Puttering in the Study

The Bible of Clay - Julia Navarro

I picked this up during the long layover in the Madrid airport end of October since I sort of enjoyed Navarro's The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud.  The premise is that Abraham dictated Genesis to a scribe, who then took it down on clay tablets, and of course there's all sorts of intrigue surrounding an expedition to find them in Iraq.  The story is set in the months leading up to the invasion, which provides the suspense.  It's okay, but as with the prior book, it sort of drains off at the end rather than reaching a climax.  I should probably chalk that up to it being originally in Spanish, where the conventions as far as dramatic arcs are probably just enough different that it doesn't read right as a thriller in English.  What is reads like is a screenplay that needs some work - the concept, characters and story is good - it just needs to be told in a more dramatic fashion to appeal to a wide audience.

But I have to admit, this is the book that has gotten me thinking that I don't have to keep every book on the shelves just because I read it once.  This is one that (with its predecessor) might find its way to a HP Books in the near future.

The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown

Got this as soon as it came out, since I've enjoyed all of Brown's so far (as well as innumerable knockoffs).  It was okay - it gives formulaic a good name since it is well-crafted, but it's better if you don't dwell on the fact that you've seen the same thing before, i.e. the police are after him, there's a nut after him, there's a puzzle to be solved.  This books focuses on the history, symbology and rituals of the Masons, and it's as much of a love letter to them as you could possibly imagine.  So it's hardly a controversial topic, as in his last couple.  But overall a good read - nothing to write home about, but still a good read.

Shatnerquake - Jeff Burk

And for comic relief, I just finished this litte gem - a book about a fictional Shatnercon convention where through some interdimensional activity I've already forgotten, all of the characters played by Wliam Shatner come to ife and chase him around the convention hall.  When "Oh sh&^, Captain Kirk's got a lightsaber" is one of the lines, and Denny Crane and the Rescue 911 Shatner are walking around you know things are going to be a litte weird.

Nice story, though - and my favorite part was that all of the Shatners spoke the same way, with pauses ... between all ... the words.  That never stopped being funny.

Dracula: The Un-Dead - Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt

 Was surprised to see this in the airport bookstore in Brussels while on our recent layover when I was looking for some reading material for our trip.  It's a sequel to the original Bram Stoker novel by Ian Holt and Stoker's great-nephew Dacre Stoker.  The book is actually quite good - well-written and plotted, and the characters are enjoyable (and logical) updatings of the original ones.  I'm never crazy about authors trying to turn Dracula into a romantic and sympathetic character, but that aside, I thought it was a nice piece of work.  It's heavily researched as far as the 1912 details (overly so in my opinion, since it repeatedly tries to have its characters meet up with actual historical figures) and contains an afterword detailing why the authors made the decisions they did, and frankly admitting where they just departed from canon as far as the original book.

All in all, an excellent addition to the Dracula ouevre.

The Tiger Warrior - David Gibbins

This is the second Gibbins book I've read, following The Lost Tomb.  As with that one, I liked the book generally, but with some reservations.  First of all, the clumsy dialogue is still there, but this time primarily at the beginning.  You still read detailed historical dialogue between two divers during a dive that a professor in a classroom wouldn't say.  But once out of the water, the dialogue, while still stilted (just read it aloud and you'll see what I mean) is better than it was.  The main problem is that people just don't say things that they know the listener already knows - for example a character might say "that's in the old teak chest on the Seaquest II at anchor in Malta"  Well, when the person they're talking to knows what the chest is and where it is, and where the ship is, you'd never say that - you'd just say "that's in the chest".  And you would never refer colloquially to a ship as the "II" to people who work on it.  I just don't get why the author doesn't read the dialogue aloud and ask himself whether real people would say this.  I understand exposition, but much of what is used as dialogue doesn't have to be - the reader can be told what the character thinks - he doesn't have to sound like an idiot reciting it to people that already know.  Oddly, this fault is largely limited to the lead character, and not the others, and I think the characters would benefit from limiting the dialogue to what the character needs to convey, i.e. tell us what the character realizes he's seeing, they have him give his sidekicks the abbreviated version at the scene, then follow up with more on the ship or at the camp.  The consistent scholarly recitation in the form of dialogue is a little sleep-inducing because you can't maintain the fiction that this is actually happening because if it were, people wouldn't be saying this.

The exposition style is still a problem as well, with Gibbins spending page after page after page on exposition of historical details and unfortunately slipping into what I was thrilled to actually read a character admit was "speculation upon speculation".  The main plot of the book escaped me, possibly because the principal bad guy was always offstage, so the threat never really seemed real, and possibly because the lead character was making up an amazingly detailed story about something that happened to one or two Roman soldiers two thousand years ago based on practically nothing (that the flashbacks showed he was right actual undermine the reality).  There are also problem with the writing in actions scenes - several times I read and reread scenes trying to figure out what was happening, and just couldn't make it out.  In one major scene where a character confronts an old body, there are no nouns whatsoever telling you what he's looking at.  There are references to rags and an outline that indicates a body, as well as placing an object in the grasp of what must be the body's hand - but no indication what that hand is - is it bone, mummified flesh, or just not there - and if so, why did you just tell us that it had been grasping an object of a certain shape?  There is major action taking place and the reader is blindfolded.  Gibbin does a good job describing things and places, but during action sometimes there just isn't enough information given.

All that having been said, both the dialogue and the exposition is better than in the last book, and the characters are noticeably better and more believable.  The action is likewise more believable and easier to follow - still not perfect, but easier.  I know I enjoyed the book more than the last one.

The Messenger - Daniel Silva

Often I don't like these espionage or historical artifact thrillers because the writing is bad, or the characters cardboard.  This is was definitely not the case with Daniel Silva's latest Gabriel Allon thriller, The Messenger.  This was my first Silva book, and I really liked the characters - an Israeli government spy who does art restoration in his spare time was a definite improvement over the characters I've been reading lately, and the story is well-written and well-planned.  It's nice to have another series I can start reading the prior books of - I've exhausted my other favorite, Steve Berry.

The Collectors: David Baldacci

I'd read one Baldacci book a few years back (Last Man Standing, I think)and thought it was okay.  Well-done, with good characters, although a bit dull.  Which is why I was surprised that this one was so, well, bad.  Not badly written, and it had interesting characters, but the characters just didn't make any sense together, and I could never keep them straight, or understanding his this bunch of goofballs could do the investigative work Baldacci attributes to them.  It's an awful lot like "The A-Team" but with less interesting characters (and no van). 
It's difficult to put my finger on what I didn't like - but I definitely didn't.

Mister B. Gone - Clive Barker

Okay, there was a reason for this.  As much as I didn't like Clive Barker's fiction I've been reading on my handheld, when I ran out of books on CD to listen to in the car I saw this an HP Books in Dallas and thought it looked like a good short horro novel.  I generally don't like listening to the Teaching Company lectures in the car for the same reasons adolescent boys prefer to look at National Geographics rather than have them read - I like to see the pictures, unless it's some literary or theological topic).

I just didn't care much for it.  It was an imaginative story of a demon who gets into our world and ends up trapped in a book (and magnificently performed by Doug Bradley, by the way) but it got too convoluted to follow, and was rather disgusting in its descriptions at times (bit of blood and gore).  Barker can describe a scene really well, but the story that the scenes hang onto is just not real interesting.

Star Trek - Alan Dean Foster

For many, many years, I considered Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Log series the best writing I knew.  I can still remember reading the first one (and still the best, I think) on the bus on the way back from school in Dallas when I was ten years old in the fall of 1974.  I recently reread it and the post on that can be found here.  The scripts for the animated shows were quite good, but Foster's adaptations, which were enlarged and enhanced versions of the episodes, were unparalleled.  I had read some of the James Blish adaptations of the original series, and they were short, cardboard versions of the stories.  Foster's, on the other hand, were detailed, eloquent narratives, filled with minutiae and metaphors, many of which I didn't get originally, but which affected my reading immensely.   Speaking of which, I now realize that Foster's prose about the Enterprise itself - his descriptions of its "titanic warp engines", or the "great starship" was probably the language that took the starship itself from a prop in a sci-fi cartoon to an icon in its own right.  Star Trek hooks people different ways - for me it was the Enterprise as Foster described her.

So I was glad to hear that Foster had been recruited to write the novelization of the new movie.  Although I had read a really bad review of it recently (the audiobook read by Zachary Quinto got a glowing review) I picked it up at Walmart yesterday and read it cover to cover yesterday afternoon and evening.  Overall I was really happy with it.  It added a lot of detail and explanation that the movie didn't have time to cover, and it had the character nuggets and additions I was hoping for.  In many places I think the movie said things better - or at least quicker - but this is a different way of presenting the story.  Not always better, but it is nice to have an old friend telling the story again.

The Brotherhood the Holy Shroud - Julia Navarro

Well, now I know.  Two books about the Templars is enough.  This is the third Dan Brown look-alike I've read in the past six months or so that was centered around the Knights Templar - this time assigning them the role of protecting the Shroud of Turin (actually the original of which the Turn shroud is a medieval xerox - a nice touch).  Unfortunately, while the characters were pretty good, it just never really went anywhere.  It wasn't bad, but some of the dialogue was stilted, and some scenes just didn't work - I suspect something in the cultural translation.  The translation itself was good, but I was baffled why the translator called priests "Padre" instead of "Father", assuming that he was inexplicably using the Spanish term for Italians speaking of a priest.  I still think the translation should have referred to "Father" but I just looked it up and "Padre" is also the Italian title for "Father", so it was technically correct local nomenclature.  How I missed that in four days in Rome I can't imagine.