Let me tell you about: Richard Preston's The Cobra Event

Are you kidding? 1998?

That was a lifetime ago. I could not even remember where in the world I bought the book. Maybe, it seemed my affair with books began in a secondhand bookstore. This was no exception.

This book was published in 1998, and it caused quite a stir in White House back then. A lone terrorist could unleash terror upon the unsuspecting world, it seemed, and within the pages of this novel, the plan seemed infallible.

The book began with a typical girl's waking hours before going to a school in New York with a terminal difference: she had a cold. As the chapter progresses, her cold turns into something more sinister, life-threatening, cannibalistic. It ends with her dying in the arms of her arts teacher, who, by no long stretch of imagination, must have been infected by whatever that kills her just now.

Enter Alice Austen, an adept forensic pathologist, and Will Hopkins, a Special Agent of the FBI. Both have their own issues, but that matters little, because their paths are about to converge in the heart of the malice known as Cobra. As they watch people they like (and don't like) self-cannibalise and die (in that order), they must race against a lone terrorist whose idea of changing the world does not involve the man in the mirror, but the world as a whole.

This book came out before the CSI was even on TV, and yet the details in there (whenever Austen goes to the morgue and starts cutting on the bodies) are as tantalising as they are repelling. I was always looking forward to the next possibility of another body spread out under the white light while Austen picks and prods her way in it, looking for answers. Hopkins was the masculine side of the story, putting into action what Austen has in words.

This was no literature feat by any means, but in the end, one cannot help but wonder the next time a bulb breaks in the subway train whether it contained nadir gases or something else more deadly...

Let me tell you about: James Rollins's The Doomsday Key

For a yarn that often polarises old and obscure wisdom upon the height of scientific discoveries of modern age, James Rollins’s SIGMA Force series has never lost its momentum. From the first book to the sixth, action and history never looked so good together. His latest offering, The Doomsday Key, is no exception.

Slightly breaking away from his norm, the story began in the spring of 1086, in England. Men were travelling on lands that were devastated by a deadly pestilence.  They noted down everything they saw in a book named Domesday Book, written for William the Conqueror who wanted to know everything that he owned and how much it all was worth. (Trivia: the Domesday Book was slowly known as the Doomsday Book because what the book contains is final and unchangeable.) The pestilence is then updated to the modern century as it became clear throughout the novel that someone is pulling at the strings so that the world leaders, meeting at a summit in Norway, would inevitably arrive at a single terrible decision.  And throughout the novel, too, Sigma Force will find ways and means to avert that finality, even if it means pulling down stars from the sky, among other things.

I am always fascinated by the depth of details Mr Rollins manage to squeeze in his novels. All the fancy-schmancy science talk is rendered simple and tight. The action sequences are written out in such a manner that I could clearly see them in front of my eyes, especially that last bit where things started to fall out of the sky. (No spoilers here, don’t worry.)

This time, Mr Rollins’s subject is as diverse as life itself. Genome manipulation and its negative side effects, Black Madonna, ancient repopulation, overpopulation, and depopulation, world famine – the problems in the book reads like everyday headlines mixed with religious scholar paper. What if humanity has really come to a saturation point? How would we face it? Would we turn in and destroy ourselves, or would we rise above our current stagnation?

That aside, I finally got my secret wish – seeing the two women of Agent Pierce Gray’s life in action, and in the same page. The two could not be more different and yet, similar. Maybe the women are a reflection of the man himself. And Monk Kokkalis (thank you for resurrecting him!) returns in grand form. With a baby and a wife, he finally relearns who he is (after his resurrection in The Last Oracle). Seichan is also taking up most of the scene (book?) time, as she struggles between the two sides that have her.

All in all, it’s a wonderful romp through several continents, science, ancient history and modern calamities. Just remember to love the bees, because they are very important (hint hint).

4 out of 5 stars.

Let me tell you about: The Name of the Rose

I have heard of this book for some time. When Mr Brown's The da Vinci Code came out, most of the reviewers compared him with Umberto Eco's later novel, Foucault's Pendulum. I however chose to read this book first.

As I've mentioned earlier, I was in luck to find a secondhand book with this title. What surprised me at first was the fact that the book was actually written in Italian. William Weaver took great pains to translate it into English, and I must say that he did a very good job at it, considering nobody has tried to re-translate it after all these years. 

I was, at first, appalled by the voluminous descriptions found within the book. At times, the narrator seems to abandon the whodunit yarn and debate about the human logic, money and the Church, different orders of monkshood, and the uncertainties created by Christians themselves. For example, the debate between William and the elderly, blind Benedictine monk, Jorge, was about whether Christ ever laughed during his lifetime. Both sides had so much evidence to prove and disprove the question that I had to decide for myself whose side shall I root for. Then, sneaky as a black cat, the narrative would smoothly swing back to the detective yarn again. 

William of Baskerville is a Franciscan monk with a novice traveling along. (Ring any bells?) He's invited by a Benedictine order to their monastery for a discussion on religious matters. However, their arrival is marred by a death that seemed to defy any explanation except for demonic possession. As the monastery is  thrown further into chaos by further murders, William finally arrives at the solution by going into the labyrinthine library that seems to open its arms to everyone, but lets out only dead monks.

Like any good whodunit, the story itself was flawless, an Agatha Christie, and I'm not going to spill more of the beans. But there is more to this book than 'just a whodunit'. For within, I found out that the medieval monks were actually the first scholars, regarded higher than the lords whose lands they live upon. Monasteries also function as universities and libraries, where both the works of the 'heretics' and the Christians were collected, studied and cared for. Countless other historical facts, like a painting of Christ hanging on the cross with a hand pointing to a purse, was shocking. It's something that I would never learn from other books. This goes to show what anybody would do to 'legalise' their actions, and it mirrors what I see everyday in the newspapers.

Be prepared to spend a long time with this book, preferably on a long weekend.