"The Turkish Gambit," Boris Akunin

The second Akunin I've read, and not as enjoyable as "Winter Queen," mainly because Fandorin is off-screen (off-page?) for most of the narrative. Instead, everything is seen through the eyes of Varya, who turns out not to be the burning revolutionary I expected her to be but more of a well-intentioned flirt who has bumbled her way into a Russian army camp in search of her boyfriend. So while Varya is wondering which handsome soldier is attempting to win her heart, I'm wondering what exactly Fandorin is up to and what exactly the mystery is. Perhaps if I knew more about the 19th century conflicts between Turkey and Russia, I could imagine the dashing officers and courageous war correspondents in more detail, and fall in love along with Varya, but since I don't it's all a bunch of names that Fandorin strings together so that he can make a big "I have solved everything!" speech at the end. Perhaps I'm just not interested in war fiction pastiche? "Murder on the Leviathan" is next, regardless.

"The Winter Queen," Boris Akunin

I am not an especial lover of the mystery genre, but a friend has sung the praises of Boris Akunin once too often for me to pass by "Winter Queen" when I had the opportunity to pick it up in the local library.

The story itself is as old as dirt - callow policeman is thrown into mysterious situation, manages to make his way out and catch the thugs but at what cost? - and the plot twists are apparent to anybody who's ever read this sort of novel before (or knows anything about foreshadowing). However, Akunin keeps the plot going at a good clip, and the unfamiliar setting (1870s Tsarist Russia) keeps things fresh as well. It's impossible not to like scenes of decadent aristocrats playing "American roulette" to prove their nihilist credentials. And there are ghosts! Definitely am going to read the next one - apparently it involves cross-dressing revolutionaries who can't resist our hero's imperialist booty.

"Claudius the God," Robert Graves

Ah, Claudius, everybody's favorite possibly-retarded Roman emperor. I've read the first volume of this duology and I adore the miniseries and would purchase it in a heartbeat if I had any of that little thing called cash. So when I saw "Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina" (no forgetting Messalina, people) at the library, I felt compelled to pick it up.

And now I have to pick a bone with Orson Scott Card, who slates Graves's Claudius books for being anachronistic and unappealing to a modern audience. I disagree - you don't have to have grown up scribbling "amo, amas, amat" under the beady eye of your headmaster to enjoy the books. The more knowledge you have of the time period, the more rewarding the book is.* But if you have an amateur interest in Roman history, or even if you've watched the I, Claudius miniseries, you won't be left scratching your head over the particulars.

In fact, that's a problem, as much of the book is taken up with Claudius and pals' various military and political endeavors, described in loving detail, so that you, the reader, know everything of the times. This matches Graves's conceit exactly - his Claudius prides himself on his historical works, so it's no surprise that much of this "autobiography" is a record of events. It's also no surprise that all of the drama and intrigue of the miniseries is gone, as there would be no reason for Claudius to dwell on the more sordid and personally painful aspects of his reign. Of course, this also means that there's no $1.98 orgy scene and no Decapitation-cam (although I doubt that those charms would translate into print - Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome" series, anyone? Time for some indigo prose!) Visual appeal aside, Claudius's viewpoint does become limiting, after a while - unlike the first book, in which he's mainly observing his crazy relatives, here he's mostly justifying his own actions, and it does become tiresome. Still, better written than most historical fiction, and a good companion to the miniseries.

* And if you know something about Graves's own life (I know the bare minimum), it's fun to extrapolate Claudius's prejudices from the author's life experiences.

"The Journal of Dora Damage," Belinda Starling

I picked up this book During My Travels and it turned out to be a good airplany sort of read. The story is simple - London bookbinder's wife has to take over from her husband when he falls ill and ends up binding pornography for rich men with time on their hands. Binding porn turns out to be a dangerous business, and it's all complicated when Dora's employer's wife forces her to take on a hot ex-slave as her assistant. It all ends with tattoos in uncomfortable places and candlelit sex, as it should.

I can't utterly dislike any novel that has pornography binding as the basis for its plot (there are lots of good descriptions of 18th- and 19th-century naughty books, and Dora's reaction to the forbidden material she was reading struck true). However, I found Dora too agreeable a character, which is always the danger in first-person historical novels - the supporting characters have the attitudes of their time and place, while the viewpoint character expresses thoughts that are similar to the reader's moral code. Voilà, instant sympathy for the heroine. (It usually is the heroine - the common tactic is to make the men in the book nasty misogynists even by the standards of the day, and the women proto-feminists. Which implies that the only reason that a woman would want her own power in the world is in reaction to living with a brute, but there you go.)

Maybe it was the Generic Proto-Feminist Heroine deal going on, but I found myself more interested in the side characters and their pasts and futures - Dora's opiate-hooked, sex-abhorring husband, the frivolous wife of the leader of the pornography club (I didn't buy her ending - not for a second), Din, the educated former slave who goes back to America to lead a rebellion. I mean, crazy sexual repression! Class conflict! Slave rebellions! Forget binding porn, that's porn-worthy stuff right there!