Friday, August 03, 2007

Weekend Silence

I am going away for the weekend and doubt I will have computer access, so I won't have a chance to post again until Sunday or Monday. As to where I am going? Cape Breton. I haven't been there since I was a little kid, so I am looking forward to it. My grandfather lives there and we are going to Fortress Louisbourg, which I think I was too young too appreciate last time I was there.

In the meantime, computer usuage with a kitten is annoying. This morning alone he jumped on my laptop keyboard and managed to turn it off and then just now, he unplugged it. Annoying cat!

Right, so have a good weekend everyone! Hopefully I will get a chance to do some reading. I am breaking out of my comfort zone this weekend with a mystery of sorts. The book I am reading is The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber. I do not read a lot of mystery-type books.

Here's a description:

A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death . . .

A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries . . .

An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth . . .

The Washington Post called Michael Gruber's previous work "a miracle of intelligent fiction and among the essential novels of recent years." Now comes his most intellectually provocative and compulsively readable novel yet.

Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?

These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer—or killers—unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one—not family, not friends, not lovers—is to be trusted.

Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery . . . or self-destruction.

I think it sounds interesting. It came out in March of this year, we will see how things go. I started it last night and I read for like 2 hours and only have like 60 pages to show for it. It was really humid last night and I couldn't get comfortable. I also got books yesterday from Book Depository, I will share the list with you as they arrive.

Have a good weekend everyone! I promise to have pictures, although I still have not posted the pictures from Sherbrooke Village...

1 comment:

  1. I am so glad you are reading this as I've looked at it all week in the bookstore (which means, of course, that I've been to the bookstore MANY times this week! ;) ) I can't wait to hear your positive or negative review so that I can know if I should pick it up or not.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by and commenting!

I am so sorry, but I turned anonymous commenting off. I have had it from the very beginning, but that is how the spam is getting by my spam filter at the moment. If it is a big deal I will turn it back on and moderate all comments. I also changed moderation from older than 14 days to older than 7.