I never really thought I’d read this book, but an available copy was offered with indications about the strong draw of the story. Like any good suspense mystery, each chapter ends off in such a way that it’s nearly impossible to stop reading. The writing isn’t necessarily amazing and the characters aren’t always completely believable, but all the history (which is presented pretty much as facts) is all very interesting—a secret society passing down a great mystery that the Catholic Church wants to hide. Hints of this secret show up throughout Leonardo da Vinci’s work, hence the title.

Of course, it was some disappointment to reach the end a little surprised and inspired and do some research only to find out that many facts are distorted and perhaps even made up entirely—but it’s still an entertaining read, even if it isn’t accurate. (My hopes for entertaining if a bit cheesy status on the movie version faded when I learned Tom Hanks would be playing against Audrey Tautou, which seems like very questionable casting.)

Incidentally, the above-linked Wikipedia article mentions that some people call Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco “the thinking man’s Da Vinci code.” Men who think, take note.

eta: Geoffrey Pullum’s literary analysis of the Da Vinci Code made me feel embarrassed that I admitted getting wrapped up in the story (where’s my cred?), but sometimes poorly written fluff delivers.

I was fairly excited about this book when I first heard about it. I never read the blog that started it all, but I went through a month or two of entries on a slow day at work. It seemed pretty entertaining. Plus, I have a certain affinity for Julia Child since we shared the same birthday; I like the idea of projects like making all the recipes in one cookbook; and the book has a cute cover to boot.

Unfortunately my expectations floundered early on, as Julie Powell delves in further than just Julia Child and her groundbreaking cookbook; more often it’s a memoir of a frustrated, going-on-30 secretary at a government agency in New York City, including sidetracks for stories concerning her friends’ love lives. The problem being that more often it’s this, and though Powell has a certain comedic knack, she doesn’t know how to spin a yarn.

At times the book lumbered on through tangential anecdotes that left me confused, either from holes in the storyline (unsuccessful attempts at switching up the narrative sequence?) or just bizarre grammatic choices (like three sequential paragraphs all in parentheses). Maybe that example was an attempt at grammar humor, though it seems more likely I just don’t appreciate the style of constant digressions. It probably doesn’t help that I had just read Time’s Magpie before this and was swooning over Myla Goldberg’s writing style. Despite those frustrations, I liked the bits where Powell imagined scenes between Julia and her husband Paul (helped by letters and journals he wrote), but this is only about an eighth or even a sixteeth of the book, and otherwise the self-deprecating humor just got old. When Powell starts out yet another chapter foreshadowing disaster and no disaster comes, I just felt like I wasn’t in on the joke.

The potential worst fault here is that she has little style for writing about food. I know that food writing can be overburdened by too artful of attempts at capturing the pleasures of eating, but on the other hand, this book was absent of any mouthwatering descriptions of completed recipes. Though I don’t eat a lot of meat and therefore would need something amazing to get me going on calves’ brains, I did expect to get somewhat excited about the food itself. That may be the biggest disappointment—a lack of salivation.

All the same, there was enough here to get my interest in Julia Child raised, and I have just discovered that My Life in France (a memoir finished by her grandnephew) will be released in just a few weeks. Appetite for Life (a biography) may also prove interesting.

I haven’t spent much time exploring the world of travel essays, but after reading Wickett’s Remedy a couple of months ago, I happened to notice this book mentioned and hadn’t heard about it before. It turns out Myla Goldberg is a former Prague expat, and this book of essays was written on the occasion of returning there ten years later.

The thing I like about Myla Goldberg is she has an eye for quirks and charming details that I can relate to, so I get the feeling reading these capsules that this is the sort of Prague I’d see if I ever got myself there. The essays touch largely on the experience of Prague in its post-Communist era but also on the more idiosyncratic places you might find in a tourist book: libraries with bizarre taxidermy, theme parks populated with strange sweets, and a neighborhood basically destroyed during the 2002 floods in Europe, among others.

Myla, she’s got a way with words; I could probably read these essays over and over again just to savor her phraseology.

I have been considering an unofficial focus for my 2006 reading to be some kind of combination of “books I read in high school” and “canonical books I’ve never read.” (So far several Russian novels fall into the latter category, including Lolita by Nabokov and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and Pale Fire also by Nabokov, though I’m not sure if that one technically falls into “The Canon”?)

This book falls into the former category—I don’t recall enjoying it much when I was in high school, so perhaps this wasn’t the best one to feel out an annual reading intention. Apparently I only remembered (vaguely) the first half of the book and even just vaguely remembering the story made it so boring, definitely more than it might have been as a teenager. Luckily, once things became less familiar, they also became more interesting and I began to understand why my roommates were both emphatic about how much they loved this book, both reading it in their 20s outside of a school setting.