The Alchemyst by Michael Scott (2007)

I spent a good deal of this past Friday and Saturday nights sweeping through The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. I just could not put the book down. The feeling was akin to the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings marathons I used to have which resulted in my reporting to school/work reeling from lack of sleep.

I am a big fan of the Tudor dynasty so Dr. John Dee’s appearance in the series was a major come on. Mix in Nicholas Flamel and his wife Perenelle, equally mysterious and exciting characters from the 1300s, add on lots of magic, and I was transported.

The book excitingly opens with the forcible abstraction of the Codex/Book of Abraham the Mage and the abduction of Perenelle. Fifteen-year old twins Sophie and Newman, innocently working in Nicholas and Perenelle’s bookshop and coffee/tea shop, respectively, were quickly swept into the adventure. They’d find out later that their involvement appears to have been foretold in the Codex and that they were going to play major roles to save the world.

Nicholas and the twins need to recover the Codex from Dr. Dee in order to save the world from the Dark Elders with their plot to subjugate humankind and/or reduce them to food. Nicholas and the twins, however, need help. They enlist Scathach, an ancient warrior next generation Elder who physically does not look any older than the twins; Hekate, an Elder who can awaken the twins magical powers; and the Witch of Endor/The Mistress of Air who taught Sophie not only skills to protect herself but more importantly transferred to her magical powers.

There is a more urgent reason why Nicholas and Perenelle must quickly get hold of the Codex: They are ageing rapidly and without the book, they will be dead in a month’s time.

The book has a cliffhanger ending. I read a preview of the next installment and the Florentine philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli is in it. Since I am also a big fan of the Italian renaissance period, it looks like I will have several more reading marathon weekends (The Alchemyst is the first of a six-book series).

I am highly recommending this book for young adults. I believe that the introduction of historical personalities in the series will encourage readers to either brush up on their history or undertake in-depth research work on the interesting life and works of these characters.

The Venetian Betrayal by Steve Berry (2007)

This time, it is Cassiopeia Vitt who is messed up and who does not want Cotton Malone’s help. Of course, this would not be a Steve Berry book if Malone remained a bystander.

The Venetian Betrayal is an exhilarating story of the search for the tomb of Alexander the Great; a despot’s dream to conquer Asia and the Middle East with the use of biological weapons; an American’s grandiose plan to bring to the international market the solution to the HIV virus; the US meddling in the affairs of Central Asia; and the discovery of a person dear to Henrik Thorvaldsen and Cassiopeia Vitt. The Venetian Betrayal also bears witness to the blossoming of (much!) friendlier relations between Vitt and Malone (uh oh…. Berry is getting sappy…)

This is my 6th Steve Berry book and I cannot be sure if I am honestly enthralled with Malone’s adventures or my captivation at the moment is due to the hormonal changes brought about by this little pebble I am carrying due in seven weeks. I remember when I was reviewing for the bar exam, how I was transfixed every 6pm with a certain Spanish soap opera which I found absolutely unendurable after I completed the four-Sunday bar exams.

Guess I’ll know after seven weeks if I still find Berry’s predictable plots and mishmash of history and futuristic what-ifs as mesmerizing as I find them today while my little one is doing cartwheels in my tummy. That’s not too long now.

The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry (2008)

Cotton Malone’s retirement from the US Justice Department, a job where he was chased and shot at a lot, has so far been unsuccessful.

In The Templar Legacy, he was forced out of his peaceful existence as a bookseller in Copenhagen when his ex-boss Stephanie Nelle got into trouble. Next, his son Gary, in The Alexandria Link, was kidnapped. Now in the Charlemagne Pursuit, he finds out that his father, Forrest Malone, who he thought died in a submarine accident in the North Atlantic, was actually aboard a secret nuclear vessel lost on a highly classified mission beneath the ice shelves of Antarctica.

Steve Berry manages to weave a complex plot in this book. Parallel with Cotton Malone’s adventure with the wealthy (and shapely!) blonde twin sisters Dorothea Lindauer and Christl Falk in search of the missing nuclear vessel, Stephanie Nelle has her hands full contending with the US President, the two Deputy National Security Advisers Edwin Davis and Diane McKoy, and the ambitious naval commanding officer Admiral Langford Ramsey.

The Charlemagne Pursuit has the characters being “played” against one another. This is perhaps Berry’s determined effort to keep an element of suspense throughout the book unlike in his previous works where he laid all his cards on the table all at once.

Berry has enjoyed himself so much in this episode with Cotton Malone that he has indulged him with an affair with one of the twins. He has also made his usual bad/executioner guy not so elegant this time. Charlie Smith is a far cry from the suave Christian Knoll in The Amber Room but has more in common with the Russian police bad guys in The Romanov Prophecy.

Berry is definitely on a roll in this book. He has managed to seamlessly interconnect the stories from the time of Charlemagne, to Hitler’s predisposition for the Aryan race, and the US’s top secret mission to Antarctica culminating in Cotton Malone’s finding the body of his father frozen in time and the lost city somewhere in Antarctica which Charlemagne, the Nazis, and the Americans have been long looking for.

The Alexandria Link by Steve Berry (2007)

Harold Earl Malone, a.k.a. Cotton Malone is back!

In The Templar Legacy, it was Stephanie Nelle, Malone’s former boss at the Justice Department, who needed help in solving the puzzle of her dead son and husband. In The Alexandria Link, Malone needs Nelle’s help this time when his 16-year old son Gary is kidnapped.

Two of Malone’s pals from The Templar Legacy also show up to lend their assistance - Henrik Thorvaldsen, a rich, eccentric Danish and Cassiopeia Vitt, a wealthy, intelligent, highly skilled female Moorish engineer whose specialty is Middle Ages architecture.

Malone this time is up against the Der Orden des Goldenene Vliesses (The Order of the Golden Fleece) a European economic cartel composed of 71 members governed by a Circle of five Chairs. The Blue Chair, who is elected for life, heads both the Order and the Circle. The Blue Chair is presently the billionaire Alfred Hermann, owner of European steel factories, African mines, Far Eastern rubber plantations, and banking concerns worldwide. Malone is also up against some powerful people in the White House.

The Order has tasked Dominic Sabre, known as die Klauen der Adler (the Talons of the Eagle), to use Gary as bait so that Malone can be led to reveal the whereabouts of George Haddad, a Palestinian biblical scholar, referred to as the Alexandrian Link. It is believed that the Alexandrian Link has been able to find out the location of the lost library of Alexandria which had the greatest concentration of knowledge on the planet and which stood for 600 years until the middle of the 7th century when the Muslims finally took control of Alexandria and purged everything contrary to Islam. Copies of half a million scrolls, codices, maps, were purportedly stored in the library of Alexandria.

Berry has definitely improved in the Alexandrian Link. He was able now to build a semblance of suspense and almost right to the end, has managed to keep readers guessing who between O. Brent Green, US Attorney General and Larry Daley, Deputy National Security Adviser, was in cahoots with the US Vice President in the plot to assassinate the US President while on a trip to Afghanistan. He also did a clever trick with the disappearance of the Alexandrian Link.

We also get to meet in Alexandrian Link, Pam Malone, Cotton’s ex-wife lawyer (she has decided to keep the name Malone after the divorce so she shares the same name as her son). We sympathize with Mrs. Malone here a bit. While Cotton has repeatedly berated the shortcomings of his ex-wife, it has come up in the search for the lost library of Alexandria that Cotton has not been only an absentee husband and father but has had affairs in the past which led to the breakdown of the marriage. At least Berry has given the poor woman a break in this book.

Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord (2002)

Hector is a young psychiatrist who is not very satisfied with himself because he couldn’t make his patients happy. He thus decided to go on a long trip in search of the formula for happiness.

Hector’s trip takes him to different places (while these are not specifically mentioned, one can surmise that these are Hong Kong, a country in Africa, and the US). He meets old friends in these trips and makes new ones. He has all sorts of adventures ranging from a flirtation with the “prettiest Chinese girl he’d ever seen in his life” to being kidnapped by goons, talking to a monk, attending to a sick woman in a plane, and discussing the theory of happiness with a professor who was a world expert on happiness.

In these travels, Hector made the following observations on Happiness:

1. Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.
2. Happiness often comes when least expected.
3. Many people see happiness only in their future
4. Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or money.
5. Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.
6. Happiness is a long walk in beautiful, unfamiliar mountains.
7. It’s a mistake to think that happiness is a goal.
8. Happiness is being with the people you love.
9. Happiness is knowing your family lacks for nothing.
10. Happiness is doing a job you love.
11. Happiness is having a home and a garden of your own.
12. It’s harder to be happy in a country run by bad people.
13. Happiness is feeling useful to others.
14. Happiness is to be loved for exactly who you are.
15. Happiness comes when you truly feel alive.
16. Happiness is knowing how to celebrate.
17. Happiness is caring about the happiness of those you love.
18. Happiness could be the freedom to love more than one woman at the same time.
19. The sun and the sea make everybody happy.
20. Happiness is a certain way of seeing things.
21. Rivalry poisons happiness
22. Women care more than men about making others happy
23. Happiness means making sure that those around you are happy.

(Hector crossed out #18 for fear that such will upset Clara, his special friend, if she happens to see his notes.)

The professor said that Happiness can be measured as follows:
Average = (What We Have – What We’d Like to Have) + (What We Have Now - The Best of What We’ve Had In the Past) + (What We Have – What Other People Have)

The professor explained that the average of the differences is closely related to happiness and the smaller the difference, the happier we are.

The monk’s formula, however, is different. He said that Happiness is as follows:
Happiness = Certain way of seeing things + feeling useful to others + doing a job you love

“Hector and His Search for Happiness” is a delightful book written with child-like simplicity but replete with age-old wisdom. Hector’s trip gives us the realization that people have different concepts of what happiness is and as such it is difficult to arrive at a universal formula for achieving happiness. The beauty of this book is that while it does not tell us how to attain that elusive elixir, it gives powerful insights on how we can be less grumpy and less satisfied in our lifetimes.