The eminent author Dan Brown, his hazel eyes glistening in the early morning sunlight was woken by the chimes of England’s famed giant clock, Big Ben, a true testament to man’s dedication to engineering really big clocks.

With his hazel eyes he gazed over the manuscript sitting on the heavy antique wooden desk which was large enough to crush an elephant if dropped from a high enough height, say 160 ft, which in ancient Grecian times was a sacred number, arrived at when Plato got his students to drop a large wooden desk on an elephant.

Suddenly, he was being whisked to Rotterdam, aboard a train, a long sleek train. His handsome hazel eyes looked steelily out across the European landscape.

“Rotterdam, is, of course,” a passing train-bound professor of European history, “Europe’s only capitol to claim tulips and murder amongst its chief exports.” The professor handed Dan Brown, eminent author in his tweed jacket, a copy of Flann O’Brian’s “At Swim-Two Birds,” which is a commentary on the German occupation of Rotterdam, during which they plundered the magical lapis lazuli amulet of Astarfisis, a Zoroasterian goddess of fertility and plums. “Dan, you are our only hope,” whispered the professor in a tone that signified hopefulness, but at the same time no hope at all.

The eminent author Dan Brown flashed his hazel eyes at the professor and the view, though not at the same time. “I’ll do my best,” he said, sizing up the situation, considering all of his options and a brief tangential jaunt down a line of thought about the rise of the shogun in Japan.

I listened to the audio version of the eminent author Dan Brown’s novel Inferno. I really wanted to visit Florence, at some point during the reading, then I may have passed out and imagined Dan Brown’s Rotterdam trip.

I listened to the audio version of this book. The kids and I had listened to Coraline, which was also read by the author, and really enjoyed it.

But this one… the reading was fine, excellent, even, it’s just that the main story, the flashback to that time when he was a kid, just didn’t do much for me. I would have preferred it if the enveloping narrative about the man returning to the lane to sit by the ocean had been developed, dwelled upon more.

There wasn’t a terrible amount of suspense, and this isn’t a spoiler, because you’re told, in the beginning, that the guy is now in his 50s, returning to the lane, reminiscing. So the kid didn’t die. So that’s one worry off your mind. The mythology Mr. Gaiman constructed was fine, I suppose, the magic forest and mysterious ancient creatures playing just on the other side of our reality was fine, it just didn’t grab me at all. The revelations when he finally surfaces from his reverie by the pond were far more interesting, for me, and I wish there had been more of that.

We stopped listening to this audiobook (read really well by Nick Landrum) a while ago because we’d only just started watching Dexter and it seemed so redundant that we moved on to other content.

But now that the Dexter TV series is over I figured I’d revisit the book, just to get my Dexter fix at the end of what was one of our favorite television shows. I was blown away by how much of the characters’ personalities were fully fleshed out by Jeff Lindsay and how much of the story they used, wholesale, in the TV show. Dexter is a great character, and the story zips along. But enough different things happen along the way that make this book worth listening to.

The only drag on the story is the sometimes heavy lean on alliteration (so many darkly disturbed Dexters, deeply dented Debs). Other than that it was a really enjoyable read/listen, like looking at a childhood album of photos of one of my favorite television show characters.

I was always afraid to start this collection. Thomas Pynchon, himself, doesn’t make it sound like a good time. I’ve had the book on my library shelf for a few years now, from where I’d occasionally take it down, start reading the intro, that first page where he partly disowns the writing therein, and I’d get scared off.

But I did it. I must have been drinking heavily, that old Dutch courage (sorry, Dutch folks reading this, no offense intended). Maybe I was reaching for another book and grabbed this one by mistake, sat down, started reading and was whistling (literally, I suppose this was the type of stupor through which you whistle) through the introduction. It’s interesting to watch a literary giant, an invisible literary giant like Thomas Pynchon dissect his earlier self’s work, going into a critique of each and every story in the collection. If I had a time machine and memory-eraser, I would probably read the introduction last, as I’m sure it colored my impression of the stories.

My favorite story of the bunch was probably “Under the Rose.” I enjoyed the spy vs. spy rush about Egypt and the old, weary spies who have been enemies for so long it’s not clear which side they really back. I had a blast with the characters in “Low-lands” and I loved the secret history of a Long Island dump he’s created for the story.

“Entropy” I enjoyed, though it may be because I’d recently been reading up on entropy, and I loved the idea of this “lease-breaking party… moving into its 40th hour.”

The others were fine, as well, certain moments and situations, like the kid in AA in “The Secret Integration” or the practical joke planning and the intricacies thereof in the same story were excellent.

So in the end, dear Reader, the lesson is that you shouldn’t be afraid to start (and continue reading) this book. It’s not as good as his later stuff, but, paired with his own analysis in the intro, it’s a fun peek into his development as a writer.

It’s like a koan wrapped in an elephant. Except more pleasant than that. And more accessible.

These were quiet, sweet little stories about a curious elephant with a very personal relationship with his god, who appears as a cloud or a rock in a river. While I read them all in a sitting or two you could probably pick and choose your way through like some all-you-eat buffet. If you are doing that, here’s where I think the bacon and sausages are (but there are few, if any, runny plates of scrambled eggs or sawdust biscuits, really):

“Love” – my favorite line from this one is:

“What the hell?” asked the cloud.”

“Jealousy” – God’s reaction to the elephant’s dramatic sighing is worth the price of admission for this one

“Pots O’ Clay” – a lovely story about the butterflies and elephant conspiring to make pots from the clay in the river.

“I’m God,” said God. “I do know what pots are and how they are used.”

I loved the characterization of God, in Its many (2) forms, the elephant, and the elephant’s jungle roommates. You could pick a worse book to center your religion around, for sure.

Excerpts From: Estey, Dale. “The Elephant Talks to God.” Goose Lane Editions, 2006. iBooks.

This material may be protected by copyright.

This wasn’t a crisp read. It wasn’t a symphony. There were a lot of discordant notes, a lot of extraneous material that tripped me up when I just wanted to hang on to Nevin’s subject: Bill Watterson and his brilliant strip.

His subject is what kept me reading. It was a pleasant trip back to consider that special magic that Calvin and Hobbes held. Sure, that trip’s lens was smudged with Nevin’s own perspective, perhaps too much, sometimes, but that’s his prerogative, because it’s his book. Did I get to write the story of Bill Watterson? No, Nevin did. And, if for nothing else, it was worth the time spent reflecting on the career and talents Mr. Watterson for a few hours. Thanks, Nevin, for getting us up off the couch for the jog down memory lane.

The last two books I’ve read by Christopher Moore (“Sacré Bleu” and “Fool” — actually, make that three, I have it on reasonable authority that I read “Lamb” prior to those two and that was another fantastic book) have blown me away.

He’s been going so deep on his books, immersing you into the world in which it takes place so efficiently that you hold these fictional versions of historical periods dearer than the originals. Or are they the same as the original? He’s done such a fun job of realizing the world that you don’t really much care, though you feel, if you were the sort, that you could go research and verify all the incidents in the story more or less.

Not as good as Black Maps, which is one of my all-time favorites, but still an okay read.

It was only after I’d begun reading it that I saw the blurb from Ken Bruen on the back, which should have given me a clue as to the writing style in this one. If Ken Bruen likes it, with his long, tedious navel-gazing protagonists, the same might have slipped in here.

The narrator, John March, gets a little more overly descriptive in this book, and seems… duller, somehow, in this book than the first one. Duller as if his colors were different, not in a boring sort of way.

Thankfully you can skim most of the wardrobe inventory, though the mystery is a pretty lukewarm one that you may have guessed whodunit pretty early on.

Death’s Little Helper isn’t enough to have soured me on Peter Spiegelman, but it’s definitely not my favorite book of his. We’ll see how the next in the series goes.

The main problem I had with this book was the wholly unlikeable main character. No, not “you,” but Russell. He’s condescending (to the reader, to the people with whom he works), vapid, and I found his own personal journey, which never really goes anywhere all that interesting, boring.

In fact, perhaps two-thirds of the slog through this book you get a confession from one of the other characters that they never trusted Russell in the first place, and still don’t trust him, now that he’s flown back into their world of game design geekery, that he won’t finish the job of designing this latest game and then fly off to the cool kids again.

The narrative switches perspective a few times — it’s mostly written in the first person, but occasionally will go deep into another character’s thoughts and motivations, a sort of first person omniscient, but since the narrator has held himself at arm’s length from the other characters it’s an unrealistic expectation that the reader would buy he’s able to speak for his fellow characters. Plus, as I’ve said, I just didn’t like the character, so it was tough to swallow an entire, galumphing journey through an imaginary games company’s back catalog told from his perspective.

The journey through the back catalog and into the actual games is wildly boring, as well, the language enraptured by being immersed in a whole other world, the sights, the smells, the emotions of the characters! But, wait, the smells? The feelings of the characters? I get where the author is trying to go with this treatment of video games… but it’s way over the top and the game stories don’t seem particularly compelling and he goes into far too much detail about the backstory that just kills the things flat for me. We’re supposed to be fascinated by how rich and full these games are even if it’s just ampersands and characters running around a maze of periods!!!!!! But you’ve either played these games and know how you can get sucked in or you haven’t and the painfully dry and long-winded explanations are just not going to convince you otherwise.

I kept plugging on to see if the story got any better, or maybe I was hoping to see the narrator get killed as the Alewife T station collapsed, spewing concrete rubble everywhere, but here’s the spoiler: it really didn’t.