John Cotter reviews Annie Dillard’s novel, The Maytrees in the latest Open Letters Review.

The splash made two summers ago by The Traveler from John Twelve Hawks (JXIIH) is about to return with his next book, The Dark River. From the publicity poster anonymously pasted on a brick wall outside Brandywine Books International Headquarters and Yogurt Emporium:

In a post-9/11 world, The Traveler struck home with its disturbing yet familiar themes of state-sponsored paranoia, the dismantling of individual privacy and the ever-increasing number of personal liberties a society is willing to relinquish in return for a sense of security. Picking up where The Traveler left off, The Dark River follows the Harlequin warrior Maya and her charge, Gabriel Corrigan – one of the fabled and endangered mystics known as Travelers – from New York’s Chinatown to a thousand year old Irish monastery, from the catacombs in Rome to the ruins of WWII bunkers in Berlin, as they race to stop the Tabula from unleashing a powerful weapon of surveillance that will change the balance of power across the globe.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer recommends reading The Traveler before diving in to The Dark River, which I don’t plan to do in order to give this book a chance to stand on its own. Maybe that’s a bad idea.

Raskolnikov is back, and this time he’s not wasting his time philosophizing! In the long awaited sequel to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, terror strikes the heart of a sleepy Russian town . . . okay, I’m making that up, but there is a sequel to this novel, reviewed today in the Philly Inquirer.

This is curious. Swedish mysteries are popular in English apparently, and now children’s detective books are building momentum.

I think I can see it, but if the book jacket told me I was holding a compelling drama on the garbage in our lives, I’d probably put it down.

Frank Wilson links to Ed Pettit’s review of Tolkien’s new book, and Ed clarifies in the comments that he loved the book. He blogs at The Bibliothecary.

“Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an intriguing interpretation of British history” is what’s in store within the new translation of an old Welsh book from the Middle Ages, The Mabinogion. No, I haven’t heard of it either, but it’s bound to have some great material even if it’s a bit hard to read.

Terry Teachout praises Donald Westlake’s comic novels, calling the latest one, What’s So Funny? a stinking funny book. Well, he doesn’t exactly say that it’s stinking funny. He says all of his Dortmunder series books are “incredibly, pulverizingly funny, and the only thing wrong with them is that there aren’t twice as many.”

Terry Teachout praises Donald Westlake’s comic novels, calling the latest one, What’s So Funny? a stinking funny book. Well, he doesn’t exactly say that it’s stinking funny. He says all of his Dortmunder series books are “incredibly, pulverizingly funny, and the only thing wrong with them is that there aren’t twice as many.”

Author Orson Scott Card calls a thriller he read “evil.”

At the beginning of the book, we are shown a Palestinian during the 1948 war over the creation of the state of Israel. . . . [Steve] Berry sets this scene against a background in which Israelis are systematically driving all the Palestinians out of Israel; the Israelis are heavily armed by the British while the Palestinians have no weapons to counter them; and the Israelis have rounded up whole villages of Palestinians and slaughtered them, men and women alike. . . .

This is the kind of thing that readers — especially ones who don’t know anything about history — are likely to assume the writer has researched, so that it can be trusted. . . . So when a novel like Berry’s The Alexandria Link treats such events as background, as if everybody knew that this is how Israelis act, what it is really doing is furthering the propaganda of one side in a desperate war.