Since I no longer see book reviews listed on the News-Journal Web site, I’ll start posting my reviews here. For instance, while traveling (more info to come), my book review of Stephen King’s enormous “Under the Dome” ran.

“The King is back”
The sheer size of Stephen King’s latest book “Under the Dome” is imposing. It could pass for a doorstop.

But readers shouldn’t worry: The 1,088-page book is hard to put down. There were several nights of saying, “Just one more chapter before bedtime.” As that so often goes, however, one chapter turns to two, then three…

In “Under the Dome,” the town of Chester’s Mill is isolat­ed by a sudden invisible dome. No one can go in or out, and that brings out the best and worst of its citizens. The dome may be remind some of “The Simpsons Movie,” but King has said he started writing portions of the novel in the 1970s.

Because there are a hundred or so characters, going through all of them, much less remem­bering each one, is a little tricky. Before the novel starts, there’s a who’s who of charac­ters.

One of our heroes is Dale “Barbie” Barbara, an Iraq war veteran who made enemies out of the good old boys in Chester’s Mill because of someone else’s lie. He’s perfectly content to be a drifter and leave the town, but circumstances require him to return to duty.

He’s helped by Julia Shum­ way, who is the editor and pub­lisher of The Chester’s Mill Democrat. She gets the word out when those in power would wish otherwise.

The major villain — and truly one of King’s most terrifying vil­lains since Annie Wilkes in “Misery” —is used car salesman and local political kingpin Jim Rennie Sr. (His son is just as scary — and sick.)

It’s amazing to see how a func­tioning society just falls apart, and so easily, too. That’s part of the pull of the novel.

With its topic and scale, “Un­der the Dome,” compares to King’s epic “The Stand,” but doesn’t quite surpass it. There seems to have been massive trimming in the second half to shorten the gigantic novel.

By the time one reaches the end — and finds out whether the dome has been placed by the government, supernatural forces, local yokels or some­thing else entirely — some of the magic evaporates. Deaths get glossed over, and while King rightly kills some of his darlings and wraps up the entire enter­prise, readers are left wishing he’d done an epilogue to explain it a little more.

Though the ending may feel unfinished for some, the novel is worthwhile. If nothing else, it will inspire readers to think about how they or their leaders should act in a crisis.

Teachers around the world tell students, “Show, don’t tell,” when learning to write. Too bad the author of “The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery” did not take this advice to heart.

Enrique Joven, its author, takes a fascinating mystery and puts us to sleep instead. It’s all the more infuriating because the mystery — an either 15th or 16th century manuscript painstakingly written in an unknown language and illustrated with what looks to be symbolic drawings — is real and stored at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The author of the Voynich manuscript is unknown, but it’s associated with the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia Rudolf II, who patronized a variety of artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, including Dane Tycho Brahe and German Johannes Kepler.

Those names should sound familiar because their work (and the work of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei) formed the basis of our understanding about astronomy and physics. In fact, it was the tumultuous relationship between Brahe and Kepler as well as Brahe’s strange and untimely death that should have been shown, not told to us in lecture after lecture.

The narrator of “The Book of God and Physics” is a likable Jesuit named Hector, who teaches at a Catholic prep school in Spain. He belongs to an online group dedicated to unlocking the secrets of the Voynich manuscript, which has never been translated. And many have tried, including American military cryptographers after World War II.

Then, Hector’s online world collides with reality, as two of his online friends — Juana, an heiress from Mexico, and John Carpenter, a physicist with the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge, United Kingdom — seek his help to unlock the secrets of the manuscript. Together they become enmeshed in a conspiracy possibly stemming from Rudolf II’s court to the present day.

Author Enrique Joven, who himself holds a doctorate in physics and works as a senior engineer in the Canary Islands, obviously loves and is enthusiastic about science. He puts forth all the theories surrounding the Voynich manuscript as well as discusses the speculation about Kepler’s possible role in Brahe’s death.

Though Joven wisely makes his narrator both a priest and teacher, who might be forgiven a little too much exposition, he unfortunately litters the book not only with long summaries of events but also clunky dialogue, such as this scene from page 282:

“That last one sounds good. Explain,” Juana asked.

“Aqua regia is a yellow, extremely corrosive solution, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid, highly concentrated. It got its name, royal water, because it could dissolve precious, or royal, metals like gold and platinum. Very few reactants could do that,” John explained.

Unless the reader is a very dedicated scientist or history buff, “The Book of God and Physics” won’t capture many people’s imagination, which is a shame because the Voynich manuscript — and all the people associated with it — resonates as a real-life mystery needing resolution.

This was a fun review to write, which sounds terrible since it was negative, but the disappointment I felt reading this book made it easy to offer criticism. Apparently, my passion was obvious.

“You should only write negative reviews,” my co-worker David said. “That was your best book review yet.”

Stay tuned then for my review of Stephen King’s “Under the Dome,” which isn’t all negative but isn’t all positive either.