Adventure! 4 Books About Books

Matthew Pearl has a new book out: The Last Bookaneer. Ostensibly an adventure tale about the last novel of Robert Louis Stevenson and set mostly in the South Pacific of the late 19th century, it is also about books both as artifacts and conveyors of ideas. A bookaneer, by the way, is someone willing to do shady things for publishers, including stealing unpublished books. Edgar Fergins is a bookseller who acts as a bit of a factotum for Pen Davenport, possibly the greatest bookaneer of them all.  Word has it that Robert Louis Stevenson is dying, but has one last novel that he is working on from his latest home in Samoa. Davenport and Fergins travel there and match wits with Belial, another bookaneer, to see who will bring home the last great prize before copyright laws go into effect. Just as compelling as Pearl's first book, The Dante Club, the exotic setting and fascinating characters as well as the twisty plot and philosophical musings make this a fun read.

Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell is another story about a book hunt, this one set in the relative present. Kate Shelton is directing Hamlet at London's reconstructed Globe theater when her mentor gives her a box supposed to contain a clue to a lost Shakespeare play. After her mentor is killed in a Shakespearean manner and the Globe damaged by fire, Kate dodges bodies, traverses the Atlantic and uses her prodigious intellectual capabilities to put the mystery to rest. Another intelligent read with a complex plot.

No less an author than Carlos Ruiz Zafron has taken on the subject of dangerous books in The Shadow of the Wind. In Franco's Spain, Daniel is taken by his father to the poetically named Cemetery of Lost Books. Daniel chooses a book to protect, and protect it he must: as he gets older, he discovers that a man with no face is burning every copy of every book by the author of "Daniel's" tome. Well-developed characters and an intricate plot recommend this atmospheric novel.

Like Interred With Their Bones, Michael Gruber's The Book of Air and Shadows deals with a lost Shakespeare play. Intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin finds evidence of said play in some letters by a Jacobean spy found as filler in an antique book. Teaming up with a timid film buff and an enigmatic bookbinder, Jake takes on the Russian Mafia for the holy grail of English majors and theater aficionados. Deep characterization, betrayals and thrills along with an unlikely romance recommend this volume to readers.