I, Claudius by Robert Graves

If, by some quirk in the time-space continuum, I was able to time travel, probably one of the last places I would want to end up would be ancient Rome. It’s not the food, the constant wars, or the public toilets that bother me (derail: sat on one of those at a Roman archeological dig in Israel—I prefer to do my business when I don’t have a neighbor’s butt about five inches from mine). Nope, it’s about the murdering—the constant, constant murdering.

When I set down Robert Graves’s I, Claudius for the final time, I tried to figure out how many of the main and secondary characters had been taken out by poisoning, bludgeoning, or neglect. It’s a pretty staggering number. We have mothers killing daughters by walling them up in a room and listening to them starve to death, grandmothers gradually poisoning grandsons, and emperors getting their jaws hacked off by assassins. Neither rank nor blood can protect you from an inevitable and unnatural death.

Unless, of course, you’re an idiot. Or, at least, you’re perceived as an idiot, like the titular Claudius. Born twisted, small, and with a dreadful stammer, Claudius is immediately discounted by his family, a powerful combination of Claudians and Caesars. When he’s not being the punching bag for his mother, grandmother, sister, or a whole host of other family members, he spends his time learning and observing. It’s this quiet behavior that allows him to watch the goings-on unharmed. Claudius watches as Rome goes through three emperors: Augustus (who you might recognize as Octavian from Rome), Tiberius, and Caligula, the “little boot” who nearly ran Rome into the ground.

Throughout, I had trouble deciding whether Claudius was in fact an idiot or not. True, much of his perceived idiocy comes from his self-imposed dumb show, but the situations that he puts himself in are kind of ludicrous. Maybe it’s the comparison between him and his brother Germanicus that makes Claudius come out looking out of it, cowardly, and unmanly in the Roman sense. Then again, Claudius outlived his brother, so that shows how much I know. I’m sure that I might find the answers to my questions in the sequel, Claudius the God, where Claudius comes up against the challenge of his life as emperor. And I'll also end up hiring someone to taste-test my food as my poison paranoia grows.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I had mentioned in my post about The White Queen that I occasionally like to avoid more taxing reading material by diving into a world of harmless, mediocre historical fiction. I try not to make it too much of a habit, but I’m not going to beat myself over the head when my job does such a fine job of doing that for me. However, I am often surprised at the number of quality historical fiction authors there are out there. They clearly immerse themselves in research and not only entertain, but elucidate. You can close the novel, pick up a history book, and immediately identify with the time, making history just that much more understandable to the modern mind—all without relying on bodice-ripper tactics and other-worldly influences. Hilary Mantel is one of those authors.

Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the 2009 Man Booker Prize winner, takes a markedly different approach to the turbulent Tudor era than most. Instead of taking place in the cushioned boudoirs of England’s ruling women, the reader spends most of the time in Thomas Cromwell’s odd little world, where a common blacksmith’s son is raised up to the highest political positions in the land. Cromwell is a walking, talking contradiction. A solid man covered in the scars of his many former trades, he blends in with the lily-white delicates of the English court. He is a former soldier and brawler, yet he conducts business with far more subtlety than nobles who have been bred to the position (most notably the bombastic Duke of Norfolk). He understands the machinations of Anne Boleyn, but seems completely mystified by the women in his own home.

Cromwell’s foil is Sir Thomas More (note: the sheer amount of Thomases in this book is ridiculous—so ridiculous that Cromwell wryly comments about it to himself), the world-renowned intellectual with a violent streak. Cromwell has the flexibility of mind to transfer his services from the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey to the king. More, unfortunately for him, sticks firmly to his worldview, one where everyone from the king down follows the True Church. Their wry interactions and respect-bordering-on-contempt for each other are almost touching, considering the two ultimately suffer the same fate.

The book isn’t without its flaws. Mantel’s cast of hundreds makes it difficult to follow without a background in this history or a very thorough viewing of The Tudors. She also uses the convention of referring to Cromwell as “he” constantly, never really mentioning his name unless another character utters it. I can understand her reasoning behind this style, as the reader can be totally immersed in the character, but it is terribly annoying. When Cromwell interacts with other male characters, which is most of the time, it’s crazy complicated keeping everyone straight. Yet, the book is a valiant work of seriously absorbing literature. I hear through the grapevine that Mantel will be coming out with a sequel, so my Kindle and I will wait with bated breath.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

I have a confession to make: I’ve been known to read trashy books. Now, this isn’t something that I like to shout from the rooftops, but if you spent your days reading Chaucer, you would unwind with something less cerebral too. I’ve done the romance novel thing, but the formula becomes grating after a while. So, my most turned to brainless literature is mediocre historical fiction.

I don’t think Philippa Gregory started out as a mediocre artist. Her break-out novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, was pretty gripping and presented a side of that worn out Tudor saga that I hadn’t heard before. Unfortunately, her work has started to go down a long, dull hill. She’s now turning her attention to the final years of the Plantagenet reign over English with The White Queen.

The White Queen follows the rise of Elizabeth Woodville, a commoner widow, who captures the eye of the young King Edward IV and rises to be the queen of the penultimate reign of a Plantagenet monarch. This period of time has been much discussed by artists and historians as an era of greed and blood. Many a historian has portrayed Edward IV’s queen as the head of a family of grasping bloodsuckers who wormed their way into the highest positions in the kingdom, much like the Boleyns a few generations later. Shakespeare even dedicated his pen to a play based on the period: Richard III. There’s an incredible amount to tell and so many points of view to take in.

Unfortunately, Gregory decides to take the least believable route. Inspired by the whispers of witchcraft that surrounded the Woodville family (which was supposedly descended from a water goddess), Gregory portrays Elizabeth Woodville, her mother, and daughter Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII) as practitioners of wizardry. What made Edward fall for Elizabeth? A ring tied to a string. What made a boat carrying important dignitaries toss violently over the sea? A storm called up by witches’ breath. What withers Richard III’s sword arm and cripples his health? A curse and a locket. Really, Philippa, really?

I think her choice in plot devices shows an author taking the easy way out. Elizabeth Woodville, whether you liked her or not, was a force to be reckoned with. She defied an ordained king by claiming sanctuary for herself and her children in a basement. She suffered through accusations that her husband had been a bastard, sired by a lowly English bowman. She climbed to the highest position in the land and hung there through some of the greatest storms in English royal history. And Gregory credits it to witchcraft? Ugh.

Seriously, if you find this era interesting, pick up Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour, a hefty novel that relies on history and the strength of the characters. Gregory would indeed need witchcraft to reach her standard of work. Sadly, I’m probably going to end up reading Gregory’s next book, which will be a depiction of the same events, just from the point of view of Margaret Beaufort, mother to Henry Tudor. I will grit my teeth in irritation, then maybe through my Kindle in the trash, but I will read it shamefaced. Why am I so weak?!

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Family's Past by Ariel Sabar

I'm very lucky that my job has introduced me to books and authors that I wouldn't normally hear of in the mainstream media. Besides Tatiana de Rosnay and Jeffrey Zaslow (who's signed book is waiting to be read shortly), none of the authors have been featured very prominently on my local bookstores or featured in the myriad of newspapers that I get on my desk each day. I doubt I would have even glanced at My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past by Ariel Sabar as I walked by the rows of spines on the bookshelves.

My Father's Paradise spans decades, centuries. Sabar's father, Yona, came from a small Jewish village in northern Iraq, a town in the middle of river where Kurds of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim descent lived together peacefully for centuries. After the establishment of Israel, Jews are thrown out of Iraq, making their way to a new land and a new life.

This may just seem like another Jewish diaspora to repatriation book, but Yona Sabar has a singular trait that lifts him out of the poor Kurdish-Israeli neighborhoods and into the vaulted heights of academia: he grew up speaking Aramaic. Without him, the world would have lost the language of Jesus, as Iraqi Kurds now speak mostly Arabic and Israeli Kurds rely on Hebrew. Yona created the first Aramaic dictionary and was even the Aramaic expert for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (don't hold that against him).

Sabar's book may celebrate his father's academic career, but it also charts the journey of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Arab countries) to an Israel overwhelmed with European Jews. Like other countries around the world, Israel has its own problems with racism and classism. Many Mizrahi Jews hold low-paying blue collar jobs, such as construction or taxi driving. It's a difficult, unfair, under-publicized life that may see more light with the publication of this book.

My Father's Paradise is worth the read, if only to find out a civilization that was once a vital part of the Arab world and now fights for appreciation in the State of Israel.

Sister Teresa by Barbara Mujica

I wish I could say that I liked Sister Teresa, a novel by Barbara Mujica recounting the life of St. Teresa of Ávila. I even read it twice to convince myself that there was something to the book that I just hadn't found. But, alas.

Granted, Mujica's Teresa is an interesting, multi-faceted character. She's not a sweet saint-- she manipulative, ruthless, loving, and intellectual, a woman to be respected even over a backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. It's not the characterization that gets me, it's the writing style.

I know I harp on writing style a lot in these reviews, but it truly affects my ability to fully enjoy a book. I also think that it's a bit of a cop out to use a a fictional, modern-day translator who only appears one time in the whole novel, just to be able to be rid of some of your own writing responsibility. Mujica's translator mentions that she found this hagiography in a market and tried to make the prose sound as informal as possible, leading to a novel full of anachronistic language. It takes me out of the time period, leaving me consciously out of the story. Frustrating.

I don't really want to expend any more words on this book. Suffice it to say that if you're interested in Inquistion-era Spain, nunneries, or saints, this is a book you can afford to spend a few minutes on. Otherwise, give it a miss.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

It's a rare writer that can make an atom personable. Based on our science books, an atom is a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. They combine into molecules, which then combine with other molecules, which then becomes the reason I failed chemistry class. If we rely on a textbook, of course an atom is going to be a dead thing.

It's too bad that our text books aren't written by Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and many other fine works. Bryson can give an atom life of it's own, a personality, the entirely real sense that atoms are the most important part of our lives. It's not just a numbered figure on an impersonal page.

Bryson, an immensely talented writer, brings all of science to life in this book, a rare feat. He disabuses us of the notion of eternal truths, for example, demonstrating that until just the middle of the last century plate tectonics was not accepted as a viable theory. He destroys the archetype of the all-knowing scientists and shows them at their most vulnerable and ingenious. Most disturbingly, he lays out all of the myriad ways that our planet and universe is trying to kill us.

As you can probably guess, I am a science dumbass. I scraped through three years of high school science and two semesters of similar college classes with smiles and a cheerfully frank self-assessment that though I may try my hardest, I am never going to successfully balance a chemical equation or triangulate the distance to the moon. With Bryson, however, I am introduced to the personalities behind the theorems: venerable, yet staid Lord Kelvin, egotistical Hubble, prickly Newton, thieving Hooke, and (my favorite) painfully shy Cavendish. Science is more than just fact and theory-- it is a violent clashing of egos and dogma, a bureaucratic beast as slow-moving as religion itself.

It will take more than a few reads to truly understand the science portrayed in A Short History of Nearly Everything, though Bryson has made a valiant effort to make everything readable. Looking on Amazon, it appears that he has come out with an illustrated edition of the book, for which I may need to shell out some cash. It's strange that for a girl that can't tell a mitochondria from a nucleus, such a work can become a favorite work and occupy a coveted spot on the bookshelf.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I don't think that I've ever stopped and tried to imagine America through an immigrant's eyes. To me, America has always been here. I know intellectually that America as I know it didn't exist until the 18th century, but when you've lived here forever, it's hard to imagine that the skyscrapers, freeways, and roadside monuments didn't just spring out from the ground thousands of years ago. They seem a permanent, indelible part of the landscape.

And yet, that can't be how someone just landing on these shores views America. After all, they came from lands steeped in history, where the land is the only constant. Their ancestors have seen governments fall, villages and cities disappear from the face of the Earth, once inhabitable climates turned poisonous. It is this resignation these people bring to America, a land blissfully ignorant of upheaval. Today's America is no place for history.

It is this concept that Neil Gaiman explores in American Gods, a masterpiece of a novel that sweeps the whole of the United States. Ancient and foreign gods, having ridden over in the minds and hearts of their worshippers, are woefully out of place in 21st century America. Reduced to grifting, prostitution, and, in two cases, running funeral homes, the gods drift through time with no followers to speak of. On the horizon, the new gods-- lords of technology, media, and freeways-- approach, determined to wipe the old superstitions off of the planet entirely. In the middle, is Shadow, an ex-con who has little to live for and less to fight for.

I don't think an American could have written a book like this. Granted, Gaiman's native United Kingdom does have the same worship of technology and celebrity (magazine shelves are drowning in £1 rags over there), but not to the extent that only the breadth of the American continent can provide. It takes a foreigner to accurately see our obsessions and our affections. Not only that, it takes someone with a sense of history behind them to understand how the ancient can drown in our modern society.

Gaiman tells a wonderful story and I had a hell of a time trying to identify all of the gods he referenced based only on oblique physical traits. Next time, I hope to sit down with my world mythology book and cross reference. I'm sure that such a thing will make a second read even more enjoyable than the first.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

I think there is something strangely beautiful about The Plague. Not what it does to the human body or psyche, but the ease at which nature was (and is) capable of balancing human populations with a wave of bacteria riding Valkyrie-like on the backs of fleas. Strangely enough, people were better off each time the sickness swept through Europe—there was more land, more jobs and more opportunity with less competition. It’s hard to think of the benefits, though, when you’re reading Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.

Brooks’s novel depicts the fictional counterpart to Eyam, a real plague-wracked 17th century English village, which quarantined itself to save its neighbors from the sickness. As the inhabitants begin to die horrifically, people begin to fall back on superstition and barbarity. All this is told through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young widow who mingles with both people of exalted status and the people of the dirt to show the reader just how fear has affected every strata of society. She leads us through a nightmare world where saviors are brought low and healers are destroyed by the ones they sought to cure.

Since college, I have read this book three or four times. Despite my intimate knowledge of the novel, I find myself sucking in breath as the ending draws closer, releasing it only after I have shut the final page. It is a gripping, well-told historical fiction book that is a far sight better than some of the popular period pieces these days, which are more bodice-rippers than anything. The writing is fabulous, but I think it’s the very elemental story that keeps the air locked in my chest. After all, we may have defeated The Plague, but it only takes one antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria to slam the human race back to the Stone Ages. With the ease of travel these days, the ability to voluntarily quarantine ourselves to save others is strikingly diminished—if not defeated all together. Would we have the courage of the real-life inhabitants of Eyam or the fictional ones in Brooks’s novel? I don’t know, but I’m sure that we’ll have a chance to test our mettle some time in the near future.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Bodies. They pulse and squish, intake and excrete. They do the heavy lifting and the fine-tuning. Bodies. You can’t… well, you can’t live without them. In Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, you can take a look into the (hopefully) distant future to when your body becomes an inanimate object and someone else’s property.

Unfortunately, Roach does not have enough confidence in her subject matter. Instead of allowing very interesting facts to speak for themselves, she crowbars her own feelings, history, and any extraneous material she comes across (no matter how incidental) into paragraphs or footnotes. I get the feeling that is she were enlisted to do a eulogy, she would fill is with puns, asides, and random observations rather than throwing her all into honoring the life of the deceased. I found her style to be so distracting that I was unable to concentrate on the excitement that the inside scoop on corpses should provide.

The saving grace of Stiff is that dead bodies are just so damn interesting. Even for a notably squeamish person, I can’t pretend that finding out what’s going to happen when I die isn’t fascinating. Roach lays out the whole “donating bodies to science” business clearly, outlining everything from full-body donations to anatomy classes to getting a post-mortem facelift by plastic surgeon trainees. And the body farms. You’re just going to have to read about the body farms.

I’ve always been an organ donor, but Stiff has made me wonder if I can do more after death. While I don’t like the idea of moldering out in an open field, I can certainly consider how I want my remains taken care of in the event of a brain death. Why not save my family the hassle and just have a piece of paper that enables doctors to pull the plug and hustle me down to the OR, ready for harvest for people who really need a piece of me? It’s a final good deed that can echo through the generations.

The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow

If someone had told me that I would be reading a book in which the heroine is an Enlightenment natural philosopher, daughter and brother to witchfinders, witness to the Salem witch trials, a member of an Indian tribe, beloved of a young Ben Franklin, one of two people who knows the coordinates of an island on which escaped slaves debate the merits of government, and the personified end to witch hunting, I would have cocked an eyebrow. If that someone had then breathlessly explained that the book was in fact written by another book, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, I would have given that person the finger for wasting my time with such nonsense.

And yet, here it is: The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow. And it’s amazing.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be able to stomach a book that tries to shove everything mentioned above into one book, let alone one character. It smacks of a high schooler trying to combine as many awesome 17th—18th century events into a single story, fashioning a Mary Sue to triumph over each trial, and then uploading it to fanfiction.net. It would be too, if the Principia Mathematica hadn’t been telling the story.

James Morrow gives the Principia perhaps the most understandable voice of the whole novel, both in word and in concept. While the characters speak in a quick, Enlightenment-era patter, the Principia has had the benefit of surviving to the modern day, picking up the up to date slang and a wry sense of humor. While the non-physicist reader stares dumbly as Jennet, our heroine, and Ben Franklin debate Newtonian theories, the very being that embodies these theories molds them into beautiful, non-obtrusive metaphors. It’s the Principia’s very human voice that turns these philosophically-minded characters into relatable beings.

The Last Witchfinder is a book that can span disparate genres of bookworms. Scientifically-minded readers can revel in Reason overcoming superstition and actual Newtonian philosophy; English majors can marvel in the prose that is gorgeous enough to make some of the textbook sections a little less mysterious. It’s a book that I will read over and over—pausing only to pass it along to my engineer mother, who will undoubtedly love it as much as I do.

Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

I frequent a series of forums that I don’t mention often, mostly because I don’t want people to venture there and think terrible things about me. What’s difficult to explain to most people is that, in the tens of thousands of members of those forums, there are quite a few who produce beautiful works of art, be it visual, audio, or even in novel form. That’s what led me to Mr. Shivers, a novel by forums member Robert Jackson Bennett.

Mr. Shivers is a weird amalgam, a mixture of The Grapes of Wrath and Doctor Faustus, generously shmushed up with ancient mythology and good old fashion horror. Throughout the Hoovervilles of Depression-era America and along the railways inhabited by tramps and runaways, there is the tale of Mr. Shivers, a scarred man who brings death in his wake. He’s a ghost story, a legend, a boogyman to frighten children. And he’s real. Enter a motley group of men who have lost everything to the man and will travel thousands of miles for revenge.

The book has quite a bit in common with Southern American literature—surroundings that are not always what they seem, the people of high status brutally brought low, and superstition is in the very air that characters breathe. Yet, I don’t think that I would have ever considered Depression-era America as sibling literature to the stories of Flannery O’Conner before reading this book. Now I see that the intense suffering of families, farmers abandoned by nature, and the seemingly complete absence of government makes for an environment that should spawn ghost stories regularly. Bennett has done his research—the reader is fully immersed in the hopelessness of the time period, the fear that everything familiar was now turned on its head.

I think I’ll be watching Robert Jackson Bennett from now on, hoping that I’ll find out more about his future works. And I’ll be doing it on The-Forums-That-Shall-Not-Be-Mentioned.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Tatiana de Rosnay was another one of those authors to appear at work, her very presence apparently summoning every Baby Boomer and Generation X-er to our auditorium. Book clubs, a small group of friends, alone—they came, consumed tiny croissants and listened to the author of Sarah’s Key.

De Rosnay is a tall woman, elegant in silvery hair, her French accent rolling over sounds in English that sound superfluous when she says them. She’s an enthralling speaker, like a voice stemming from a culture centuries older than ours. I wish I could read French because I have to believe that when she writes in her native tongue, she reads how she speaks. Unfortunately, she chose to write this book in English.

Before I get into this in earnest, I have to say that de Rosnay tells a story in Sarah’s Key that I had never heard before. I had known that the French Vichy government had collaborated with the Nazis, but I was never told the extent to which they had carried out orders. In the summer of 1942, French police gather Jews in the Vel d’Hiv, a stadium in Paris. Among these Jews were 4,000 children. Kept for days with little to no food or water, all were to French satellite camps and then off to Auschwitz for extermination. Few survived. De Rosnay’s novel follows a little Jewish girl who experienced the Vel d’Hiv and holds a terrible secret, as well as a modern-day American journalist struggling to bring the story to light.

My issue is not with the story (though the modern storyline seemed shallow and a little self-righteous), it was the writing. As I mentioned before, I wish I could read French, for I believe that de Rosnay must have a better style in her native tongue. Her English makes the characters too shallow and the dialogue is peppered with Americanisms that sound shoved it, as if trying to demonstrate a familiarity with American lingo. I found it all distracting, to the detriment of a story that could have been quite compelling. It makes me sadder to say that her dictated interview in the supplementary chapters of the books brings back all of the elegance of her speaking voice with none of the ridiculousness of her writing style.

I can’t tell you not to read the book because I think the story is incredibly important. However, I can say that the tale suffers in the writing, which is a tragedy.

Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son by Peter Manseau

You may remember that a few months ago, I reviewed a Peter Manseau book called Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. You many also remember that, after meeting him, I was thoroughly enchanted by this soft-spoken man with a talent of gracefully weaving disparate words and concepts together into blanket that you want to snuggle into on a cold day. This particular talent, that of blending the dissimilar, is almost the subject of his book Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, a heartbreaking look into the lives of two people who refuse to choose between reaching for a more spiritual plane and raising a family.

Vows is a sweeping memoir that endeavors not only the history of a family, but also of the Boston Catholic Church and the city of Boston itself. Manseau shows us that these three elements—the family, the Church, and Boston-- could not exist independent of each other. Without the Church, neither of Manseaus would have begun their religious journeys. Without the rough areas of Boston, neither of them would have met. And without the family, the Boston clergy would never have been forced to take a look at the centuries-old practice of holy celibacy.

Manseau’s book made me look at Catholicism as I never had before. For a Jew, I thought I was pretty educated about the history and practices of the Catholic Church, having spent more time at mass than at synagogue throughout my time in college. Yet Manseau opened my eyes to the rather mundane reason for priestly celibacy (it’s easier to maintain control of the Church when you don’t have to apportion bits of it to a priest’s heirs), how the child abuse scandals of the Boston diocese affected Boston Catholics, and to the fact that there are far more married priests than you would expect.

Vows is proof that you can find a touching beauty and devotion to a religion, yet still push for improvement and basic human rights. No matter how poorly the Church treated the Manseaus, they continued to worship with the zeal of the truly religious and so find faith in humanity in the basic tenets of their belief. If only all of us could work to truly change things that have potential, instead of throwing our hands up in disgust and abandoning it all together.

Author's Note: I should tell you that I wrote this review before this global scandal about abuse within the Catholic Church struck. Vows actually covers quite a bit of the Boston abuse scandal (it affected the family in ways I won't mention here) and how the training of priests affects the young men sexually. If you want to gain some context for the stories you read in the news, I suggest that you pick up this book.

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

You know how in my review of Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, I was little underwhelmed and blasé about the whole thing? I had my reasons—it was your standard middle book of a trilogy, designed to get from you from point A to point B. But this review isn’t about The Subtle Knife; it’s about The Amber Spyglass, which was amazing enough to wipe out the lingering malaise from the previous book.

Pullman drops back into a world gone mad—angels, witches, and monsters from every world imaginable have been culled by either the Church or Lord Asriel to do battle and decide the ultimate fate of the universe and belief. Amidst the chaos, Mrs. Coulter keeps Lyra in a drugged slumber deep within the Himalayan mountains, torn between her cold personality and her desire to keep her only child safe from both sides of the conflict. From the north, Will leads a contingent of bears in a desperate effort to rescue Lyra and restore the altheometer to her. And, finally, scientist Mary Malone braves new worlds to learn more about the Dust, or Dark Matter, that she has dedicated her life to studying. It’s “reader, beware” from there.

Unlike The Subtle Knife, the action is quick and decisive. We’re pulled from the land of the dead, to a world of intelligent wheeled beings, and even as far as the Kingdom of Heaven. Pullman pulls from medieval Christianity, mythology and science to weave a tale where priests can absolution for a future murder by doing penance his whole life, harpies guard the underworld’s doors, and scientists use the mundane to figure out the spiritual. Altogether, it kept me flicking through my Kindle at a mad pace, leaving me distraught as a reader, yet pleased as a student of literature, that the happy ending was not quite as joyous after all. The book brought me back to that delirious fervor that I felt reading The Golden Compass in my youth.

So if you’re setting out on this three-book journey, take heart when you’re stuck in that windless ocean of a second book—you’re world is about to get exciting very soon.

My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith by Benyamin Cohen

I do not generally give bad reviews about books. The worst I’ve ever written or said about a piece of literature can be summed up in that infuriatingly smug syllable “meh.” Wasn’t good enough to stick in my mind, don’t you know. Wasn’t good enough to keep its feet amongst the gods of English literature. Meh.

I’m changing that now. I’m about to give a bad review.

It became clear to me from the first few pages of My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith by Benyamin Cohen that this was going to be a chore. It wasn’t necessarily the subject matter. I’m a Jew and I like Jews. Check. I get a look into the world of megachurches and revival tents. Check. Enlightenment by the last page. Check. These are great things for a book to take my mind off of other pressing matters, right? Well, as any museum-goer will know, the artifacts can be gorgeous and heart-stirring, but they completely lose their charm when they’re displayed on top of an over-turned cardboard box and lit by a homeless man holding a flashlight.

What I’m trying to say is that Cohen’s writing style and personality made me want to wring his neck. Where there should be humor, there are nudge-nudge-wink-wink pop culture references. Where there should be actual insight into his spiritual journey, there is whining. And, oh G-d, the whining.

Mr. Cohen, listen, that skinny asthmatic Jew thing is all played out. It died once Israel got an army, Lenny Krayzelburg won gold, and the Hebrew Hammer kicked some ass. You’re not Woody Allen—you’re barely a Woody Allen wannabe. Sure, you didn’t choose to become an Orthodox Jew, but last time I checked, none of us had a sign up sheet in the womb. I’m sorry that your mother died when you were young, but you should be thanking your lucky stars that you had a family that loved you, clothed you, and fed you. You know how many people have less than that?

What kills me here is that I agree with many of his assessments of his time in the Christian world. Of course it’s disturbing as all hell when you find Christians wearing the Star of David. Yes, a Sunday mass can be an incredibly uplifting experience. And, absolutely, gospel can elevate a service in any religion. There is so much to be gathered from gentiles, so much to learn that can give us a perspective on our own faith. However, calling someone the Michael Jordon of faith or constantly harping on your own spindly little body is tiresome.

People, if you want to read a humorous book about religion, read A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (why are these titles always so long?). If you want a fish out of water book, pick up Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson. The Jesus Year, as much as I wanted to like it, is a sad waste of cellulose.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

I find it hard to begin this review of The Subtle Knife, maybe because it was a book that I had picked up and put down before. Back in elementary school, after I had finished with The Golden Compass, I ran to my school’s library to grab the next in the series—which I ultimately never finished. After having finally pressed the last “Next Page” button on my Kindle version, I remembered why I had put it down in the first place.

The Subtle Knife is not a bad book by any means, but it lacks the otherworldliness of The Golden Compass. This is reasonable, considering that half of the book takes place in our own world, far away from Lyra’s version of England. It’s perhaps for this reason that I slogged through it. When I do read fantasy novels, I like them to be a world where magic and normal lives coexist in a practiced harmony. Jumping back and forth between world, especially between a pretty mundane one and a world that where your souls exist outside your body, is jarring. However, I have to believe that this is what Philip Pullman wanted us to feel. If the characters are forced to endure jumping back and forth through space and time, the reader should be able to sympathize.

I’m usually one to wax on and on about books, but, to be frank, The Subtle Knife felt like the means to get from book 1 to book 3. Who wants to write about the unremarkable path that links two fabulous cities anyway?

Sorry, I suck. :(

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The first time I read The Golden Compass, I believe I was in elementary school. There is no doubt that I was too young to understand the complex philosophical arguments being thrown around, couldn’t possibly wrap my head around theories of elementary particles and Original Sin. I think mostly my reaction was “OMG, I want a little animal to follow me around all the time and change and be awesome and…” Sue me, I was ten.

Now, a little older and slightly more educated, I’m better able to understand the religious and philosophical ramifications of the novel—and it’s become one of the most terrifying books that I have ever read.

A little synopsis: Our protagonist is Lyra, an 11 year old living in what appears to be a steampunk London. Her world is very similar to ours, though seemingly canted a little to the point where our bedrock institutions seem unrecognizable. The Church has fragmented, outsourcing its thoughts and religious research to private third-party companies. In the midst of this, intrepid and brash Lyra sets off on an adventure to the far north to rescue children stolen by a shadowy group called the Gobblers.

It’s not the plot that bothers me so much; it’s the machinations that drive the plot. Religion mixes with science mixes with religion, tumbling over and over again until it’s impossible to separate the two unlike parts. And, like always, it is the children who are caught in the middle.

Without going into the complexities of the human/daemon relationship, perhaps the simplest way of explaining a daemon is that it is a human’s soul. In Lyra’s world, humans are accompanied everywhere by animal familiars who reflect the deeply held emotions within a person’s heart. Separation from the daemon is painful and potentially deadly, leaving the severed person more zombie than human. The Church severs kidnapped children to prevent them from Original Sin; Science uses the energy created from separating child from daemon to eliminate death. In both cases, children are used as sacrifices.

What bothered me on a deep level was the extremism. I hate extremists in whatever environment they choose to settle in—religion (complete with its flipside, militant atheism), government, science. The inevitable outcome is criminal short-sightedness, an urge to do the right thing and only creating evil. Sure, the Church wishes to banish Original Sin and Science wants to eradicate death, but to what end? And does it justify the suffering of innocents?

The Golden Compass shines a light on this strange dichotomy through the lens of young adult fiction. Yet, I feel that it takes an adult, with all of his or her experience, to truly fathom the depths to which humans can sink in the name of G-d or knowledge. And if there is a kid in elementary school reading this right now who understands, then I pity him.

John Adams by David McCollough

“Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?” Adams asked. “Who can write it? Who will be able to write it?”

“Nobody,” Jefferson answered, “except perhaps its external facts.”

I’ve just finished reading John Adams, the brilliant work of biographical history by David McCollough, which expanded my knowledge of the titular founding father beyond the HBO ministry and the musical 1776, in which I learned that Mr. Feeny was “obnoxious and disliked.” And while I must applaud Paul Giamatti’s portrayal of America’s second president, one can only really know the man by his words. Thanks be to Mr. Adams, he sure did leave a lot of words.

McCollough digs deep into Adams’ writings, from his first scratched letters to the spidery scribbles of a dying hand. In them we find a man who settles deep into self-perusal, leaving few of his many flaws unseen by the daylight. Vanity, temper, ambition—Adams bemoans them all in diary entries and letters to his dear friend and wife, Abigail. Yet we also see a man with a critical wit, a streak of self-deprecating humor, and an all-abiding passion for his fellow human beings. As much as he claims in his letters that he would have been happy being “Adams the farmer” or “Adams the shoemaker,” it’s clear that both his flaws and positive traits could never have kept John Adams from the tide of history.

McCollough’s book is much more of an exploration of a man—it is the baby scrapbook of the United States, complete with the first coos and heart-rending cries of a newborn nation. Through Adams’ pen, we watch the aftermath of the Boston Massacre as Adams defends the beleaguered British troops in court. We see the orderly streets of Philadelphia as the fertile grounds of liberty, far from the “Killadelphia” that many know today. We watch as the “true blue patriots” wrangle with those seeking a peaceful settlement with the British on the floor of the State House, launching the Revolutionary War. The desperate battles of General Washington, the feeble grasping for European allies and money. Then, eventually, triumph. All of this is seen through Adams’ correspondence with his wife, his friends, and his mercurial exchanges with Thomas Jefferson.

Through these writings, McCollough draws the battle lines in America’s first partisan wars for control of the government. Perhaps most striking are the libelous claims slapped down in decidedly unfair and unbalanced newspapers, which should remind the reader our most recent administrations. Everything old always comes back shiny and new.

It’s a book that, like, Adams himself, defies description. Call that laziness on my part if you want, but clocking in at 768 pages, the book would be highly disrespected if I were to try to boil it down to its simple parts. Suffice it to say that I disagree with President Jefferson in the epigraph above. He, John Adams, and everyone else who put pen to paper during the first turbulent decades of America’s past wrote the history of the American Revolution. It’s now up to us to read it and learn from it.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

(Yeah, yeah, I've spent more time reading than I have writing. Trying to rectify that.)

Everyone has that holy grail of a book. Some people work like dogs to finish books by the great Russian literary masters; others tough it out through the oeuvre of Steinbeck. They may not enjoy it, but, by G-d, you are not a real reader until you slam that back cover onto that tome of pain and frustration.

I finally finished my grail: the 1500+ page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I labored for two months, reading mostly at home to avoid the embarrassment of busting out a book with a giant honking swastika on the front. I dropped it in the middle to blow through a cheap historical novel, only to pick it up again. I laughed, I cried, I did a victory dance when I turned the last page.

Rise and Fall, despite the paragraph above, was worth the pain. Years of Holocaust classes give you the suffering of millions, but they rarely share the gallows humor that should accompany the tales of the Nazi elite, a motley band of misfits. There were times during my reading that the leadership of the Third Reich reminded me of nothing more than one of those coming of age sports films where a strong, yet flawed leader tries to mold a championship-winning team out of a bunch of sad sack losers. Shirer does nothing to dissuade the reader from this conclusion. Indeed, he goes out of his way to show the gluttonousness, pride and absolute stupidity within those smart uniforms. The rest of the cast doesn’t fair very well either. Shirer heaps a fair amount of scorn on the rest of Europe’s leadership, portraying them as teams (if we are to continue the sports movie line of comparison) who alternately wrung their hands as the visiting German team charged down the court or flung the ball into Nazi hands before running in the opposite direction, shrieking like a school girl. Few people manage to make it out of the book with their reputations unscathed—mostly the desperate leaders of doomed Eastern European countries and Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg (it’s hard not to come out with a little respect for the guy—he lost an eye, an arm, and several fingers on his surviving hand and still tried to blow up Hitler).

The sheer amount of information the Nazi regime left behind after their defeat is astounding. Journals, letters, and secret missives give us a glimpse behind the propaganda, behind the war machine that decimated much of Europe. Couple that with Shirer’s uncanny ability to actually be present at many of Hitler’s most important public moments and the reader is presented with the human interaction along with the solid facts. Accounts of Hitler’s raging tantrums sit comfortably beside the fact that the man was quite fond of sweets; the Fuhrer’s cold-blooded executions of his own staff rest near his ability to forgive a dithering Mussolini nearly anything. Shirer brings the Third Reich that we know and adds the gut-wrenchingly human side, making forgiveness all the more impossible to give.

Verdict: Library this one.

(Author’s note: As a Jew, I’ve been dealing with Holocaust for years and that occasionally does things to you, so I must ask that you understand my black humor is an attempt to mentally encompass this devastating era in both European and Jewish history. There’s only so many times you can read about death camp prisoners having their skins made into lampshades before you have to switch off.)

Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau

I've been trying my best to recall a quote by Franz Kafka describing the essence of Yiddish. If I remember correctly, he explained that the language was verbal expression of everything the gentiles felt about European Jewry. Yiddish is a bastardized German, mutated like a cancer cell, laid out in letters from the dark places of the Middle East. Spoken by an alien people who moved from one walled ghetto to another, the language, like the Jews, was at once disturbingly familiar and troubling foreign. Trouble is, in the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, many European Jews felt the same way.

Enter Itsik Malpesh, a Yiddish poet from Kishinev. Through his eyes, we see the plight of the Eastern European Jew a century ago, a life of fear and trepidation. He survives a pogrom, a forcible drafting into (and escape from) the Russian army, and life in Odessa as the ports slowly closed on Jewish emigration. Smuggled out of the Old World in a trunk of Hebrew letters meant for Yiddish presses in the New World, Malpesh struggles to compose his poetry amidst the frustration of learning English and the American way of life. Throughout his travels in the novel, one theme remains the same: the uneasy standing of Yiddish in both the Jewish community and the world at large.

One chapter in particular captures the combative nature of the Jewish “national” languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. A Zionist-leaning Jew in a bar is intent on resurrecting Hebrew, a language that was more ancient dust in the mouth than anything, while a socialist Jew insists that Yiddish will always hold the Jewish heart. In a vaudevillian routine that would make any respectable Catskills comedian jealous, the two battle for the linguistic fate of a 5,000 year old religion. Sides are chosen, drinks are thrown, and Jews continue to perpetuate the “two Jews, three opinions” saying into eternity.

There’s a clear winner in the battle of the tongues. Yiddish maintains an uneasy throne in tiny Jewish communities, most of its kingdom buried in mass graves dotting the European countryside. Hebrew, on the other hand, has turned from dust in the mouth to a breath of life to Jews from all over the world. It’s telling that I, an Ashkenazi Jew whose grandmother spoke Yiddish in her childhood home, can speak whole sentences in Hebrew and only swear haltingly in Yiddish. With one’s decline came another’s birth.

Surprisingly, author Peter Manseau is Catholic, the product of a priest and a nun (his memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son is on my Cannonball list). His story is also part of this novel—the translator who shares Malpesh’s story (and occasionally inserts his own commentary) shares quite a few characteristics with Manseau, who worked at a Yiddish book conservatory in New England. Peter Manseau, for those of you who insist that their authors be nice people, is a nice person. Anyone who can deal with a line of cranky old Jewish women and still remain smiling when he signs my book is a keeper.

Adorableness of the author aside, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is a deep book, a book that I can’t possibly explain in a poorly executed review. It transcends religions, continents, and languages. It’s a strange and wonderful novel that I was sad to put down. Now it’s time to foist it off on my family and see if they get anything out of it.

Verdict: Buy!