Recent books

Ex Libris is a novel by Ross King, the author of the bestselling nonfiction book Brunelleschi’s Dome, which told the story of the design and construction of the basilica on top of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican. Set in England in the 1600s, Ex Libris is told from the perspective of a widowed bookseller who is asked by a peculiar widow to track down a unique manuscript that her father had rescued from Prague during the Battle of Prague in the Thirty Years’ War. Although King’s attempts to work 16th-century English styles into his prose dragged the novel down at times, the plot was definitely compelling and he managed to strike a nice balance between evoking the time period and grabbing your attention with action sequences, with a nice history of the printed word mixed in. It’s like a Da Vinci Code for non-morons.

The Big Over Easy is Jasper Fforde’s first novel outside of the incredible Thursday Next Series (which started with The Eyre Affair, a book to which he pays backhanded homage in TBOE). Humpty Dumpty – who is in his sixties and is living in Reading, England – well, make that “was,” because he’s been murdered. Detective Jack Spratt and his new assistant, Mary Mary, are on the case, which involves a visit to the imprisoned gang leader Giorgia Piorgia, a sighting of the serial killer The Gingerbread Man, and some magic beans. It’s typical Fforde, broad, farcical, witty, but I will say that it wasn’t as brilliantly madcap as the Thursday Next books. I was at a bit of a disadvantage, since I can’t say I know my nursery rhymes that well, but the society-page description of the wedding between the Owl and the Pussycat was one I understood.

The Catholic Church, by Swiss theologian Hans Küng, was a fascinating read as he broke down the various points in the Church’s history where various popes, emperors, or other power-brokers imposed some of the various rules, practices, and doctrines which still exist in the Church today, and which Küng argues are a major reason that the Church is in disarray. The refusal to ordain women, the opposition to contraception, and the doctrine of papal infallibility all postdate Christ’s life and the founding of what is now the Roman Catholic Church by hundreds of years. He also has a very critical take on the reign of Pope John Paul II (written two years before John Paul died) that runs in stark counterpoint to the hagiographies that greeted that Pope’s death.

Finally, The Invention of Clouds, by Richard Hamblyn, was a very good if unusually conflict-free history-of-science book. I say conflict-free because these books usually involve some massive stumbling block that keeps the protagonist from quickly (or ever) reaching his goal of fortune or fame or just contributing to scientific progress. Luke Howard came up with the first reliable method of identifying different types of clouds, using the same three basic terms we still use today (cirrus, cumulus, and stratus) at the core of his system. The concept was an immediate success and Howard, a quiet, religious family man, became a celebrity in spite of himself, culminating in a correspondence with the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Invention of Clouds is a quick read, mostly well-written and with lots of interesting facts, but that lack of some conflict or foil left the book feeling a little light. One little highlight is the description towards the end of how Howard’s system of nomenclature led to the modern phrase “on cloud nine.”

Note: I’m turning on comments for this thread as a sort of test to see how much I really need to moderate it. As long as it’s not too much work, I’ll leave them on for all book threads and will try to participate myself. Thanks for coming by.