The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt, Ray. Non-fiction. This was a book club recommendation, and it was extremely informative. Pathetic fallacy (the stone having a sense of humor, the stone having made up its mind to be deciphered by a Frenchman) distracts badly when it appears. Fortunately, it does not appear all that frequently. The work naturally goes into far more detail than the corresponding section of The Codebreakers, and gives a substantially different view of the early work of the two folks who were key in arriving at a translation.

There is a section in which the author offers some awfully tortured rationalizations why keeping artifacts away from their countries of origin is okay (“where would it end?” “who’s to say where its home really is?” like that), and while I’m not passionate about returning the marbles or the stone to where they were fashioned, that’s mostly because I’m likely to get to London before Athens or Egypt, and I can’t pretend I have any justification for my selfish preference.