The Mummy Case by Elizabeth Peters

The Mummy Case (Amelia Peabody 3)
by Elizabeth Peters
Blackstone Audio, 2009
11 discs, unabridged

I was thinking that perhaps I view the Amelia Peabody mysteries as a "guilty pleasure" the other night, and then I realized that I don't actually feel terribly guilty about enjoying them so much. They are tremendously campy, silly, and grossly far-fetched, but what's wrong about enjoying them for that? Coming from someone whose reading motto resembles something like "never apologise" it seems odd that I should view reading anything as a guilty pleasure.

I get such a kick out of these books, and just that makes them worth reading. They are mysteries, sure, but it's not the mystery that's the draw. There's very little serious suspense, other than wondering exactly how the Emersons going to pull things off this time, and maybe sometimes a bit of wondering over the details of the cases. For whatever reason, what I would regard as unforgivable forebludgeoning in most other books gets a free pass here.

No, not for "whatever reason," actually. It's the characters, Amelia specifically, but the others as well. Amelia is the first-person narrator: the books are her journals. And Amelia is blessed with copious amounts of self-confidence and a finely honed sense of Victorian melodrama, leading to lots of "It did not occur to me to be concerned... at the time..." sorts of statements. Forebludgeoning, yes, but perfectly in character. And since I don't read (er, listen to) these books for the plots I don't particularly care about being heavily spoiled in advance.

Amelia Peabody is one of the great characters I have encountered, I think. She is somehow endearing in her brash sense of oblivious superiority (which is always played for laughs at Amelia's expense, except for one moment in this book, where Amelia's confidence in herself and her countryfolk is thrown back at her, and well-deserved, too) and her sharp intelligence. She would probably be less bearable except that she is often right. And not only that, she's willing, if extremely reluctant, to admit when she's wrong, too. Or at least lead the reader of her journals to draw that conclusion on their own, even if she won't explicitly say it. She is a well-defined, larger-than-life woman who both leaps off the page and feels real enough that I am willing to suspend any disbelief in following her around.

Aside from the character, I love the setting. Victorian-era Egypt and archaeology are fascinating places to visit (I wouldn't have wanted to live there.) Peters always brings it alive. She knew her archaeology and her history, and she uses Amelia's enthusiasm and passion to share some of that with us. I will admit that if anyone gave me a test on any facts I should have picked up from this book I wouldn't fare so well. It turns out I'm not reading to learn about Ancient Egypt either, though I find it fascinating at the time.

I should warn: anyone who has not read the first two books will necessarily encounter spoilers for those first two in the following paragraphs.

In this book, Amelia and Radcliffe (hereafter referred to as "Emerson" since I can't think of him any differently) are heading back to Egypt, and have decided to take their terrifyingly precocious son Ramses with them. Emerson is determined that they shall dig at the pyramids at Dahshoor, but instead they are relegated to the "pyramids" at Mazghunah, a field of rubble that may in fact once have been pyramids, but now bears little resemblance to the structures Amelia is so taken with. Despite her disappointment, Amelia at least has a mystery to keep her occupied: a suspected ring of antiquities thieves are flooding the market with some very choice items that are thus lost to science forever, and she suspects the murder of an acquaintance - a not-quite-honest antiquities dealer in Cairo - is connected.

The fact that even though things get just completely, utterly ridiculous at the end I still ate this up, and happily, suggests the power that Amelia Peabody (and Elizabeth Peters) has over me. I believe I even shouted "Are you serious?!" at the CD player in the car at one point because Amelia, despite not being stupid, does some incredibly rash things and I could see, clear as day, that things were not going to go well. The fact that she's cheerfully upfront about this (dissecting the situation postmortem, as she is) goes some way toward mitigating my mildly appalled astonishment. The other thing is that Amelia doing incredibly rash things near the close of a book (and upfront too, really, if we're counting) is hardly out of character.

I suppose one could start at this book quite comfortably in the series. I do think that the relationship between Emerson and Amelia, and the relationship they have with their son, is portrayed strongly enough in this third book that one wouldn't need to have a background in it, though I do think that Crocodile on the Sandbank is the stronger of the three books and would certainly recommend starting there instead. This, however, is a perfectly adequate outing in this series, neither surprising nor disappointing, and as entertaining as I expected and hoped.

Earlier books in the Amelia Peabody series:
1. Crocodile on the Sandbank
2. Curse of the Pharaohs

The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley

The Shadowy Horses
by Susanna Kearsley
Allison and Busby, 2009 (originally published in 1997)
407 pages

Huh, 407 pages went by really, really fast. Which is a good sign! For some reason, this book had crossed my awareness three or four times in the past two weeks, and then suddenly one of our library patrons brought it back last week. It was headed back to one of our other branches with no holds, and it seemed like fate. So I picked it up, figuring it might be a good semi-spooky read for Hallowe'en. And it was just perfectly eerie enough without freaking me out, and a solid read for other reasons as well. Solid enough that I've gone ahead and purchased a copy for my Kobo (unfortunately, not with this cover; the ebook cover is just baffling), and if I see a paper version floating around I'll pick that up too.

Verity Grey is an archaeologist. A friend and ex-flame has recommended her for a dig that he's also working on, a nice cushy job in Scotland near the town of Eyemouth on the North Sea. Feeling restless and wanting something different, and intrigued by the hints Adrian has dropped, Verity leaves her comfortable life in London to meet Peter Quinnell, the charismatic, wealthy, and possibly mad director of the planned dig. But it doesn't take long for Verity to start believing in Quinnell, and other seemingly impossible things -- the ghostly Sentinel that a local boy has befriended, and the fact that perhaps Quinnell and the psychic child have stumbled upon the final resting place of the legendary, long lost Ninth Legion, Legio IX Hispana.

First, the bad, and there is some: I don't think this is a stellar book. The writing was occasionally a little clunky, a little info-dumpy. The foreshadowing occasionally foreshadows nothing, or nothing serious. The hints of gothic suspense are just that: hints, that often flutter away into nothing, which left even my faint heart a little unsatisfied. Other foreshadowing is a bit roll-one's-eyes obvious. As a piece with these writing-related beefs, there can be a bit much telling (ie. Verity is referred to as "difficult" a couple of times) and not enough showing (she never appeared particularly difficult to me). All of this is pretty minor, comparatively, but I mention it because I was occasionally pulled out of the story, even if just momentarily.

Also, I wanted more of the horses. They never really gelled with the rest of the story for me. But they could have been so cool. The first appearance of the horses was the goosebumpiest moment of the book for me.

The middling: though there are some deeper threads here, they're never really investigated in any serious depth, so don't pick this up if you want a read that delves into family relationships, for example, in any significant way. There seems to be an attempt at exploring themes of family ties and tragedies, but it all seemed to me to be backdrop, not very meaty at all. That was just fine by me in this read, because I wasn't expecting, or wanting necessarily, a bigger emotional resonance. I just wanted some vaguely gothic fun, some ghosts, some history, and some characters I could connect with.

Which brings me to the good: writing flaws aside, this book is compulsively readable. I stayed up about four hours past my bedtime working away on it, and when I wasn't reading it I wanted to be. The plot is thick, the fun is there, and the characters are worth it. Verity herself is believable and very likable, intelligent and sensible, willing to believe the best of everyone but not blind. She's confident, absolutely not a pushover. The other characters are varied, and though we see them only through Verity's first person narration, they take on lives of their own. But it's really Verity who makes this book. I would read several more books with her as the narrator, if I could, just to spend more time with her.

And the history! This is where this book excels, although it occasionally does get bogged down in Kearsley's clear enthusiasm for the science of archaeology. Not that I minded much, given my own predilections where science is concerned, and the portrayal of science in media. This is where things can get a bit info-dumpy, but though it took me slightly out of the story, it was Verity's own enthusiasm that propelled the facts into conversation. I know that archaeology isn't glamourous and thrilling, but I've always been interested in it and despite its distinct lack of glamour I've always kind of thought I'd enjoy being an archaeologist of some description. There but for the siren song of environmental biology and librarianship I might have gone. So it's possible I enjoyed this book even more than others not so interested in archaeology might have, but I don't think it would be a show-stopper for them; there's enough here in the characters and plot to keep one engaged. Just skip the parts about the differences between Roman marching camps and forts.

This is gothic lit lite, so fans of the deeply creepy or very suspenseful may not want to bother with this. But a little light romance, a smattering of history, and a faintly ghostly story rooted well in sense of place (I really did feel like I was hanging out in Eyemouth and I read this all with a thick Scottish brogue in my head) was exactly what I wanted right now, and I'm looking forward to subsequent re-reads. Recommended, as long as you're aware that it's not a deep, disturbing, or heart-wrenching sort of read. I'm not quite convinced that Kearsley should be on my must-read list, but I'll certainly read more by her when the opportunity presents itself.

Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson

Libraries in the Ancient World

by Lionel Casson

Yale University Press, 2001

177 pages

I like history, and I like libraries. This book has been on my radar since 2008, when it was reviewed at Bookwyrme's Lair. Just that brief little blurb rocketed this book onto my list, because: history, libraries. Yes.

It's not a very long book. The page count includes several pages of notes and an index. The writing is mostly quite readable if sometimes (infrequently) a little stilted in the way of academic writing. The descriptions are often evocative enough that with the accompanying (grainy, black and white) pictures, I can visualize what an ancient Roman or Greek library might have looked like. I can picture the people, the books, the spaces.

I like that Casson leaves some things to us to infer, as well, as when discussing theft and/or damage in the private libraries of Assyria. He just goes straight to the source text for us, with an ancient version of a book plate and theft policy:

Clay tablet of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria, who trusts in Ashur and Ninlil. Your lordship is without equal, Ashur, King of the Gods! Whoever removes [the tablet], writes his name in place of my name, may Ashur and Ninlil, angered and grim, cast him down, erase his name, his seed, in the land.

Or perhaps one prefers the caution against damaging a book (this one is my favourite, because it was clearly written by one hella pissed off librarian):

He who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishtar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog's mouth!

You can bet that put the fear of the gods in some careless library patron. It's a good reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Actually, that said, the public library as we might recognize it was really an invention of the Greeks, quite some time after Ashurbanipal was cursing the seed out of the rascals who stole and desecrated his private books. And though Casson works his way through the Assyrians and slightly before all the way through to the beginning of the Middle Ages, the bulk of his time is spent showing us Greek and Roman libraries, both private and public. This is, one realizes, because that's where a lot of the evidence is -- earlier and there's not a lot to go on, later and we're out of the Ancient period Casson is investigating.

Which leads me to two things: the first is that this is a great book that investigates one aspect of a culture I know less about than I wish I did. My study of Greek culture is... extremely limited to say the least, and my study of Roman culture is limited to a Grade 10 Latin class. I took a Classics course in first year uni, but there we mostly looked at mythology, not culture (to the extent that it can be separated, which is actually quite a bit.) Therefore, I think this book will be a good re-read once I've done a bit more investigating into those cultures. I'm particularly taken with the pre-Greek cultures. I got a lot out of this little book, but I think I would have gotten even more if I had a better depth of knowledge of the time periods and cultures covered.

The second is that the cultures covered are Western precursors, which is of course the tradition in which I stand here today. I would love to read something similar about Eastern precursors. Well, to be honest, I would probably do well to read something about contemporary Eastern libraries. I don't even know if there is such a thing, though I assume there must be something like what we have here. Anyone have any suggested readings for me?

Overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in libraries, or anyone interested in the history of books or reading or literature in ancient Western cultures. Anyone who knows ancient Greek and/or Roman will find this an interesting addition and in-depth investigation into one aspect of those cultures, too. Extremely fascinating, generally well-written, and I'm very glad fishy was able to find it for me.

The Curse of the Pharaohs by Elizabeth Peters

The Curse of the Pharaohs

by Elizabeth Peters, read by Susan O'Malley

Blackstone Audio, 2005

9 discs (unabridged)

I have a habit of downloading things a bit at a time -- that is, with the Elizabeth Peters mysteries, I tend to download and burn only three discs at once, for some reason. Well, for several reasons, none of which compensate for the fact that I get through three discs just quickly enough for my online library download to expire, such that I then have to wait another week or two to download and burn the next three discs.

Which is why it's taken me so long to listen to this. It's not that book wasn't good or enjoyable. It was great. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I just had to wait between downloads. I'm still working through the Susan O'Malley books since that's what I have access to currently, but I'm keeping an eye out for the Recorded Books versions done by Barbara Rosenblat, as per Nan's instructions.

So, this is the second of the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters. It didn't disappoint. I'm avoiding summarizing and other spoilers for the first book in this review, but when I continue with the series I don't necessarily expect that to be possible. We'll enjoy it while it lasts.

I really enjoyed this book, almost as much as I enjoyed the first. The sophomore effort in a longstanding series is always a hump that I, as a reader, am anxious about -- sometimes the second book just really can't possibly live up to the shininess of the first book, and that's always disappointing. But if The Curse of the Pharaohs wasn't quite as good as Crocodile on the Sandbank, that doesn't mean it was bad. It was quite a lot of fun, of the sort that I had expected to come from Amelia, and the mystery in this one was even slightly harder to figure out than the first one. An extra abundance of suspects helps with that, as does the fact that the foreshadowing is handled a little more gently. And when I say a little, I mean just the tiniest bit, really. Subtle foreshadowing is not an Elizabeth Peters strong point. Or perhaps I should say an Amelia Peabody strong point, because it is in Amelia's voice that we receive the entire story. These books are written almost like a diary, but more a report; dispatches from the field, perhaps, with Amelia the first person limited narrator.

One thing I noticed in this book slightly more than the first was that Peters handles Amelia with gentle hands, but isn't above letting the reader see where Amelia's faults -- and faulty reasonings -- lie. There are occasions where Amelia will suggest something and the reader (or in my case, listener) will know that there is a different explanation, or she will tell us something and we will immediately grasp the significance of what she is saying but she will not, and sometimes never does. I like this about the books -- it's not that I like feeling superior to my narrator (there is no chance of that; Amelia is just too delightful) but that it requires me to do some thinking on my own, rather than having Amelia spoonfeed me everything.

The reasons I don't think this book is quite what the first was? Well, the murder mystery isn't quite as original as the sort of mystery Amelia was solving in the first book. And the secondary characters, perhaps because there were several more and varied, weren't nearly as well-fleshed as the first set. As with the first, this one was slow to get started (though charming from the beginning, too) and I found I didn't care quite as much about anyone except the recurring characters by the end of this book the way I had cared for the secondary characters in the end of the first book. I am hoping that does change in the third book, because it was part of the reason I loved Crocodile on the Sandbank so much.

I'm still recommending this series to anyone looking for a lighter cozy mystery with a fascinating, out-of-the-ordinary setting. Amelia's love of place (and perhaps Elizabeth Peters'?) shines through in her descriptions of Victorian-era Egypt. One doesn't have to have an interest in classical Egyptian archaeology to enjoy the characters and plot, and my knowledge is very rudimentary, though growing thanks to these books. For anyone who has read these books and is interested in the archaeology, I'd recommend Harry Thurston's excellent and readable (if long) book on the Dakhleh Oasis Project, Island of the Blessed. It's an archaeological project of which Amelia would thoroughly approve, I think.

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

Crocodile on the Sandbank

by Elizabeth Peters, read by Susan O'Malley

Blackstone Audio, 2005

8 discs (unabridged)

A departure! This is an audiobook, but it's not by Bill Bryson. I enjoyed it anyway, and thoroughly. So thoroughly, in fact, that I had to sit in my car after arriving at work (early, I had to run some errands beforehand that took less time than anticipated) and finish listening to the final disc. It was about 25 minutes of sitting in a rapidly cooling car in the snow, but don't think I noticed the cold. I just had to know how it all turned out.

I have been wanting to read Elizabeth Peters for quite a while now. These books were another set of mysteries that kept turning up on my mother's piles, much like the Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael mysteries. My mother has good taste. But I am not reading as much as I would like, lately, and I happen to be spending more time than I would like in a car. Seeing a way I could mitigate these problems in one swift move, I dug out the information on how to download audiobooks through the library I work at, and lo and behold what should turn up but Crocodile on the Sandbank. Experiment: success! Also, now I can tell people how to download and use our digital audiobooks from experience, rather than following vague directions. Bonus.

Amelia Peabody is a Victorian lady of independent means after her father passes away. He was a scholar, with a particular emphasis on ancient history, and Amelia has spent her life caring for him (as the only girl child, and no other woman in the house), during which time she has also become very interested in antiquities. She knows several languages, living and dead, and has more than enough money to live the rest of her life on her own quite comfortably, travelling to see the places she and her father have studied about. On her first trip, to Rome, she encounters a young woman nearly dying of exposure near one of the ancient ruins. In her no-nonsense fashion, Amelia saves the girl Evelyn and collects her as a companion for her travels. As they reach Egypt, and through a series of events become attached to a very small archaeological dig, it becomes clear that one of their little group is being targeted by persons -- or perhaps vengeful spirits -- unknown. Amelia must now bend all her considerable powers of intellect to discovering the culprits before someone gets seriously hurt, or worse.

I had some difficulty getting into this one, at the start. As I've stated before, I'm not wild about fiction in audiobook format; too often the narrator doesn't work for me, whereas in nonfiction I can usually put up with a fair bit (my present nonfiction listen excepted; for some reason, the narrator has such an odd inflection and word pacing that I can't help but think of Futurama's Zapp Brannigan, and I have had to stop listening to it). In this case, though, I didn't mind the narrator, though sometimes her male voices were a bit grating.

As to the story itself, it starts off a bit slowly, but tension keeps ratcheting up until one cannot possibly stop listening until one finishes the story. Amelia is a delightful character, absolutely flawed but believably and endearingly so. She is headstrong to the point of ridiculousness, but it was somehow charming; and she is still a somewhat believable Victorian lady -- given her background, a little bit of eccentricity is to be expected. The other characters are charming and well-fleshed-out.

The mystery is a little predictable; the foreshadowing is a bit on the blunt side, occasionally, and I figured I knew the culprit somewhere near the halfway point, and even the motive, though it took Amelia until the very end of the book to figure it out herself. Usually this can be a deal-killer for me in a mystery, but I was enjoying everything else so much that I didn't feel the need to stop. An occasional eye roll may have occurred. For my part, I wanted to know how, because that wasn't at all clear to me or Amelia, which I think is what lead her to her frustrating inability to solve the case until so late in the game. Me, I was following Holmes -- once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Speaking of impossible and improbable -- well, there are a few times where the plotline and character motivations leap from somewhat incredible to beyond the pale. I was prepared to forgive these leaps for the most part. They were, in large part, some of the fun. This is not a realistic book, and shouldn't be read that way.

I quite enjoyed this one, enough that I am now listening to the second book in the series and enjoying it too. The humour, the adventure, the romance, and the exotic location (Egypt is wonderfully and lovingly described) all combined to make this an excellent listen for me. I could see finding and owning a copy of this one in paper. I certainly will want to read it, or at least listen to it, again.

Island of the Blessed by Harry Thurston

I feel like I should be doing something really exciting here, to mark the end of my engrossed reading of Island of the Blessed. Fireworks. Trumpets. Something.

However, what I will do instead is try to keep this review to something short and sweet.

First, and most important: for all of my griping about the length, this book is worth it. I have learned so much since I started reading, and the whole thing is fascinating. Every chapter, every page, every paragraph, is worth reading and absorbing and digesting. There is absolutely no doubt that this book is large because the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) is a huge undertaking, and Thurston has obviously taken great pains to do both the DOP and the oasis itself justice. As someone who hadn't even heard of the Dakhleh Oasis prior to picking up the book, I think he's succeeded; perhaps someone who has been there might feel differently, but I think he's managed to capture the essence of the prehistory, history, culture, and environment of this remarkable place. He's also telling the incredible stories of the archaeologists who are part of the DOP, and, on top of the place and the people, he's saying something about archaeology itself, and about human nature.

This is only the second book by Thurston that I have read. The first was the autobiographical natural history book A Place Between the Tides. Island of the Blessed is very, very different but equally good. In this book, Thurston remains largely in the background, surfacing occasionally to go on a walk with one of the DOP's scientists to a particular place of interest. His own opinions and commentary are largely confined to the Introduction and the Epilogue, and this has the effect of letting the Oasis and the archaeology tell the story. It works incredibly well. This book is masterfully written and incredibly accessible, as well as being completely absorbing. Even when I was anxious to start reading the next book (or books, as the case may be) I was far too interested in Island of the Blessed to put it down.

Thurston's skill with language is so deft that, without the reader noticing, he's describing the archaeologists and their environs in such a way that they are vivid and real people and places. One of my small gripes is that I want to see more pictures -- I want to see what a town in the Oasis looks like, I want to see what a wadi looks like, I want to see what the buried city of Kellis looks like -- but really, I don't need those photographs. I have a clear picture in my head. I can hear the different scientists' voices as they speak, and see them as they work on their various projects, because Thurston makes them all come alive. He makes me believe, as the DOP believes, that the great expanse of the Western Desert was once a vast savannah habitat, complete with waterholes, giraffes, and hippos. He explains, in language anyone can understand, how changes in climate and glaciation eventually led to desert conditions -- and what that meant for both the wild animals and the nascent human civilizations that lived there.

The book takes us from prehistory to current conditions in the Dakhleh Oasis. One of the things that Thurston wants us to understand is how unique this project is: it is one of the very few long-term archaeological studies that looks not just at human activities, but also environmental conditions that surrounded those human activities, in an effort to understand how each has affected the other. He spends more time on the periods where there is more evidence to talk about -- certain times in prehistory, the Roman civilizations -- but he doesn't leave anything out. He celebrates the important discoveries made by the DOP, and talks about the future of the project; and at the end, inevitably because of the nature of the DOP and the author, Thurston talks a little bit about the future of life at the Oasis. The prognosis is somewhat depressing, as expected -- the current water supply, fossil water buried in the bedrock and stored there since prehistoric times, is likely to last fifty years or less if current practices continue. And if the water runs out, life will cease to be possible in the "Everlasting Oasis." And Thurston doesn't say much, but an intelligent reader in a society where water isn't a limiting factor will suddenly understand how it's possible that wars really will be fought over water supply.

In the interests of actually posting this tonight, and thus completing my self-mandated one review a week, I'm going to leave it at that. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Egypt, for sure, but also anyone interested in archaeology, science, political issues of water use, desert cultures, the beginnings of human civilization, palaeontology; also anyone who wants an introduction to any of those things. I came into this book without really any knowledge at all in any of the areas Thurston was writing about, and I had no trouble following except that I do wish someone had provided some sort of visual timeline so I could get a sense of the length of time we're talking about, and what cultures overlapped whom and when. Thurston is thorough enough that I could write one out myself, but I'm lazy and it wasn't that important to my enjoyment or understanding.