The Club Dumas, Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Sonia Soto

When this showed up in my library requests, I was confused. Then I read the back. Turns out this book was the basis for my favorite movie by that asshole Polanski.

Lucas Corso is hired to authenticate a hand-written chapter of The Three Musketeers. At the same time, he is asked to check a man's copy of the satanic text The Nine Gates against the other two copies.

This turns out to be tricky than it sounded, and while he is going around showing the books to people, he is being followed by a dude who looks like a character from the Dumas novel. A pretty girl also winds up following Corso, she says she is there to protect him.

This is one of those really interesting novels with a disappointing ending.

Humble Pie, Ann Dimock

In this book, the author writes about pie making as the most important thing in life. Who knows, maybe it is.

But my father has been the pie maker in our family for as long as I remember, and this book's complete failure to acknowledge that men can make pie is kind of annoying.