This time it is not one book that is sucking my will to read, but a whole pile of them. To wit:

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. I am reading this for the book club and I expected to really like it, but I do not. The prose is tiresome, the story feels trite, and Angela Davis’s ridiculous introduction gave me a headache.

The Turn of the Screw. One of my biggest regrets about grad school was that I never learned to like Henry James. I thought that maybe rereading this one, which I liked okay in high school, would help me along in that endeavor. Instead, it has just led me to think, “Good lord, Henry, just spit it out already,” more than ever.

The Professor and the Madman. Jeremy bought me this one, which I have wanted to read for a while. I will probably finish it eventually but it is not really grabbing me. Mostly, these old Victorian guys are just making me appreciate, for the very first time, why those French feminists get so pissed off about men and language.

I am feeling a little tired of books right now, and I feel more like either going for a bike ride or watching Survivor than sitting down and reading anything. It has been a bad summer, literature-wise.

The Historian. Well, that’s over with. Not exactly the reaction I expected to have to finishing this book — from the early reviews, I really expected to love it. But I did not love it. I did not hate it, exactly, although I don’t think it is a very good book. If I had to sum it up in one word, I would be torn between “amateurish” and “dull.”

I will start with what’s good. Kostova writes reasonably well. The prose is occasionally lovely, and I chose that word deliberately. Despite the dark subject manner, this is a very pretty book.

I also like what she does with the character of Dracula. He’s not well fleshed-out, but that seems appropriate. We don’t meet him until very late in the novel, but then we recognize in retrospect his presence in earlier chapters, and I like that. I really enjoyed Kostova’s version of the manner in which Dracula cheated death; I like her vision of how he has been spending the last 500 years. His current obsession is fascinating. This may be my favorite take on Dracula himself, as a character.

But that’s about it on the positive scale. In most ways this book is just fluff; Kostova tries for some deeper meaning and some clever structural play, but she doesn’t really accomplish what she is setting out to do here. Her structure is more maddening than clever: the time leaps, the multiple narrators, the improbable letters. The flaw that undermines every aspect of literary cleverness here is a simple and pervasive one: every character sounds exactly like every other character. Not one of them sounds like a 17-year-old girl in the 1970s, and I’m not even convinced that the principal narrator sounds like a middle-aged scholar/diplomat in the same time period. He certainly doesn’t sound like a middle-aged scholar/diplomat who is writing under enormous stress and in a very big hurry.

So the novel’s deep flaws prevent it from standing as any kind of serious literature, but unfortunately, it’s not really successful as a fun plot-driven novel, either. Because mostly, the plot is boring. People go to libraries, run into someone else who just happens to be researching the same subject, and wait a minute, just the other day I saw something in a book … here it is! Here is the tidbit of information that will lead you to the next library and the next plot contrivance.

As you can see, the historical research angle really irritated me, even though I expected to love it. We never see any of the characters doing any research; we just see a lot of annoying coincidences. After 600 pages I still have no reason to believe that either Paul or Helen are real scholars, except that the novel keeps informing me of their brilliance.

I was also very frustrated by the fact that even given the exotic locations and grim historical periods Kostova is visiting here, the novel rarely achieves a sense of time and place. You do get a sense of Istanbul and maybe of Bulgaria, but the cold war stuff never seems to gel into a real atmosphere. This was a novel that begged for some atmosphere, but it just seemed like a lot of description of scenery and buildings, without really making me see or feel history. Quite a letdown.

I really did expect to love this novel. I like vampire stories, horror, epistolary novels, novels that unfold slowly and don’t have much plot, novels set in Eastern Europe, novels that jump around confusingly in time, historical fiction, and literary experiments. But I did not like The Historian.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Still my favorite, at least in its audio version. Up to this point I could have walked away from the series and not cared how it ended, but Goblet hooked me. I like the structure of this one, as well; I enjoyed the tournament and I really loved the Moody (or “Moody”) character.

I am still really bothered by the house elf storyline and I don’t think Rowling has resolved it satisfactorily. I am not sure how this subplot reads from a Brit perspective, but it is very problematic for an American. I would be really uncomfortable reading this to a child, because some of the good people in these books have really squicky attitudes about slavery, servitude, and a perceived natural order.

But whatever. You don’t care if I liked this book; everyone now is just hunting through the old books for clues about what is coming next. And this one, I think, has very important clues, at least as important as the prophecy in Order of the Phoenix. So let’s run them down. Please note that I have been thoroughly spoiled about the Half-Blood Prince but I haven’t actually finished it yet, so I don’t know if any of these are resolved or explained. If you haven’t read the latest book and have not yet been spoiled, you might want to stop reading now.

• Chapter 36, as Harry tells Dumbledore about the scene in the graveyard when Voldemort returns:
  

  “He said my blood would make him stronger than if he’d used someone else’s,” Harry told Dumbledore. “He said the protection my — my mother left in me — he’d have it too. And he was right — he could touch me without hurting myself, he touched my face.”

  For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes.

  Then the look fades and Dumbledore says, oh well, that protection is gone, blah blah blah, but I think that triumphant look has to be significant. Something happened here, something about Voldemort getting Harry’s blood is significant.

  This better not come down to killing him with the power of love, that’s all I can say. Because I will throw up.

• Later in the same chapter, when Dumbledore is assigning tasks to what will be the newly reformed Order of the Phoenix, he speaks to Snape:
  

  “Severus,” said Dumbledore, turning to Snape, “you know what I must ask you to do. If you are ready … if you are prepared …”

  “I am,” said Snape.

  He looked slightly paler than usual, and his cold, black eyes glittered strangely.

  That one is not so significant because we know that Dumbledore asked him to do something at this point, but it is worth noting that it appears to have scared him.

• Chapter 30, when Harry looks into the pensieve in Dumbledore’s office: there is something here about Harry’s face changing into Snape’s, and something more about a secret reason that Dumbledore trusts Snape. It can’t be just that Snape was a double agent, because Harry already knows that, right?

I swear there was one more thing about Snape I wanted to note, but I can’t find it. It might have been in Azkaban now that I think about it. My point in noting it, though, is that if it has not yet been revealed exactly why Dumbledore trusted Snape — and I don’t mean the spying, or Dumbledore’s general faith in the goodness of people — then I don’t think we can say yet that the trust was misplaced. Maybe that secret is revealed in Half-Blood Prince and it’s just been left out of the spoilers, but right now, I think something else is going on.

(Although I am not prepared to subscribe to the “Snape is really a good guy” theorizing going on; I have two thoughts, which I will share after I finish the damn book.)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I forgot that I hadn’t yet posted this; I actually finished it over a week ago. I have read Azkaban twice before, both times the old fashioned way. I realize that this is everyone’s favorite, and I agree that it is the most tightly plotted and satisfying of the series, but I still think it has major problems. This was my first time with the audio version of this book, and for once the audio didn’t completely fix Rowling’s crappy writing — this is the worst audio version of any of the books, with some bad pacing, a few mispronunciations, and some rough edges in the characters’ voices.

I can tell you exactly why Jim Dale’s audio versions are better than Rowling’s printed versions: he ignores her as he sees fit. Rowling is always having a character shout or bellow or scream when a shout is too much for the moment. Dale reads the word “shouted,” but his characters don’t shout unless shouting is appropriate. His characters also don’t speak in capital letters or trail off into ellipses. And yet none of the meaning is lost.

In other words, Dale does with vocalization what Rowling ought to be doing with language. She has the laziest editors in the world, because these books are almost really good. Almost.

It is because I am reading The Historian, which is 900 pages long and nowhere near as good as it’s cracked up to be. That book is killing me, although it is finally getting interesting. The writing is better than The Kite Runner but the plot isn’t as good as Anne Rice. I am sure I will have more to say later if the damn thing doesn’t kill me first.

Otherwise, I am reading about bank robbers as research for my own writing. Or my own career change, if the lawyer gig doesn’t work out.