The Word

I am really trying but for whatever reason I cannot seem to get into the book, The Word, by Irving Wallace. It is supposed to be another Dan Brown-like book about a secret manuscript that might undo two thousand years of religion. The problem is the book is too preachy and hasn't yet "got going". And, I am well over a hundred pages into the book. To me, this is a bad sign. I haven't yet decided if I am going to chunk the book. But, in the event I decide to, I went out and purchased, The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl. Check out the word from the publisher on this one, it is a New York Times Bestseller:

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor." "The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

Regardless if I finish The Word, I know I'll read The Dante Club. I'll let you know how it (or either) turns out.