Write If You Get Work: The Best Of Bob & Ray – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1975 ★★★

Dipping into the Surreal

For over forty years, two men who dressed like Rotary Club members and rarely raised their voices conducted a quiet comedy revolution. Today, the legacy of Bob & Ray rests in hundreds of circulated radio recordings, fond memories of aging fans, and out-of-print books like this which collect their sketches.

I wanted Write If You Get Work: The Best Of Bob & Ray to justify my love with page after page of sheer laughter. Despite my deep nostalgia, I can’t claim this to be all that gut-busting. What it does is capture the essence of what they did, a slightly surreal, lightly barbed whimsy that marked them for decades as the gentlest and wittiest of media satirists.

Lullaby – Ed McBain, 1989 ★★★

Pushing it to 11

There are times when a novel by a favorite author has what you want and expect to the point it becomes a liability. Passion and energy are revved up to an overheated degree. Fast-paced conversations read like boxing matches. An appropriately if super-heavy mood looms large.

Lullaby is a fantastically developed and fleshed-out dive into the world of Ed McBain’s legendary 87^th Precinct. It would no doubt have read better if it had been shorter. Alas, what makes it so brilliant a read also holds it back. The author is on such a tear he knows not when to stop.

A couple return to their Isola apartment from a New Year’s Eve party to discover the corpses of both their infant daughter and her teenaged babysitter. At first, a burglar is suspected. Further investigation suggests a more personal motive. But which victim was the target?

Chancellorsville – Stephen W. Sears, 1996 ★★★

Slipping the Jaws of Victory

Initiative is a word you see a lot in military contexts. Aggressive generals seize it, unsuccessful ones fumble it, wargamers even roll for it. In Chancellorsville, Stephen W. Sears examines a major U.S. Civil War battle decided to an almost unfair degree by initiative.

On paper, it should have been a Union victory. Their usual advantage in numbers was increased when a key Confederate force was pulled away from Robert E. Lee’s command, giving the North a 2:1 edge in troops.

Learning from the mistakes of his Federal predecessors, Joseph Hooker tried something different from the usual frontal assault into entrenchments. He employed an ambitious sidelong thrust utilizing telegraph wire and secret river crossings. For a while, it was even working.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish – Douglas Adams, 1984 ★★★

Love, Hitchhiker Style

Through the course of three novels, Arthur Dent had it pretty rough. First the Earth blew up. Then the Universe tried to kill him. Misery chased him across every parsec of the galaxy, then dumped him in prehistoric exile with only his towel and bathrobe for company.

So how can one begrudge him a little happiness?

The fourth book in Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” trilogy, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish sidesteps all that backstory for a rom-com where Dent returns to Earth to find it just as he left it, except all the dolphins have mysteriously disappeared:

Sir Thomas More – Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle & others, c. 1596-1604 ★½

Shakespeare by Committee

If you accept prevailing wisdom, it is nothing short of a miracle we have this play. It presents a famously controversial episode in British history when the turmoil from that controversy still raged. For centuries the play was buried from public view, seemingly lost forever.

Most incredibly, it is the only extant play manuscript that includes handwritten lines by William Shakespeare, who composed at least most of one scene. Handwriting experts are convinced, anyway; so are many leading Shakespearean scholars.

So why is Sir Thomas More so hard to get excited about? Is it just because the play is mostly not by Shakespeare? Or is it just because it’s mostly not by anyone?

Captain Blood – Rafael Sabatini, 1922 ★★★

Don't Let the Name Fool You

Pirate fiction should be an easy sell. Adventure is baked into the formula; so is violent death, unbounded freedom, and the raging seas. Whatever your age or gender, cannon shot bouncing across a crowded deck is nourishment for that twisted 12-year-old inside you.

Captain Blood, one of the most successful pirate fiction titles of all time, demonstrates both the promise and the limits of this genre. Over a hundred years since its publication, it retains the power to thrill and enthrall. But how can you really root for pirates?

Country doctor Peter Blood wonders, too. He takes to piracy early in the book when fate gives him no other options. Though he leads a fairly nasty crew who preys on cargo vessels, he longs only for respectability and the love of a decent woman who scorns the life he leads.

Black Mischief – Evelyn Waugh, 1932 ★★★★

Perils of Western Civilization

Nothing prepares one for the spritely acid bath of Evelyn Waugh’s third novel less than reading it after his first two novels. Yes, those are black comedies, too, but there’s something extra-chilling about the whimsical savagery found here, where life is cheap and violence constant.

Off the coast of northeastern Africa, the island nation of Azania stands athwart the march of progress, its people enmeshed in bloody feuds and quick scams. Seth, the new emperor, seeks to change that by looking to to Europe for inspiration. He happens upon a mash-up of Marxism and family planning that blows up sooner than you can say: “THROUGH STERILITY TO CULTURE.”

Counting on the help of an opportunistic Brit, Basil Seal, Seth’s road to nowhere implicates both Africans and Europeans as well as the hope they might have anything to learn from each other.