Ex-Libris - Ross King

Saw this on the remainder shelf at Barnes & Noble last week, and decided, based on how much I liked both King's Brunelleschi's Dome and the supposedly similar The Club Dumas and The Name of the Rose (which I didn't like, but I'm for anything that obsessive about books) to give it a try.  I liked the setting, the writing and the plot just fine, and if I could never figure out the ending or even what the hell the focus of the book was about (to say nothing of the slightly unoriginal concept of a house collapsing on its owner at the end) I did like it.  After all, not everything in life makes sense or has a logical ending - or even an ending at all.  It was an interesting story, and I learned a fair amount about 17th century European life and politics.  Also, and this is a big plus, the book made a point of - in fact is seemed to build its premise around - the flotsam and jetsam left by the ending of the Byzantine Empire 200 years before, with books collected and made for the emperors at Constantinople spreading throughout Europe in the decades following its fall to the Turks in 1453.  One nice touch was King's declining to have his 1660 English narrator use the word Byzantine, since the term was not used to refer to the empire until the nineteenth century (I'm pretty sure I'm right about this).  Obviously I'm still a little in my Byzantine period here...