A couple of things

Fall catalogs are raining down upon my desk. Before I stack them on the shelves above my computer that will, one day, most likely break and cause me to be 'trapped under something heavy,' I flip through them looking for familiar names and titles. I admit I was fairly surprised to see that Ken Follett is writing a sequel to Pillars of the Earth. Pillars is a classic (even with the really poorly written sex scenes), precisely because Follett was telling a story that centered around something he himself is passionate about -- the building of a cathedral. For 10 seconds, I was excited by the prospect of a sequel. Then I realized that this story, set 200 years after Pillars, will lack the subplot that made the first book so fantastic. Ah well, at least I can write a shelf-talker for the updated paperback edition of Pillars that the new book will bring...

To wrap up a couple of books mentioned below... Rankin's The Naming of the Dead was fun, but my brother was right in saying that it didn't end well. It just sort of petered out. There is a review in last week's NY Review of Books that explains why: "But while that factual fidelity lends authenticity to his books, it also accounts for their unweildy structure and overburdened narratives." Again, though, as my brother says, Rankin is always worth a throw.

Frost's Second Objective was fun to read right after finishing a Rebus novel, because he takes a bit of WWII history that even I remembered from my history classes, Operation Grief and the Battle of the Bulge, and throws down a character very similar to Rebus. Frost doesn't bog down in the historical part of 'historical fiction,' and this book reads like the adventure ride it is meant to be.


Finally, yesterday I read Flight, the first novel from Sherman Alexie in a decade. To be fair, this is really a novella, and could almost have been the 10th story in his short story collection Ten Little Indians. A coworker yesterday mentioned all the things that she likes fiction to do for her -- make her laugh, make her think, and make her cry. In 180 pages, Alexie does all of this better than almost anyone. Read this book.