This book is a popular survey of Mayan archaeology, with the decipherment
of Mayan writing being the uniting theme. The topic may sound dry, but
the book isn’t–because it’s really the story of people. It’s the tale
of the Mayans themselves, of course, but even more of the wide and varied
cast of characters who have studied them over the last five-hundred years.
And unlike the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was
accomplished (with the help of the Rosetta Stone) by the great
Champollion in two busy years, the decipherment of the Mayan script took
many strange turns and odd directions courtesy of the many strange and
odd people who have studied it.

It’s a surprisingly engaging tale–this is my second time through it, in
fact. I learned quite a bit about the Mayans, dispelling quite a few
myths, but also about language and writing systems in general (by the
end, our alphabet alphabet seems a thing of wonder).

It’s also something of a cautionary tale about trends in academia. The
Old Guard in Mayan Archaeology had decided that Mayan script was
“ideographic”, that is, that each glyph corresponded to a particular
idea, rather than to any particular word. The same has often been said
of Egyptian writing, and Chinese as well, and it turns out that it’s
hogwash. Every writing system known encodes spoken language, and every
writing system known has a phonetic component. In Mayan script, for
example, a jaguar’s head might be used to mean “jaguar”, but it might be
used purely for the sound of the word “jaguar” as part of another word.
If we wrote English the way the Mayans wrote their language, we might use
a glyph that looked like a cat to mean “cat”, but also as the first sound
in “catapult”, “cattle”, “category”, and so forth.

This has been known to be true for Egyptian, for example, since the
mid-nineteenth century; the Old Guard’s ideas were 50 years out of date
even at the beginning of this century. And although the first successful
phonetic decipherment of Mayan script was done in 1952, it was thirty
years before that small beginning was able to blossom and bear
fruit–largely because the staunchest member of the Old Guard was dead
by then.

Anyway, it’s a cool book. There’s a second edition out, with more
pictures than I’ve got in mine; I should probably find a copy.

This is the fifth book of Flint and Drake’s “Belisarius” series, now
finally available in softcover; I reviewed its four predecessors last
fall. For those who’ve joined us since then, it’s an alternate history
series with a fun but goofy premise. Evil people from the far future
have sent an artificially-intelligent computer called “Link” to Earth in
the days of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I and his highly-competent general
Belisarius. Link’s goal, naturally, is to so adjust Earth’s history that
its creators ultimately end up on top of the kind of world they like.
Pursuant to this, Link has caused the founding of the Malwa Empire in
India. The goal of the Malwa empire, naturally, is to take over the
world in the most brutal and inhuman way possible, all under the
guidance of Link. This is a series with White Hats and Black Hats, and
the Black Hats (with the exception of a few misguided souls who
eventually come ’round) are very Black indeed. It’s not enough for them
to have evil ends; they must have despicable means as well.

On the other side you’ve got General Belisarius and his happy, jovial
crew of soldiers of all kinds. Belisarius is accompanied by another
visitor from the far future, the crystalline entity called “Aide”.
Unlike the inhuman, emotionless machine-entity Link, Aide is funny,
sarcastic, and caring by turns–but Aide is equally determined to see
Link fail. Naturally, both Link and Aide give advanced technology and
tactical tips to their teams. The difference is, of course, that fascist
Link wishes to control the flow of information whereas Aide is happy to
give Belisarius and his followers anything they can possibly use.

Unsurprisingly, competence, good humor, and the free flow of ideas is
going to triumph over evil totalitarianism, and this is book in which we
begin to see it happen. Like it’s predecessors, it’s a rollicking good
time; the good guys beat the bad guys six ways from Sunday, the villains
get theirs in suitably ironic fashion, and so on and so forth–though
there are some surprises.

There will be at least one more book in the series, in which Link and the
Malwa Empire will presumably be destroyed; it’s to be called
The Dance of Time.

If this sounds like anything you’d enjoy reading, I think you’ll enjoy it
quite a bit. I did.

For some reason that I haven’t quite discovered none of the Large Chain
Bookstores carry books by this author. Even Small Independent Bookstores
don’t stock her work unless they have a used section. A pity, because she
writes award winning mysteries that are excellent for suspense without
all the guts and gore you find in a great many of what is on the shelves
these days. I don’t like guts and gore. Plus, I’ve read 5 or 6 of her
mysteries now and she hasn’t repeated a plot. Usually after that many,
the mediocre start getting repetitious.

Fall From Grace centers on the relationships of 5 people who went to
high school together way back when. The Good Looking Bad Boy, Bobby
Ransome, is back in Sechelt after doing a stint in prison. And for some
reason, the school nerd and photographer, Stephen Grayson, who hasn’t
shown his face in Sechelt since leaving right after high school, has
decided to come back to visit his elderly widowed mother. And then there
is Annabelle, Wanda and poor frustrated Warren, who are just trying to
live their lives with messed up relationships and none too hot marriages.
So when Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg finally gets his girlfriend,
Cassandra, on a boat to go sailing for a day, it seriously interrupts his
romantic visions to find Stephen Grayson lying at the bottom of cliff
with all the signs that he has been pushed and a whole crew of people who
could have done it.

This is one of those mysteries where you know who did it but you can’t
figure out why. The pleasure from reading it comes from watching Alberg
work his way thru all the leads and clues. And with this one, the
solution is delightfully ambiguous. Did he or didn’t he?

In high school, years and years ago, a friend of mine read Wodehouse and,
on her recommendation, I read a couple Bertie and Jeeves stories. They
were ok, I guess. I don’t remember much more than that. Then a couple
years ago our local PBS station ran or reran the Bertie and Jeeves
stories with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and I loved them, especially
Stephen Fry as Jeeves. So when I started reading Will’s reviews, bells
went off and whistles whistled in the back of my head but I never got
around to buying any of them. Then last summer, I was looking for
Virginia Woolf in the used bookstore and found Wodehouse instead so I
bought a couple. But I never got around to reading them. So last week, I
was browsing the shelves in my sewing room where all my books are stashed
and I found the books I bought and read one. And then I read another. And
then I went to the Large Chain Bookstore and bought a bunch more. Which
is to say, I am hooked. Thanks, Will.

Anyway, I started with Pigs Have Wings, a Blandings story
published in
1952. The Blandings stories have at their center Blandings Castle and
it’s owner the slightly dim Lord Emsworth. And the center of his world is
the Empress of Blandings, his beloved pig, whom in this story he is
fattening up to win the prize at the local Fair for largest pig. And then
there is Sir Galahad Threepwood, his old but rakish brother, and Beach,
his port-drinking butler. His competition at the Fair is his grossly
overweight neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and his pig, The Queen
of Matchingham. And he employs Lord Emsworth’s former “pig man,” George
Cyril Wellbeloved, who smells of, um, pig and has a mighty taste for beer.
There are love stories, deceptions, mistaken identities, pig thefts and
general rushing about in the two seater that fill in the plot of the
novel. Summer Lightning, published in 1929, is essentially the same
with different girls and a few other characters. In fact, whole passages
are repeated at the beginning of the book, which gave me a weird sense of
deja vu. I suppose Wodehouse thought it worked well one time, why not
repeat it again.

The first thing I noticed is the language. His puns are merciless. I
spent much of the time reading and chuckling out loud, to my husband’s
annoyance. Sir Galahad Threepwood has some of the funniest lines I have
read in a long, long time. And the descriptions of the way characters
move or look is priceless. I thought about underlining them so I could go
back and find them later. About half way thru the Pigs have Wings, I
realized that Wodehouse had woven a pretty complicated web of
interconnection between the characters that he then was peeling back one
by one in the final pages of the story. You know the ending will be
happy, you just don’t quite know how he is going to do it.

I can’t wait to read Bertie and Jeeves.

I normally eschew suspense thrillers for the more traditional mystery but
every once in a while I will pick one up. I read Patricia Cornwell’s Kay
Scarpetta series whenever I can find a new one in paperback. And I read
Faye Kellerman’s Decker/Lazarus series. But that’s about it because they
tend to have too much gore and violence for my taste. However, Faye
Kellerman is married to Jonathan Kellerman and his books are everywhere
so I thought I’d pick one up and give it a go. It was just what I
expected.

Alex Delaware, the “hero,” is a former child psychologist who is now
working as a consultant in LA on police and custody cases. He works
primarily with Milo, a gay homicide detective. His live-in love is Robin
who builds and rebuilds expensive string instruments for a living. She
has issues with his police work centering on his knack for getting
himself into tight situations involving guns. Oh, and he has a mastiff
named Spike. Alex has a visit from a former, failed therapy patient, a
young hooker named Lauren, who then turns up dead a few days later, shot
in the head and dumped in a dumpster. Alex feels all sorts of guilt and
angst over not doing more to help the child she was years ago and his
investigation goes from there.

The book kept my attention. The plot twists were unpredictable and kind
of interesting. His characters were certainly realistic. Kellerman kept
Milo, the gay detective, real and didn’t stereotype him too badly. But
beyond that, it was just ok. I remembered why I don’t much care for
suspense thrillers and got it out of my system for a few months. Too much
gore and violence. Too many graphic descriptions that I don’t need in my
head.