Reader’s Diary

Bernard Cornwell

You can count on Cornwell to deliver a great adventure, and this is no exception. This book chronicles Richard Sharpe’s journey from India to England, a journey that lands him in a love triangle and in the battle of Trafalger. He handles both situations with typical directness. No fan of the series will be disappointed with this volume.

There are still some gaps in the Sharpe chronology and I hope Cornwell is working to fill them.

David A. Wilson

Wilson set out in some year and biked for some time around Ireland, going from traditional music session to traditional music session. He met some people, some of whom appear in the book. The premise of the book is promising and there are some good traveler’s tales here, but the book as a whole is disappointing. When Wilson is at his best, the trip and the people he met come alive on the page, but he sometimes writes with a detachment that leaves the reader by the side of the road wondering where the author went.

Thad Carhart

A piano shop that requires references of potential customers sounds like the setting for a Ray Bradbury story, but this book is about a real shop in the American author’s Paris neighborhood. Admittance to the shop leads to friendship with the shop’s owner, the purchase of a piano, and a reawakening of the writer’s love of playing. The memoir is seasoned with piano history and tales of people connected with the shop.

I took piano lessons in fourth grade but my hands never learned to play the notes my eyes saw. I took French in college but dropped it midway into my second semester. This book makes me wish I had persevered in both pursuits.

James W. Huston

The premise - a privately owned Nevada fighter school with a fleet of MiGs used as an unwitting tool by a clever terrorist - is implausible, but the execution is entertaining enough that you don’t really care. The characters are, if not quite fully drawn, believable and interesting. The plot has enough unexpected twists to keep you entertained until the final pages.

Unlike Tom Clancy, Huston does not write techno-thrillers that are thinly-disguised Superman comics; his characters are not flawless, invincible heroes fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Unlike Dale Brown, he does not recycle tired characters who rant like conservative talk show hosts. This book is, however, less imaginative than his earlier novels, and I miss those books’ combination of military and legal storytelling.

Jonathan Rabb

The thriller genre suffered as the passing of time made old Nazi villains less and less plausible. The techno-thriller brought new plot elements, but has yet to recover from the end of the Cold War. The small sub-genre of the religo-thriller, however is alive and well. In this book Rabb presents a Catholic Church infiltrated by Manichaeans. If you’ve thought of Manichaeans at all, you probably thought they died out by the 8th century, but in Rabb’s fictional world they - like any proper thriller conspirators - are everywhere.

The main character - Father Ian Pearse - becomes an unwilling tool in a hunt for an ancient lost Manichaean document. The story gallops along and the plot twists, despite writing that is occasionally awkward and overwrought, kept me turning the page. This a good thing, since neither the plot or the characters’ motives would survive close examination. The book is liberally sprinkled with hostages, terrorists, assassinations, betrayals, and so on. By the time Rabb is done, there is not a thriller plot device that hasn’t been used at least once (I exaggerate: there are no stolen nuclear weapons or neo-Nazis).

The book is reminiscent of Robert Ludlum’s work and, like Ludlum’s books, makes for entertaining light reading.

I am bothered, though, by the book’s portrayal of the Catholic Church. The church presented here is an anti-Catholic cartoon. There’s not a devout Catholic in the entire book: all are either conspirators with hidden agendas or self-serving hypocrites. No one with Pearse’s anti-clerical cafeteria theology would remain Catholic, much less become a priest. Not that the book is kind to Christian doctrine in general, for when the secret of the book is revealed… well, I’ll just point out that the author’s note at the end of the novel cites the “Jesus Seminar” and John Dominic Crossnan. I wish he would have used John Meier.

Heather Pringle

The “congress” of the title is the World Congress on Mummy Studies, a gathering of mummy experts which Pringle uses as her jumping-off point for this exploration of the world of the preserved dead. The book covers mummies and mummy experts around the world, from Egypt (of course) to China, where the discovery of mummies with European features rises questions about history-as-we-know-it, to Moscow, where the author interviewed of the keepers of Lenin’s corpse. There are mummies everywhere, from European churches to Peruvian mountain tops, not to mention the withered octet on the cover of the book, which I took care to set face-down between readings.

This is a fascinating book, a source of fun facts that can be dropped into any conversation. For example, you can liven up the family dinner table by asking, “did you know that European painters, into the early years of the twentieth century, used ground-up mummies to produce a brownish pigment named ‘mummy’?”

The writing is vivid, graphic enough that I hesitated to read the book right before going to bed for fear that mummies would appear in my dreams. However, it does read like a collection of somewhat superficial magazine pieces, and some things - putting the American Civil War in the “late” nineteenth century, for example - make me wonder about the author’s fact-checking. The word portraits of various mummy experts are interesting, but Pringle doesn’t really get into their heads or go into much detail about the results of their work. The book did leave me wanting more (is that a comment on me, or on the book?), and I wish it had been written in a more in-depth, John McPhee-like style.