Knight's Reading List XVI: April 2008

You may notice that this particular list is heavy on fiction. The major reason for that, I suppose, is that my wife and I were traveling during the first part of April. We went to Florida for a birding event and stayed to visit my mother-in-law. Finishing any of the heavier works I was reading doesn't seem to have been a priority.

Reading List:

Brown, Dan. The DaVinci Code.
Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
Crichton, Michael. Sphere.
Drake, David. Master of the Cauldron.
Goff, Christine. A Nest in the Ashes.
Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 7th edition.

Non-Fiction:

Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 7th edition. 2003. xiii + 270 pages. Index.

I understand that Mr. Williams has written a new style guide, which superseded Style. Style is a reasonably good resource for the writer who wants to improve. The ten lessons take one through some common mistakes, and they offer some good ways to correct them. This book offers good practice and plenty of examples. Williams is less dogmatic than Strunk and White. Some may see that as an advantage; I see the advantage on the side of Elements of Style. As with drawing, I think that a person needs to learn to write correctly and well before he can grant himself the freedom to start making exceptions to the rules.

Fiction:

Brown, Dan. The DaVinci Code. 2003. 454 pages.

This was a big best-seller, and it became a popular movie with Tom Hanks. I don’t think it’s very well written, and the “facts” underlying the plot are absurd. As far as I know, there is no historical basis to support any of Brown’s suppositions. Now that’s a criticism of Brown’s apparently belief in the context of his novel, and it may not affect your appreciation of the novel. More bothersome may be Brown’s uncertain grasp of (American) English usage and his carelessness about matters which are easily verifiable. Early in the book, Brown inserts into his character’s lecture a ridiculous comment about immigration. I read the book to the end, but I’m not sure why I bothered. If you want a conspiratorial thriller involving the Knights of Malta and all that, try Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a novel far superior to The DaVinci Code.

Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. 414 pages. Author’s Note.

This was one of the hit books of recent years, and deservedly so. Michael Chabon is original and imaginative, and he writes very, very well. He goes so far in creating an imaginary, but exactly contemporary world, that he won a major science fiction award for this book. I don’t think of it as science fiction, unless it fits into “alternate history,” a form of fantasy, often involving magic or supernatural efffects. This is an alternate history, in that sense that Chabon is portraying a world which might have resulted from a different result to the Palestine war of 1947-48. He does this with such attention to detail that a reviewer in Commentary criticised him for his choice of street names.

He thus places a large community of Jews in exile, not in Palestine or Uganda, but on the coast of Alaska. Now, sixty years later, Meyer Landsman, a detective on the Sitka police force, is trying to unravel a murder whose motive lies in that history. As the mystery becomes more complex, and Landsman finds himself hacking his way through layers and layers of connections, we are drawn into this marginalized society.

Like many good mystery novels, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union delves into the past of the community to reveal not only the solution to the mystery, but the forces of character and society that have driven someone to the extreme act of murder. Chabon develops this story through beautifully developed characters and their interactions.

Crichton, Michael. Sphere. 1987. 371 pages.

A competent time travel fantasy, with a happy, but unconvincing ending.

Drake, David. Master of the Cauldron. New York: Tor Books, 2004. 428 pages. This is another in the Lord of the Isles series from David Drake.

Goff, Christine. A Nest in the Ashes. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2002. 213 pages.

I read this book because I met Christine Goff on a flight from Denver to Portland in 2003. She was going to a birders’ convention, and I was going to a funeral. Five years later I read the book, and, frankly, I could have waited another few years before bothering with it. It’s a mystery of a sub-sub-sub-genre featuring a main character who is a birder. The biggest problem with the book is with the McGuffin: The character who is eventually revealed as the killer has not been sufficiently developed to support the motive. There isn’t enough there to raise the motive much above the level of a whim, and that sort of irrationality doesn’t make for satisfying mysteries. There are now several more in Ms. Goff’s birding mystery series.