City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte

I liked this book more by its end than I thought I might at its beginning. It tells the story of Sarah Weston, a grad student in musicology, who receives a mysterious invitation to work at a Prague museum over the summer, cataloguing scores and papers relating to Beethoven, her musical hero. But even before she arrives at the castle, she realizes that all is not well. Most of the story was really clever and inventive. But there were a number of moments when I found myself rolling my eyes--many of the characters seemed to lack clear motivation, especially at first. I'm intrigued to see where the story goes next.

The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg by Richard Handler and Eric Gable

This book contends that even as Colonial Williamsburg has adopted social history as its mode of presentation of the past--which entails embracing the dirt of the past and acknowledging that history changes not so much because of the discovery of new facts as because of the appearance of new people interpreting it--it does not fully follow out on the principles that this social history approach would suggest (for example, in job mobility, in relative pay scale, and in creative and unique interpretations of the past). I found the book easy to follow in its argument and enlightening in its scope. I really enjoyed seeing the behind-the-scenes picture of Williamsburg, even if I'm not quite so radically critical of the enterprise.

Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

This book, a thriller set in modern-day New York, but the solution to the series of murders lies buried in the past. The mystery part of the plot was pretty entertaining, but I can't say that I cared for all the gory descriptions of murder that accompany the solution.