The Eight

I would need immortality to make up for the time it took to read.

So today I think I should say more than that one line above which was all I could think to say after finishing the book. It's not (as we now say in the reviewing online world) helpful.

I started my goodreads life with the rubric that if I actually finished a book, it deserved at least 3 stars. I probably violated this at least once already but if the book is as long as this one and I finished it and declare Eight less than three, some explanation is needed.

I'd spent part of my life as a computer person, a chessplayer, a traveler in the Atlas mountains, so I was hooked somewhat by the subject matter. There's a lot of erudition in this book. I never knew, for example, that Philidor, the chess master was also a composer. My knowledge of the assassination of Marat came mainly from Judy Collins covering the songs from the musical which is called Marat/Sade for short. Who knew that Galileo lost sight in one eye from staring at the sun? [And who knew that this was in fact untrue as I learned just now from the internet. I now wonder about the other "facts" that pepper this book.]

It's also audacious, with all sorts of historical characters showing up in a way that reminded me of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure; mathematicians like Euler and Fourier, statesmen like Gadafi and Talleyrand, poets like Blake and Wordsworth. So we have interesting facts (some of which I later discovered to be fake news) and celebrity guests, and a McGuffin chess set to keep me involved. And esoterica (like the game of nim, Hermes Trismegistus, and some which turn out to be false, like Carthage being named for a moon god.)

The above considerations kept me going despite her using "comprise" as a synonym for "compose" three times in different centuries. (In this century, this is probably considered acceptable however.) The writing is at best ordinary. The plot often works, but other times feels like she moves the characters like chess pieces. In the Maltese Falcon, the McGuffin turns out to be worthless. Here she needs to make it valuable beyond belief and doesn't really succeed. Besides, once it's translated into a formula, it makes little sense that one would have to go back to the original encoding.

So there you have it. I know the game never ends but I'll be moving on now.