So I'm listening to my grandma talk about various pictures/prints she has in her bedroom, some family related, some not, and somehow the subject gets onto visiting this used bookstore on Lincoln Blvd., a bit into Venice, which she used to take me to when I was a kid (I'm almost certain it's no longer there, for the record, though honestly Lincoln is weird and there's a lot of places you'd think would never survive and yet they're still hanging on, so...).
She mentions this book series that she read at least a few of, and was really into, and how at one point at the bookstore, when she was browsing, I said "Grandma, you've read enough of those, I'll find you something else," and how I did find her something else but now, with getting a DAISY player (and if I remember, teaching her how to find books on the Kindle Fire, cause my grandpa or anyone else local has no patience for it), she wishes she could remember that series, that author.
It's about a Catholic journalist, she explains, and it's mysteries and they've got an Italian flair - set in Italy, actually, she clarifies later, since I missed that, and there's a helicopter crash and he manages to survive somehow. I ask her various questions about them, as I'm Googling them (and constantly forgetting to add the words "fiction" and "book" to the search terms, which of course led me to very different sites), and there were at least three of them, she remembers, but she can't remember reading anymore. "And this would have been, what, late 90s? Early 2000s?" Ergo before I moved to Germany.
"You know, you might have been as young as ten, actually." Okay, great. So I'm looking for a series that had at least started being published by the mid 90s, it's a mystery but not involving any too descriptive murders or crime, the main character is a Catholic journalist, and there's an Italian connection - oh, wait, they're actually set in Italy.
I'm scouring lists of books set in Italy, of books with Catholic characters, of books by Catholic authors, etc. Most of them don't sound right, from what she's said, and the few I ask about aren't right either.
"You know, Cousin G was the one who turned me onto the books. They were really popular at the time and he lent me his, and I honestly would have kept it, but I felt bad about hanging onto it so long, and I'd had it long enough that anyone who wanted to read it had had the chance to read it."
Knowing that they were popular definitely would help, I figure. But googling was getting me Dan Brown's books and not much else. I wondered if they were by an Italian author. I wondered if I should start looking for best seller lists from the 90s.
"They were really fun, the one I liked the most - I don't think it was the first one, but it was the first I read - involved this conspiracy theory and it was really fascinating." She continues to talk about how while the mystery involving the Catholic Church was totally implausible, it was very entertaining.
Look, I admit it, I went through a Dan Brown/religious conspiracy fiction phase. Those books can definitely be fun. Not great writing, generally very inaccurate, but who cares, if you're enjoying the book. However, as far I remembered, that genre got really popular post- The Da Vinci Code, and that came out in the early 2000s, so we're talking about a decade - at least - after that fateful day in the used bookstore. So what could she have been reading in the 90s - the mid 90s - that would fit that genre and her general descriptions?
"I liked the other two better because of their setting," she adds. "I remember going to Rome and seeing the Tigris river, and I could just picture the places mentioned in the books. The popular one that I read first: it didn't describe Rome as much. The journalist meets up with this woman and they're fleeing from people, they meet up at the Louvre - that's not in Italy, right?"
"No, it's in France." Once again, searching for the book is getting me pretty much Dan Brown books and nothing else, especially now with the Louvre connection.
Finally, I pause my search. "You know, Grandma," I say, "what you're describing to me really sounds like Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code, but those came out in the early 2000s."
"Well, the popular one could have come out around that time, but he had published other older books, right?"
"Yes... there's one set in the arctic and there's one involving NSA - I read those after I read The Da Vinci Code, but they don't have anything to do with religion." I bring up his site. "Yeah, Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, and Angels and Demons was in 2000."
"That title actually sounds familiar! Both of those! I think there might have even been a movie?"
Long story short, I was not ten but more like eighteen-early 20s, it was while I was still living in Germany but coming back to visit, so end of high school and my first two attempts at uni, and she wants to reread them now and read more of his books, so I should put at least one of them on her list to send to the state library for the blind.
I didn't read the latest Robert Landon book, which apparently came out in 2017, because of my disappointment with uh Inferno, which came out in 2011. The book itself wasn't bad, but I really did not like the way it ended. Basically - there's a catastrophic event that happens in the end, the thing the MCs have spent the entire book trying to prevent, and they fail, which of course sucks, but then the epilogue is as if it never happened. The movie changes the ending and they MCs do save the day, so it makes sense that life continues on as normal, whereas with the book's ending - it really should have had a huge effect on society, and instead it was completely glossed over. Like, no, if you're going to have your characters lose, fail to save the day, that's fine, but don't downplay the effects. Either don't make it as catastrophic, or end the book with the failure and don't give me an epilogue where the MC is depressed about failing but the world is fine.
I might have to read the latest one, Oblivion, though now Perhaps that kind of conspiracy thriller will get me out of my general reading slump.
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