Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows (Book 7) J. K. Rowl­ing
Thorndike Press 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This, the sev­enth and (sup­pos­edly) final Harry Pot­ter book was the first for which I was ready when it was released. I did not, how­ever, join the crowds of peo­ple who stood in line to buy it at mid­night on its first day of sale; I enjoy the books and movies, but I’m not a Potter-head (or what­ever they like to call them­selves).
NOTE: If you’re a part of the (prob­a­bly) small group that plans to read this book but hasn’t yet, you might want to stop read­ing here.

I had fun read­ing Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows, but it left me want­ing in a num­ber of ways. The first of these has to do with the expo­si­tion and con­clu­sion: they are vir­tu­ally non-existent. I sup­pose I can accept the lack of expo­si­tion — tech­ni­cally there are six books’ worth of intro­duc­tion to this install­ment, and jump­ing right into the action in some­what effec­tive as a lit­er­ary tech­nique. The six pre­vi­ous books, how­ever, also make the lack of a sat­is­fac­tory con­clu­sion even more unac­cept­able. The entire series reaches its cli­max in this final install­ment — a cli­max that includes the deaths of some fairly major sup­port­ing char­ac­ters — and the denoue­ment is per­haps the short­est of any of the books. The flash for­ward at the very end wasn’t help­ful, either — it cre­ates more ques­tions than it answers.

Another com­plaint I have is the com­plex rela­tion­ship between Harry and Volde­mort and the con­trived expla­na­tion for Harry’s sur­vival. Volde­mort acci­den­tally made Harry into a hor­crux when he tried to kill the young boy. He then some­how acci­den­tally made Harry invin­ci­ble when he used Harry’s blood in his res­ur­rec­tion. So, a part of Voldemort’s soul is in Harry, which can’t die unless Harry dies. Mean­while, a part of Harry is in Volde­mort, pro­tect­ing Harry from death, due to the pro­tec­tions placed on Harry by his mother. When Volde­mort tries to kill Harry for the final time, this con­vo­luted rela­tion­ship some­how makes the killing curse ric­o­chet around, remov­ing the piece of Voldemort’s soul from Harry, killing Volde­mort, and allow­ing J.K. Rowl­ing to get away with let­ting her pro­tag­o­nist live. Con­ve­nient, huh?

There were a few other more minor annoy­ances, the most promi­nent of which was yet another hissy fit from Ron. He once again gets mad at Harry and stops talk­ing to him. He goes so far this time as to aban­don Harry and Hermione as they’re on the run. Haven’t we been through this enough already? Has Ron had zero char­ac­ter devel­op­ment dur­ing the seven years of the series?

Again, I did enjoy read­ing Deathly Hal­lows, but it doesn’t pro­vide a com­pletely sat­is­fac­tory end­ing to the series. Per­haps Rowl­ing is plan­ning some sort of book that will give more details about what hap­pens to all of the char­ac­ters fol­low­ing Voldemort’s demise (and keep the money rolling in).

The Secret Agent A Sim­ple TaleJoseph Con­rad
Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press 2004World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Adolf Ver­loc seems to be the antithe­sis of a covert agent — he’s slow, fat, lazy, and appar­ently inept. How­ever, these latent char­ac­ter­is­tics are pre­cisely what keep peo­ple from sus­pect­ing that he’s any­thing other than a sim­ple shop­keeper with socialist/anarchist lean­ings. In real­ity, he is an agent of an unnamed Euro­pean gov­ern­ment sta­tioned in Lon­don to infil­trate anar­chist groups and report on their activ­i­ties. Ver­loc is sum­moned to the Embassy by Mr. Vladimir, a recently pro­moted offi­cial who has a new task for the agent.

Vladimir feels that the Eng­lish are not doing enough to rid them­selves of anar­chists, and that they need to be spurred into action. The most effec­tive way to do this, he feels, is to con­vince the anar­chists to carry out a bomb­ing so heinous that the British gov­ern­ment will be forced to take swift and deci­sive action. Thus, the task he gives to Ver­loc is to engi­neer an attack on the Green­wich Obser­va­tory, a bas­tion of sci­ence and mod­ernism, within a month.
Some­what shaken by this direc­tive, Ver­loc returns to the storefront/home he shares with his wife Win­nie and her mother and men­tally chal­lenged brother Ste­vie. He begins to plan the bomb­ing, using his estab­lished anar­chist con­tacts to gather infor­ma­tion and mate­ri­als. At this point in the nar­ra­tive, the plot jumps ahead in time and the point of view shifts away from Ver­loc. The bomb­ing has taken place, but it soon becomes appar­ent that some­thing went awry in its exe­cu­tion. The reader is left to fig­ure out what hap­pened, along with the police.

In this book, first pub­lished in 1907, Con­rad adds polit­i­cal intrigue and covert oper­a­tions to a detec­tive story — cre­at­ing, in essence, one of the first (maybe the first) espi­onage nov­els. Conrad’s use of mul­ti­ple lev­els of plots, iden­ti­ties, and agen­das eas­ily matches the com­plex­ity of any present-day spy nov­els. The book’s theme of a ter­ror­ist attack staged to pro­voke a gov­ern­ment response and enable expanded police pow­ers res­onates eerily today, mir­ror­ing some recent con­spir­acy theories.

As in every­thing else of his that I’ve read, Conrad’s prose is often beau­ti­ful, despite the fact that it is fairly dense. His descrip­tions of peo­ple are quite good, but that at which he truly excels is descrip­tions of set­tings and atmos­phere. The Author’s depic­tions of Lon­don — espe­cially its darker cor­ners — are vivid and truly draw the reader in. I think that Heart of Dark­ness is still my favorite Con­rad work, but The Secret Agent comes in at a close second.

Sid­dhartha Her­mann Hesse
Ban­tam Clas­sics 1981World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Sid­dhartha, the son of a Brah­min, is con­sumed by the quest for wis­dom. Early in life, he decides that he has learned all he can from his par­ents and teach­ers. As he begins to con­tem­plate new direc­tions, a group of itin­er­ant ascetics passes through his town. Impressed by their lives of sim­plic­ity and self-denial, he joins the sect.

Sid­dhartha divests him­self of worldly poses­sions, fasts, and begins the process of destroy­ing the Self in order to attain Nir­vana. He makes progress, but soon becomes dis­il­lu­sioned with this path, as well. He pro­ceeds to seek enlight­en­ment through a num­ber of other paths, each change being accom­pa­nied by dras­tic shifts in his lifestyle. After many years of this, still unful­filled, Sid­dhartha comes to rest on the banks of a river at the house of a fer­ry­man. Vasudeva, the fer­ry­man, lives a very sim­ple — yet very con­tented — life. Sid­dhartha soon real­izes that he can learn far more from Vasudeva and the river than from any of his pre­vi­ous teachers.

It was inter­est­ing to read this and Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist in the same day. Both are sto­ries of per­sonal searches for wis­dom and a mean­ing­ful life. Both Sid­dhartha and San­ti­ago take long wind­ing paths to their respec­tive goals, with many unplanned stops along the way. Also, they both real­ize their goals in ways and places they never would have imag­ined when begin­ning their quests. I think that I pre­fer Sid­dhartha to The Alchemist, largely because it is never bla­tantly “inspirational.”

I was amazed at how many peo­ple in the Chicago Mid­way Air­port gave me unso­licited com­ments as I was read­ing this book ; all were unequiv­o­cally pos­i­tive. Appar­ently, I’m among the few who didn’t read Sid­dhartha in high school (thank you, Ten­nessee pub­lic edu­ca­tion…). I’d highly rec­om­mend read­ing this if you haven’t, and reread­ing it if you have.

The Alchemist Paulo Coelho
Harper­One 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

San­ti­ago, a young Andalu­sian shep­herd, is con­tent with his sim­ple itin­er­ant lifestyle — he trav­els where he wishes and is respon­si­ble only for his flock. Then, he dreams of find­ing trea­sure near the Great Pyra­mids of Egypt. With the encour­age­ment of a gypsy for­tune teller and a mys­te­ri­ous old man, San­ti­ago decides to sell his flock and search for the trea­sure. The jour­ney takes much longer than expected, and Santiago’s path is greatly influ­enced by the peo­ple he meets along the way. As he trav­els, his world­view, his goals, and his con­cept of trea­sure change as well.

Coelho’s tale is inspir­ing, although it occa­sion­ally teeters on the edge of being inspi­ra­tional, in the annoy­ing self-help sense of the word. Still, the story is a com­pelling one that plays host to a plethora of inter­est­ing char­ac­ters. The book’s prose is almost effort­lessly read­able, evi­dently the prod­uct of a coop­er­a­tive effort between Coelho and trans­la­tor Alan R. Clarke. The only down­side to this is that the book lacks the won­der­fully pecu­liar turns of phrase that often result from a trans­la­tor work­ing alone.

Labyrinth Kate Mosse
G. P. Putnam’s Sons 2006World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Alice Tan­ner is on her last day as a vol­un­teer on an archae­o­log­i­cal dig in the Pyre­nees when she makes a star­tling dis­cov­ery: a cave con­tain­ing inscrip­tions, an alter, and two graves. Within one of the graves, she finds a ring bear­ing a labyrinth design iden­ti­cal to one on the wall behind the altar. She slips, falls, and is knocked uncon­scious. When she is awak­ened by other dig mem­bers (she had fool­ishly ven­tured into the cave alone), the ring is nowhere to be found. Alice comes under inves­ti­ga­tion for the dis­ap­pear­ance of the ring, but soon finds her­self caught up in a much grander strug­gle involv­ing the cave, the ring, eight hun­dred years of French his­tory, and a pow­er­ful ancient secret (nat­u­rally). The natures of the strug­gle and the secret are revealed largely through the sec­ond plot line, which is set in thirteenth-century France. The two plots have some par­al­lel char­ac­ters who are related by more than just circumstance.

Labyrinth is yet another novel that involves the leg­end of the Holy Grail. Thank­fully, Mosse dis­penses with the Mary Magdalene/Knights Templar/Priory of Sion plot points that Dan Brown and oth­ers have run into the ground. Mosse’s grail is of ancient ori­gins, pre­dat­ing the Chris­t­ian church by thou­sands of years. She also gives a fairly com­pelling rea­son for its exis­tence. In her efforts to shroud the grail in ancient mys­tery, she has her char­ac­ters talk an awful lot about its his­tory and power, but the grail itself and its attached cer­e­monies are never described very well. This annoyed me some­what. Also, it seems to take some of the char­ac­ters alot longer than nec­es­sary to fig­ure some things out — sort of a pet peeve of mine. Labyrinth is cer­tainly enter­tain­ing though, with secret soci­eties, ancient arti­facts, good vs. evil, etc. Mosse does seem to have done a fair amount of his­tor­i­cal research for this book; the main plot it cer­tainly fic­tion, but the events sur­round­ing it have at least a basis in history.

You Suck A Love StoryChristo­pher Moore
William Mor­row 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

You Suck picks up just after the end­ing of Blood­suck­ing Fiends, its pre­de­ces­sor. The vam­pire Jody and her for­mer min­ion Tommy are, they think, safe from the vam­pire who’d been pur­su­ing them. Jody is finally get­ting a han­dle on the ins and outs of being a vam­pire, and has turned Tommy. While Tommy gets used to his new strengths and weak­nesses, the two go in search of a new min­ion and a reli­able source of blood that doesn’t involve killing people.

They soon find them­selves pur­sued again, this time by the police, the vam­pire they thought they’d taken care of, Tommy’s for­mer co-workers, and a blue-skinned pros­ti­tute. Luck­ily, they have some new friends with cre­ative ways of help­ing them.

Unlike many sequels that appear many years after the orig­i­nal , You Suck does not dis­ap­point. I fre­quently laughed out loud at Moore’s bizarre yet com­pletely sound turns of phrase and use of words that don’t exist (out­side this novel), but should (e.g. ono­matopeed v. — to vocal­ize an ono­matopoeia). As usual, Moore’s cast of char­ac­ters includes per­son­ages from a num­ber of his pre­vi­ous books as well as new won­der­fully ridicu­lous addi­tions. This book can be read on its own, but Blood­suck­ing Fiends is well worth a quick read.

Blood­suck­ing Fiends Christo­pher Moore
Harper Paper­backs 2004World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

I’d read this book once before, but decided to reread it before tack­ling You Suck — Moore’s lat­est novel and sequel to Blood­suck­ing Fiends. Jody, a young insur­ance claims adjuster, is viciously attacked one night after leav­ing work. She comes to in an alley with a badly burned arm, a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars in her blouse, and a dump­ster on top of her. Things become even stranger as she finds her­self able to eas­ily throw off the dump­ster, hear elec­tric­ity cours­ing through street­car wires, and see the heat ema­nat­ing from build­ings and peo­ple. Jody is baf­fled about what has hap­pened to her until the last piece of the puz­zle clicks into place: she has an irre­sistible crav­ing for blood.

Jody sets about learn­ing the ropes of life as a vam­pire; she soon enlists the help of Tommy Flood, a mor­tal min­ion who can take care of her day­time busi­ness. The two soon find them­selves pur­sued by both the police and the vam­pire who turned Jody. Tommy and Jody soon fall in love, and have to jug­gle evad­ing their ene­mies and fig­ur­ing out how to make a mortal/vampire rela­tion­ship work.

Blood­suck­ing Fiends is full of Moore’s trade­mark hilar­i­ous absur­dity, from a Blood Drinkers Anony­mous meet­ing at which Jody is the only real vam­pire, to an assault on a high-tech yacht by a rag­tag group of super­mar­ket night shift work­ers. Sev­eral of Moore’s recur­ring char­ac­ters appear in this book. My favorite of these is the home­less Emperor of San Fran­cisco, along with his two canine atten­dants. I’ve read all of Moore’s books so far, and this is one of my favorites — I’m glad he decided to write a sequel.

Pere­landra (Space Tril­ogy, Book 2) C. S. Lewis
Scrib­ner 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this, the sec­ond book of his Space Tril­ogy, C.S. Lewis shifts his own role from that of reteller of Elwin Ransom’s adven­tures to that of a par­tic­i­pant in some of the action. Lewis is unex­pect­edly sum­moned to Ransom’s cot­tage in Worces­ter. When the two meet, Ran­som reveals that he (Ran­som) will be under­tak­ing another jour­ney into space. He will travel to Pere­landra (known to us as Venus) to help pro­tect that planet and its inhab­i­tants from attack by an evil being. (The basis for the con­flict is fairly com­pli­cated — for an expla­na­tion, read Out of the Silent Planet.) Ran­som knows very lit­tle about his task, only that he will be mak­ing the jour­ney alone.

Lewis’s role in all of this is to seal his friend in a rather unortho­dox ves­sel and to be ready at any time to meet him upon his return to earth. Lewis sees Ran­som off, then returns to his reg­u­lar life and awaits a sig­nal. He receives it more than a year later and returns to the cot­tage in the coun­try. Once Ran­som emerges from his craft and cleans up a bit, he begins to recount his expe­ri­ences on Pere­landra. Lewis’s retelling of the tale makes up the bulk of the book.
Lewis (the author, not the char­ac­ter) has made Pere­landra a young world, not yet dom­i­nated by a sen­tient species. He has, in effect, cre­ated a Venu­sian Gar­den of Eden and writ­ten a por­tion of a sec­ond Gen­e­sis. This book, like much of Lewis’s writ­ing is highly alle­gor­i­cal. How­ever, in a brief pref­ace, Lewis states that

All the human char­ac­ters in this book are purely fic­ti­tious and none of them is allegorical.

The first part of this state­ment can’t be true; he him­self is a char­ac­ter. The sec­ond part can only be true if one is will­ing to get into a seman­tic argu­ment about which char­ac­ters are truly human. Then again, the pref­ace also refers to the inhab­i­tants of Mars as if they were real, so per­haps it is meant to have been penned by Lewis the character.

I enjoyed the book for the most part, although it does drag a lit­tle at times. Lewis’s lush descrip­tions of his beau­ti­ful invented world and its fas­ci­nat­ing inhab­i­tants make read­ing it more than worth­while, though.

Out of the Silent Planet (Space Tril­ogy, Book One) C. S. Lewis
Scrib­ner 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

C.S. Lewis is prob­a­bly best known for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the other six books that com­prise The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia. But, about ten years before the tale of the Peven­sie children’s trip through a magic wardrobe, Lewis com­pleted a novel about an entirely dif­fer­ent sort of jour­ney. Out of the Silent Planet was the first vol­ume in what would become a tril­ogy about space travel.

The book cen­ters on Dr. Elwin Ran­som, a bril­liant philol­o­gist and Cam­bridge fel­low. While on a walk­ing tour of the Eng­lish coun­try­side, Ran­som hap­pens upon Devine, an old school­mate, and Weston, an accom­plished physi­cist. He dis­cov­ers the two doing some­thing rather sus­pi­cious, but they pla­cate Ran­som and offer him a room for the night. Unfor­tu­nately, his ini­tial impres­sions were spot-on, and he soon finds him­self drugged and sub­se­quently impris­oned on a space­ship by Weston and Devine. Although his cap­tors refuse to tell him every­thing, Ran­som learns through ques­tion­ing and eaves­drop­ping that they are en route to another planet within our solar sys­tem, that Weston and Devine have been there before, and that he is to be turned over to one of the species native to the planet.

After about a month of fly­ing through space, the trio’s craft lands. Weston and Devine soon try to hand Ran­som over to the inhab­i­tants, but the philol­o­gist man­ages to escape. Ran­som wan­ders the strange planet alone for a time, and even­tu­ally comes upon a mem­ber of a sec­ond sen­tient native species. Being a philol­o­gist, he imme­di­ately sets about learn­ing the creature’s lan­guage. The more flu­ent he becomes, the more he is able to learn about the planet and its inhab­i­tants, and the more he real­izes how poor a grasp his for­mer cap­tors have of those subjects.

Although Out of the Silent Planet con­cerns space travel, I’m not sure that it really fits into the cat­e­gory of sci­ence fic­tion. It con­tains almost no sci­ence or advanced tech­nol­ogy other than an early twentieth-century space­ship, of which the con­struc­tion and work­ings are never dis­cussed. The book focuses mainly on the rela­tion­ships between the three sen­tient species on the alien world, the rela­tion­ships between the var­i­ous plan­ets in our solar sys­tem, and the his­tory of the solar sys­tem itself. As in The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, much of Lewis’s writ­ing here is Chris­t­ian alle­gory; there are char­ac­ters or classes of beings which rep­re­sent God, the Devil, angels, and demons.

Thee is much to enjoy in this book. Lewis, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, enjoys invent­ing words and whole lan­guages, which I find fas­ci­nat­ing. Also inter­est­ing are the dynam­ics of three sen­tient species shar­ing a sin­gle world. Because none of them is clearly dom­i­nant, they all seem to have a more har­mo­nious rela­tion­ship with their planet that we humans do with earth.

I look for­ward to the next book in the series: Pere­landra.

The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco
Har­court Brace 1994World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This novel, like Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, is set up as the trans­la­tion of an obscure per­sonal account hun­dreds of years old that has sur­vived to the present day only in par­tial copies and quo­ta­tions in other works. The account in ques­tion here is that of Adso of Melk, a Ger­man monk writ­ing at the end of the four­teenth cen­tury. Adso’s tale con­cerns a series of mys­te­ri­ous deaths at an abbey some­where in the Appenines. Adso — who was a novice at the time about which he has writ­ten — trav­els to the abbey with his teacher, who has been sent to inves­ti­gate the first sus­pi­cious death. As the casu­al­ties pile up, the two are drawn into a tan­gled web of lies, secrets, con­spir­a­cies, and abba­tial politics.

This book does a good job of emu­lat­ing medieval writ­ing (or at least my con­cep­tion of it). Too good a job, in fact. The prose is clunky, with fre­quent run-on sen­tences, extra­ne­ous lists, and irrel­e­vant digres­sions. Some of this, at least, may not be Eco’s fault — a por­tion of the blame may lie with William Weaver, who trans­lated the novel from the orig­i­nal Ital­ian. An annoy­ing fea­ture of the book that is cer­tainly Weaver’s fault is the fre­quent appear­ance of phrases and short pas­sages in Latin with no trans­la­tion. This may be fine for native speak­ers of a Romance lan­guage, but how many English-speaking read­ers are equipped to deal with this?

The char­ac­ters and plot of The Name of the Rose are intrigu­ing — the book is full of twists, codes, and puz­zles. Unfor­tu­nately, it has been sab­o­taged by bad writ­ing and/or trans­lat­ing, and was some­what of a chore to finish.

Today, I bring you fur­ther proof that a book should not be judged by its cover. I’m cur­rently read­ing Yucatan Deep by Tom Mor­risey. I don’t remem­ber where I picked the book up, but it was most likely at a thrift store or a used book shop. I do remem­ber that is was cheap (prob­a­bly no more than two dol­lars), and that I bought it because it seemed to involve a num­ber of things that inter­est me: cav­ing, div­ing, and pos­si­bly archae­ol­ogy. I’d never heard of the book or the author before, but I fig­ured that it would be good for a quick read, even if it was a fairly ter­ri­ble novel. Lit­tle did I know what I was in store for…

A cou­ple of days ago, when I was about sixty pages into the book, my mom e-mailed me, won­der­ing why I was read­ing an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian adven­ture novel. “A what?” I thought. I fig­ured that she must have looked at the Ama­zon page for the book, which is linked in the “Now Read­ing” sec­tion of my side­bar. I man­age my read­ing list with Media Man­ager, which auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates the Ama­zon links. I gen­er­ally don’t visit the linked pages until I’m done with a book, if then. So, after get­ting the mes­sage from my mom, I checked Yucatan Deep on Ama­zon. This is how the “Edi­to­r­ial Reviews” sec­tion begins:

Cave div­ing is a rel­a­tively unusual topic for an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian adven­ture novel, and this debut novel by Mor­risey is chock-full of inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and cliff-hanging suspense…

Crap.

I had no idea that there was such a thing as an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian adven­ture novel, much less that I’d pur­chased one. The blurb on the back cover didn’t clue me in to the book’s true nature (it con­tains only a sin­gle pass­ing ref­er­ence to ‘faith’), nor did the first six­ty­ish pages lead me to believe I was read­ing any­thing other than a mediocre bit of escapist fiction.

On page eighty-five, it hit. There are three par­al­lel plots, one of which cen­ters on a young mechan­i­cal engi­neer and surfer, named Elvis, who has decided not to join his father’s respected surf­board busi­ness. We don’t find out what his new career path is until page eighty-five. Elvis has decided to become a mis­sion­ary and plans to min­is­ter to small Cen­tral Amer­i­can Indian tribes who have had lit­tle to no con­tact with out­siders. And he reads the Bible cover-to cover more than once per year. This book should not, as the back cover kindly sug­gests, be filed in FICTION/GENERAL/SUSPENSE.

I don’t mean to offend any of my Chris­t­ian friends, so I’ll just say that I’m not exactly the church-going type. I feel kind of tricked by the pub­lish­ers of this book, and I may not be able to read all the way through. I’ll let you know what I think if I man­age to fin­ish it (although, I’m at least ten books behind in post­ing reviews, so it may be awhile).

Next Michael Crich­ton
Harper­Collins 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this, his lat­est novel, Michael Crich­ton addresses a num­ber of aspects of cut­ting edge genetic engi­neer­ing and research. As usual, he focuses on the pos­si­ble prob­lems that this rapidly devel­op­ing sci­ence could cause. The dan­gers his posits are not the vicious prod­ucts of the tech­nol­ogy itself, à la the dinosaurs of Juras­sic Park or the nanopar­tic­u­late swarms of Prey; rather, they stem from the moral and legal issues sur­round­ing its application.

Should genes be patentable and own­able? Should genetic pre­dis­po­si­tion for a dis­ease be grounds for denial of insur­ance cov­er­age or child cus­tody? What rights should peo­ple have regard­ing their own genes and tis­sues and any prod­ucts derived from them? At what point does a trans­genic organ­ism tran­scend its orig­i­nal species des­ig­na­tion and become some­thing else (espe­cially if the added genetic mate­r­ial is human)? Crich­ton weaves these ques­tions together through the use of mul­ti­ple con­cur­rent (and some­what inter­con­nected) sub­plots. He keeps the excite­ment high through­out, as usual, which makes the book hard to put down. I barely did; I read it in a day.

Next lacks the foot­not­ing present in State of Fear, and is less preachy, too. Crich­ton does how­ever include an author’s note at the end, in which he offers his con­clu­sions about the moral and legal impli­ca­tions of genet­ics and what needs to be changed about cur­rent laws and prac­tices. He also sup­plies a fairly exten­sive bibliography.

This isn’t my favorite of Crichton’s nov­els (I can’t help but be par­tial to those that include some of my boy­hood fas­ci­na­tions — dinosaurs, knights, and Vikings), but it’s well worth a read.

The World Accord­ing to Garp John Irv­ing
Bal­lan­tine Books 1990World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Irving’s novel tells of the life of T.S. Garp, from his uncon­ven­tional con­cep­tion to his tragic death. Garp’s life is any­thing but ordi­nary, in no small part because his sin­gle mother is an early leader of the nascent fem­i­nist move­ment. He con­stantly finds him­self in the shadow of his famous mother, but he does man­age to make a bit of a name for him­self as an author. Garp’s work draws heav­ily on his own per­sonal expe­ri­ences, although he denies that any of it is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. At a num­ber of points in The World Accord­ing to Garp, the reader is treated to lengthy sec­tions of Garp’s writ­ing. I enjoyed this sort of fic­tion within fic­tion; it works quite well here.

Other than his writ­ing, the book really focuses on Garp’s life — his suc­cesses and fail­ures, his rela­tion­ships with his fam­ily and close friends, the events that shape his con­cep­tion of the world around him. This is not an easy book to read. It is at times very dark, and is punc­tu­ated by a num­ber of bru­tal and tragic events. By the end, I felt a lit­tle like the lit­er­ary equiv­a­lent of being punch-drunk — it was maybe a lit­tle more harsh than I would have wanted. That said, the book does con­tain many light, funny, and charm­ing moments, and I liked it over­all. It’s a pow­er­ful novel, and well worth read­ing if you’re will­ing to deal with some heavy stuff.

The Thir­teenth Tale A NovelDiane Set­ter­field
Atria 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Mar­garet Lea lives in a world of books. Her father owns an anti­quar­ian book shop, in which she learned to read and write, and where she has worked ever since. Her hobby involves read­ing the diaries of his­tor­i­cal fig­ures who have fallen into obscu­rity and con­dens­ing them into short biogra­phies. Her nor­mal read­ing fare con­sists of books by authors like Jane Austen and the Brontë Sis­ters. Thus, Mar­garet is taken aback when she receives a let­ter from Vida Win­ter, the best-selling author of all time.

Win­ter, of whose fifty-six nov­els Mar­garet has read pre­cisely zero, is an enig­matic fig­ure. Almost noth­ing is known about her life, due in no small part to Winter’s prac­tice of telling inter­view­ers woldly dif­fer­ent sto­ries about her­self and actively dis­cour­ag­ing would-be biog­ra­phers. This is the strangest thing about Winter’s let­ter — she seems to want Mar­garet to write her life story.

Despite her unfa­mil­iar­ity with Winter’s work, Mar­garet knows that this oppor­tu­nity is not to be missed. Still, she is some­what incred­u­lous. Why her? Why now? She trav­els to Winter’s coun­try home, which seems as cut off from the world as the author her­self. Win­ter begins telling her story to Mar­garet, but refuses to answer ques­tions or tell any part of the story out of its proper order. Mar­garet grudg­ingly accepts these con­di­tions, but begins inves­ti­gat­ing on her own. She wants to fill in what she sus­pects are omis­sions or mis­lead­ing ele­ments in Winter’s tale. The deeper she digs, the more she unrav­els the mys­tery of Winter’s fam­ily and the rea­sons for her reluc­tance to tell the whole story.

I enjoyed the man­ner in which Diane Set­ter­field weaves her tale within a tale through a mix­ture of sto­ry­telling and detec­tive work. I also liked the lit­er­ary bent of the novel — a story about an author telling her own per­sonal story, with time spent in libraries and book­shops, and ref­er­ences to clas­sic lit­er­a­ture through­out. The Thir­teenth Tale is a pretty good read, and a refresh­ing change from crime– or Knights Tem­plar-based mysteries.

Cor­rupt­ing Dr. Nice John Kessel
Tor 1998World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In a world in which time travel is not only pos­si­ble, but exists as a pop­u­lar tourist activ­ity, oppor­tu­ni­ties for con artistry abound. August Fai­son and his daugh­ter Genevieve are pros in this field, hav­ing run suc­cess­ful cons at var­i­ous places and times in his­tory. Shortly after arriv­ing in Jerusalem, 30 C.E. to plan a new job, the Faisons meet Dr. Owen Van­nice, a young pale­on­tol­o­gist. Owen is some­what naive, and is a mem­ber of one of the rich­est fam­i­lies in the world. He’s also trav­el­ing from the Cre­ta­ceous era with an ani­mal, which he claims is a dog. These facts com­bine to make him a per­fect mark for the Faisons.

But, as the father/daughter team schemes to relieve Owen of his “dog,” trou­ble is brew­ing in Jerusalem. A group of his­tor­i­cals (as the time trav­el­ers refer to the locals) are plan­ning a revolt. Although the time trav­el­ers have brought them help­ful tech­nol­ogy, espe­cially in the areas of agri­cul­ture and med­i­cine, these his­tor­i­cals feel that their cul­ture is being destroyed by tourism and the intro­duc­tion of things like motor vehi­cles, firearms, and tele­vi­sion. They plan to smug­gle in weapons from the future and drive the time trav­el­ers out by force.

From this com­plex and some­what bizarre set-up, John Kessel’s tale unfolds with equal mea­sures of humor and social satire. I found this book to be very enter­tain­ing. It can be clas­si­fied as sci­ence fic­tion, but isn’t bogged down by the long expla­na­tions of futur­is­tic tech­nol­ogy, alien races, or invented lan­guages that some­times mar the genre. Kessel’s use of time travel — while inte­gral to the plot– is not the focus of the book. It merely serves as a tool for Kessel to set up the cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal jux­ta­po­si­tions that make the book so inter­est­ing. Cor­rupt­ing Dr. Nice is a good, quick read, and I very much enjoyed Kessel’s quirky sense of humor.

The Kite Run­ner. Khaled Hos­seini
River­head Books 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Amir, an Afghan immi­grant to the United States, nar­rates the story of his life. He lives his child­hood in rel­a­tive com­fort, the son of a wealthy busi­ness­man and liv­ing in Kabul prior to the 1979 Russ­ian inva­sion of Afghanistan. Amir and Has­san, one of the family’s ser­vants who is near Amir’s own age, are insep­a­ra­ble friends — prac­ti­cally broth­ers. They do almost every­thing together, but one of their favorite activ­i­ties is kite fighting.

This sport involves teams of two boys fly­ing kites with string coated in ground up glass. The object is to cut the strings of the other kites. It is a point of pride to catch, or ‘run,’ the defeated kites, espe­cially the last to be cut. Fol­low­ing a par­tic­u­larly impor­tant kite fight, some­thing hap­pens which for­ever alters the rela­tion­ship between Amir and Has­san. Things dete­ri­o­rate to the point that Has­san and his father leave, after many happy years with Amir and his father.

Fol­low­ing the Russ­ian occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan, Amir and his father sur­rep­ti­tiously flee the coun­try and set­tle in Cal­i­for­nia. They have a hard time adjust­ing to life in a new coun­try with­out any of the wealth they were forced to leave behind. Even­tu­ally though, Amir mar­ries and finds some suc­cess as a writer.

A phone call out of the blue from a friend in Afghanistan stirs the ghosts from Amir’s past, and per­suades Amir to return to his native coun­try to try to set things right. He finds him­self in an almost unrec­og­niz­able coun­try, dev­as­tated by war are the rule of the Taliban.

In this, his first book, Khaled Hos­seini has cre­ated a heart-wrenching story of tragedy, betrayal, and redemp­tion. His descrip­tions, espe­cially those of his char­ac­ters, are vivid and engag­ing. Although occa­sion­ally hard to stom­ach, this book is def­i­nitely a worth­while read.

Ser­vants of the Map Sto­riesAndrea Bar­rett
W. W. Nor­ton & Com­pany 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

The char­ac­ters in the var­i­ous sto­ries in this col­lec­tion are all some­how involved with the fron­tiers of sci­ence and dis­cov­ery. There is a sur­veyor par­tic­i­pat­ing in the first trigono­met­ric map­ping sur­vey of India, a nineteenth-century pale­on­tol­o­gist ques­tion­ing the lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tion of the bib­li­cal time­line of cre­ation, a doc­tor and nurse work­ing to keep tuber­cu­lo­sis patients alive before the cause of the dis­ease was known, etc. Each story mixes the rig­ors of sci­ence with the emo­tions of love and desire.

While each story stands on its own, ten­drils of con­nec­tion serve to tie the col­lec­tion together. Many of these con­nec­tions are sub­tle — a men­tion of a character’s dis­tant rel­a­tive who appears promi­nently in another story, a soli­tary woman’s boot that some­what mys­te­ri­ously appears in two sto­ries sep­a­rated by a hun­dred years. These lit­tle con­nec­tions are not inte­gral to the plots, but they reward the atten­tive reader.

Barrett’s sto­ries vary quite a bit in set­ting, sub­ject mate­r­ial, and length, but all are inter­est­ing and well-written. Her char­ac­ters are engag­ing, and she pep­pers her sup­port­ing casts with real fig­ures from the his­tory of sci­ence. I thor­oughly enjoyed this book.

Hook Man Speaks Matt Clark
Berkley Books 2001World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Leg­ends gen­er­ally have a basis in fact, but what about urban leg­ends? Matt Clark explores this idea via Leonard Gage, his one-handed/one-hooked pro­tag­o­nist. Gage is a fairly reg­u­lar guy, except for his metal pros­the­sis and his pen­chant for hid­ing in the bushes near known make-out spots. He’s not an escaped felon, he’s never hurt any of the cou­ples he’s spied upon, and he’s cer­tainly never left his hook planted in the pas­sen­ger door of anyone’s car. He is, how­ever, the liv­ing, breath­ing inspi­ra­tion for the Hook Man urban legend.

Leonard reads an arti­cle about his leg­end, and writes to the author to set the story straight. The author, a folk­lorist named Brauti­gan, decides to study Leonard, his life, and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of his urban leg­end. Dr. Brauti­gan becomes obsessed with the Hook Man, and starts sneak­ing up on parked cou­ples while hold­ing a plas­tic hook. Through­out his life, Leonard runs into other peo­ple who have spawned urban leg­ends. Most of the time, they turn out to be fairly nor­mal peo­ple like him — it’s other peo­ple who are the weird ones.

In this book, Matt Clark has man­aged to strike a good bal­ance between hilar­i­ous and touch­ing. His char­ac­ters are delight­fully quirky, and his writ­ing style is clever and a plea­sure to read. Sadly, this is Clark’s only novel — he suc­cumbed to can­cer at an early age. He was appar­ently a pro­lific writer of short sto­ries, though. I’d like to get my hands on some of them.

The Cold Moon A Lin­coln Rhyme NovelJef­fery Deaver
Simon & Schus­ter 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Lin­coln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are on the trail of another bril­liant mur­derer. The killer is nick­named “The Watch­maker” due to his pen­chant for leav­ing clocks at the scenes of his crimes. But, The Watch­maker is not who — or what — he seems to be. Deaver pro­vides plenty of twists and sub­plots to keep the reader guess­ing. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that these twists don’t keep Rhyme and Sacks guess­ing. They remain one step ahead of their quarry through­out the book, which takes the fun out of it. Their appar­ent omni­science can­cels out the plot twists — no mat­ter what hap­pens, the detec­tives are always pre­pared for it. Deaver’s next book would ben­e­fit from fewer unnec­es­sary twists (maybe a sin­gle plot that can sus­tain an entire novel?) and fewer imme­di­ate suc­cesses for the protagonists.