The Geographer's Library

Way back when, before Grandpa was a boy (1154 AD to be precise), an Arab geographer assembled a collection of jewels, rocks, scientific instruments and tiny art objects, which he kept in a strongbox. Some items even had magical properties. The box was stolen, also way back then, and each item went i......more

I thought this book would be an intellectual thriller, but it turned out not to be much of either. The interesting part of the narrative are the short descriptions of the 15 objects that make up the geographer's library. These brief but vivid stand-alone chapters kept me reading this book through th......more

A puzzling and ultimately unsatisfying ending! THE GEOGRAPHER'S LIBRARY has aspirations to that lofty genre, the literary thriller, which is attracting so many hopeful authors and readers of late. For a debut novel, Fasman's efforts come very, very close indeed to success but ultimately a puzzling an......more

The Geographer's Library is a novel with two threads. Every other chapter follows the story of Paul Tomm, a newspaper reporter in modern-day America investigating the mysterious death of an old university professor; the alternate chapters describe the origins of fifteen arcane objects thought to hol......more

“The Geographer’s Library” is a mixed bag that I strain to explain why it went from delighting me, down to three stars. It was like Jon Fasman had superb ideas and well-stocked ingredients for a cake but did not use the right quantity or order of those of quality. He checked off originality, the mos......more