TRASHY NOVELS FOR SMART PEOPLE
It's been raining here in the Northeast for like 3 weeks; the sudden torrential someone turned on a faucet kinda rain. Very spooky.
That kinda rain in August tends to disappoint a lot of beachgoers unless they thought ahead and brought a lot of reading material.
Long overcast rainy beach days call for long deep fiction, usually the historical kind...the kind that takes you elsewhere. The
kind that annoys the crap out of you when it's over. You start looking around for more of the same, usually futilely...I keep
finding people who have one great book in them and then a bunch of just okay titles.
Some of titles that I call trashy novels for smart people:
The Eight by Katherine Neville - Catherine Velis is a computer expert who is invited to take a mysterious moonlighting assignment:
recover the pieces of an old chess set missing for centuries. search >>>
Back Bay by William Martin. Six generations pursue a lost Paul Revere treasure from the days of old Boston to the Back Bay of
modern day. search >>>
The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte - An art restorer sets out to solve the riddle of a 15th-century masterpiece in this
multilayered thriller and finds that one murder begets another, down through five centuries. search >>>
Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte - Set in a world of antiquarian booksellers where dealers would gladly betray their own mothers
to get their hands on a rare volume, The Club Dumas is a thinking person's thriller: fallen angels, satanic manuals, and a passion
for the works of Raphael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas are woven through a tale of murder, sex, and the occult. search >>>
Last Call by Tim Powers - Rich, top-flight mythic fantasy based on Jungian archetypes, Tarot symbolism, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land,
and the Parsifal legend. search >>>
Towing Jehovah by James Morrow - God is dead and Van Horne an Exxon Valdez-type captain has been hired by the Vatican to pilot his
former vessel as it tows the Supreme Being (found dead of unknown causes) to a tomb in the Arctic that His angels have built for
Him. A modern-day Odysseus. search >>>
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman, everybody's favourite scoundrel. Flashman, a British cavalry officer, lies,
fornicates, cheats, pleads and abuses his way thro ugh battles and uprisings and other major historical events always emerging the
hero. search >>>
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - Connie Willis labored five years on this story of a history student in 2048 who is transported to
an English village in the 14th century. The student arrives mistakenly on the eve of the onset of the Black Plague. search >>>
To say nothing of the dog by Connie Willis - Science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel. A highly
comic romp, its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's singular and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat . search >>>
Krippendorf's Tribe by Frank Parkin - [FORGET THE MOVIE] To qualify for a research grant house-husband and anthropologist manque
James Krippendorf invents an Amazonian tribe, the Shelmikedmu, a fine example of english black comedy. search >>>
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett - Pratchett's wackiness collaborates with Gaiman's morbid humor in a zale tale of
switched babies, anti-christ and Armageddon. search >>>
Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt - Inheriting a magic ring from a dying badger, Malcolm Fisher suddenly finds himself in the
middle of an hysterical present day Ring of der Nibelungen. search >>>
The Dutchman by Maan Meyers - In 1664 in the trading post of New Amsterdam, the slow-witted, drunken Schout (i.e., sheriff),
Pieter Tonneman, must solve the mystery of a friend's death before the British invade as threatened. search >>>
Zaddik by David Rosenbaum - An ex-cop from the NYPD, is called upon to recover a magnificent 72-carat diamond that was to be used
as dowry in a historic wedding meant to unite two powerful, bitterly antagonistic Hasidic sects. search >>>
The Body: A Novel by Richard Sapir - A crucified body is found in a rich man's tomb recently excavated in downtown Jerusalem and
Rome sends the requisite Jesuit scholar/warrior for God to investigate. search >>>
