvino’s cities are delight­fully fan­tas­tic, and his brief but rich descrip­tions pro­vide ample fod­der for expan­sion by a reader’s imag­i­na­tion. I par­tic­u­larly like the way in which Calvino blurs the tem­po­ral set­ting of the book. Kublai Khan and Marco Polo lived in the thir­teenth cen­tury, and much of the book fits this time period. But, amid palaces, vel­lum, and camel car­a­vans, Calvino’s Polo also describes radar anten­nae, air­ports, and adver­tis­ing jingles.

I liked this book more than I did If on a winter’s night a trav­eler, the one other book by Calvino that I’ve read. I think I’ll seek out more of his work.

Deep Fathom James Rollins
Harper 2001World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Dur­ing a total solar eclipse (which is some­how simul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble from San Fran­cisco, Alaska, and Guam), mas­sive earth­quakes rock the Ring of Fire that sur­rounds the Pacific. Air Force One, with the Pres­i­dent on board, flees the quakes in Guam only to mys­te­ri­ously crash in the ocean. Among the ships called to the crash site is the Deep Fathom, a deep-sea sal­vage ves­sel owned and oper­ated by ex-Navy SEAL and for­mer astro­naut Jack Kirk­land. Jack and the rest of the Fathom’s crew had been on the verge of sal­vaging a World War II-era Japan­ese ship full of gold bars when the seis­mic activ­ity opened a rift in the sea floor and their prize melted in a pool of magma.

On the sea floor below where Air Force One crashed, jack and his team dis­cover a strange crys­tal spire that bears writ­ing in an unknown lan­guage. They also find that the plane’s wreck­age has some­how been mag­ne­tized.
Mean­while, Cana­dian anthro­pol­o­gist Karen Grace and her com­puter sci­en­tist friend Miyuki Nakano set out to inves­ti­gate two for­merly sub­merged pyramid-like objects off the coast of Oki­nawa, Japan. Upon reach­ing the site, the pair finds that in addi­tion to the pyra­mids, the earth­quakes have raised an entire ancient city above the waves.They inves­ti­gate, find­ing a crys­tal star cov­ered in mys­te­ri­ous sym­bols and get­ting chased by armed thugs. Karen and Miyuki escape with the hlep of Gabriel, Miyki’s AI com­puter assistant.

The pair man­ages to con­nect with Jack and his team when the two groups find that they have found sim­i­lar crys­tal arti­facts with the same type of writ­ing. They dis­cover that the crys­tal has strange light-and-gravity prop­er­ties, and join forces to learn more about the crys­tal and the lost civ­i­liza­tion that carved both the star and the under­wa­ter spire.

Rollins’s story only gets more ridicu­lous from this point. Through the course of the book, we get an entire sunken con­ti­nent, a fight with a giant squid, the out­break of war between China and the United States, the threat of world destruc­tion from solar flares inter­act­ing with the crys­tal, a fail-safe sys­tem involv­ing an inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile, a particle-beam satel­lite weapon that the pro­tag­o­nists eas­ily hack into and con­trol, and a time por­tal. In the end, the heroes man­age to not only dis­pose of their ene­mies and save the world, they actu­ally send the rest of the world back in time to before the eclipse, thus pre­vent­ing all the bad stuff in the book from ever hap­pen­ing. Thus, Rollins has man­aged to write a book that while sim­i­lar in con­tent to some of Clive Cussler’s nov­els, far sur­passes even Cussler’s more recent books in terms of absurdity.

Per­haps what I liked least about the book is Rollins’s inclu­sion of mul­ti­ple pseudo-scientific the­o­ries and dubi­ous archae­o­log­i­cal “dis­cov­er­ies” — the lost con­ti­nent of Mu, the Pyra­mids of Yon­a­guni, etc. He expands on chau­vin­is­tic the­o­ries that the var­i­ous Poly­ne­sian peo­ples couldn’t have pos­si­bly built the mega­lithic struc­tures on Pohn­pei, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Tonga, and else­where in the Pacific. Rather, they must have been built by some ancient lost cul­ture. At least he stops just short of sug­gest­ing alien intervention.

Deep Fathom is cer­tainly meant to be light, escapist fic­tion, but for me it’s just too absurd. I won’t be pick­ing up any of Rollins’s other books any time soon.

Scoop Eve­lyn Waugh
Back Bay Books 1999World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Up-and-coming writer John Boot des­per­ately wants an excuse to leave Lon­don so as to escape an unwanted admirer. He spots the per­fect oppor­tu­nity when civil war breaks out in the African Repub­lic of Ish­maelia. He per­suades an influ­en­tial friend to get him a job as a for­eign cor­re­spon­dent for one of the major Lon­don news­pa­pers. This friend con­vinces Lord Cop­per, the head of the Dail Beast, to hire boot and send him to Ish­maelia. But owing to ambigu­ous instruc­tions and sub­or­di­nates eager to cater to Lord Copper’s every whim, the wrong Boot gets shipped to Africa.

William Boot has no aspi­ra­tions to fame or adven­ture; prior to his pro­mo­tion to for­eign cor­re­spon­dent, William had writ­ten a bi-weekly nature col­umn for the Beast from the com­port of his some­what ram­shackle rural fam­ily estate. Now, William finds him­self in a land about which he knows noth­ing, assigned to a task for which he has lit­tle apti­tude, expe­ri­ence, or inter­est. On top of this, he has to con­tend with schem­ing com­peti­tors, slow and mis­di­rected telegrams, and the vagaries of the ever-changing Ish­maelite government.

Waugh is in top form here, sat­i­riz­ing sen­sa­tion­al­ist news­men, incom­pe­tent busi­ness lead­ers, banana republics, and a hand­ful of other things. Some of his ref­er­ences are a lit­tle obscure for a reader sep­a­rated from him by sev­enty years and the Atlantic Ocean, but the rest of the book is hilar­i­ous enough to more than make up for it.

The Nav­i­ga­tor (NUMA Files) Clive Cus­sler
Put­nam Adult 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

The Nav­i­ga­tor more or less fol­lows the typ­i­cal Cus­sler for­mula: the life of a beau­ti­ful woman sci­en­tist becomes endan­gered as she pur­sues an impor­tant historical/archaeological arti­fact, Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino (or in this case, Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala) swoop in and save her while test­ing a cutting-edge piece of marine tech­nol­ogy. They then team up to find the arti­fact and thwart the evil mastermind/shadowy multi-national corporation/secret soci­ety that needs the arti­fact to achieve world dom­i­na­tion. The good guys, of course, save the world, recover the arti­fact, and thereby cause a large chunk of his­tory to be rewrit­ten. The Nav­i­ga­tor improves on this some­what by touch­ing on two lev­els of his­tory: a Phoeni­cian trea­sure located by Thomas Jef­fer­son and his con­tem­po­raries. Other than that, it’s stan­dard, for­mu­laic, thrill-a-minute Cussler.

Villa Incog­nito Tom Rob­bins
Ban­tam Books 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Dern Foley, pos­ing as a priest, is appre­hended as he attempts to smug­gle illicit nar­cotics from Laos into Los Ange­les. This is far more than a stan­dard drug bust how­ever; Foley and his two com­pa­tri­ots Dickie Gold­wire and Mars Stub­ble­field had until this time been miss­ing and pre­sumed dead since their plane was shot down over Viet­nam twenty-eight years ear­lier. Foley’s case rep­re­sents a pub­lic rela­tions night­mare for the CIA dn U.S. mil­i­tary. What to do with a for­mer POW who decides to stay miss­ing, then turns up years later as a drug smug­gler? The agen­cies scram­ble to find out who Foley is work­ing with, where the drugs came from, and if there are any oth­ers like him still in hiding.

Mean­while, Dickie Gold­wire is brav­ing the mean streets of Bangkok in search of a gui­tar to take back to Villa Incog­nito, the for­mer POWs’ head­quar­ters. Shortly after his return, his fiancé Lisa Ko arrives at the Villa with news of Foley’s arrest. Gold­wire and Stub­ble­field argue about how to pro­ceed and, after a short visit, Lisa Ko returns to her trav­el­ing cir­cus in the U.S. There, she dis­cov­ers that her tanukis, the odd lit­tle east Asian mam­mals which she trains to per­form — and with which she has a bizarre ances­tral con­nec­tion, have escaped in her absence.

Robbins’s sto­ry­telling is far from lin­ear; his nar­ra­tive is a tan­gled web, work­ing roughly from the inside out. This in no way makes for a dis­jointed read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it does trip one up when try­ing to sum­ma­rize the book. Robbins’s writ­ing is delight­fully con­voluded on a smaller scale as well — he twists sen­tences around, going off on brief tan­gents and mak­ing fre­quent asides to the reader. His cast of char­ac­ters is weirdly hilar­i­ous, includ­ing (in addi­tion to those men­tioned above) a Bangkok pros­ti­tute who hap­pens to be work­ing on a degree in com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture, an unem­ployed draftswoman with a clown fetish, an entire town of out-of-work Viet­namese cir­cus per­form­ers, and a Japan­ese animal-god come to earth in more or less human form. Although this is one of Robbins’s most recent nov­els, it’s my first of his; I’ll have to seek out some of his ear­lier books.

Mae­stro John Gard­ner
Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing 1995World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Louis Pas­sau, at age ninety, is the world’s most-accomplished and best-loved orches­tral con­duc­tor. Thus, it is no sur­prise when a con­cert in cel­e­bra­tion of his birth­day sells out in min­utes. But, some­thing else is dri­ving pub­lic inter­est as well: the immi­nent release of a book which claims to link Pas­sau to the Nazis dur­ing World War II. This rev­e­la­tion, along with some clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion about the mae­stro, draws the inter­est of Amer­i­can and British intel­li­gence agencies.

Pas­sau is will­ingly taken into cus­tody fol­low­ing the cel­e­bra­tory con­cert, but then two attempts on his life are made in rapid suc­ces­sion. Semi-retired British agent Her­bie Kruger man­ages to almost single-handedly save Pas­sau in the sec­ond and more sophis­ti­cated attempt. In order to get the con­duc­tor out of harm’s way (and ensure that the British SIS gets the infor­ma­tion it wants with­out CIA, FBI, or NSA med­dling), Kruger squir­rels him away with the help of some old friends.

With some coax­ing, Pas­sau agrees to tell Kruger what he wants to know. But, there’s a catch: the con­duc­tor is only will­ing to tell the entire story of his life, in order. Thus, the rel­e­vant bits will be told in their proper places, sur­rounded by the con­text Pas­sau con­sid­ers indis­pen­si­ble for under­stand­ing his actions. What fol­lows is a long and com­pli­cated tale with more twists, illicit deal­ings, and intrigue than the intel­li­gence agen­cies (or gos­sip colum­nists, for that mat­ter) had guessed.

As Kruger lis­tens to Passau’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, he fig­ures out that he and the mae­stro are con­nected in some unex­pected ways — and that Pas­sau isn’t exactly telling the whole truth. Through­out this whole process, the two must also stay one step ahead of both the com­pet­ing intel­li­gence agen­cies and Passau’s would-be assas­sins.
I found Mae­stro to be a fairly enjoy­able read. It’s rare that clas­si­cal music is fea­tured in a work of fic­tion — espe­cially a spy novel. It’s evi­dent that John Gard­ner has a pretty exten­sive knowl­edge of the sub­ject. My only real com­plaint about the book is Gardner’s pen­chant for name-dropping within Louis Passau’s life story. He ties the con­duc­tor to so many real-life peo­ple of all sorts that the tale strains credibility.

A good man is hard to find and other sto­ries Flan­nery O’Connor
Har­court Brace Jovanovich 1977World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this col­lec­tion of sto­ries, Flan­nery O’Connor looks at the darker side of life. Many of her sit­u­a­tions and char­ac­ters are far­ci­cal, but the inher­ent humor is usu­ally of the dark­est sort. Tragedy, in one form or another, is present in every story; none has a truly happy ending.

O’Connor draws on her back­ground in the south­ern U.S. for her char­ac­ters and set­tings. She makes exten­sive use of dialect in her dia­logue. In the past, I’ve been some­what annoyed by this tech­nique, but O’Connor does it very effec­tively (the fact that I grew up in the south may have added to my appre­ci­a­tion of it.

I liked these sto­ries, but that is not to say that I nec­es­sar­ily enjoyed each one as I read it. I found it best to take them one at a time, allow­ing for a break in between. Some of O’Connor’s char­ac­ters are so awful and her sit­u­a­tions so twisted that one needs a lit­tle time to digest them. That said, I would still rec­om­mend this col­lec­tion as mas­ter­ful short fiction.