Timon Of Athens – William Shakespeare, 1605-08 ★★★

A Fool and His Money

It is not the first play people think of when they think of Shakespeare; probably closer to 32nd or 33rd. As a dramatic work, it is deficient, especially when it gets to the home stretch.

But Timon Of Athens makes an impression, of unbridled contempt for humanity, society, womankind, even art, that gives this play a rare kind of charge and makes it a unique entry in the Bard’s canon.

Crowned Heads – Thomas Tryon, 1976 ½★

Tinseltown on the Fade

The work of Thomas Tryon commands respect for its highly literate tone and the author's way of drawing out a good mystery.

But his often hard-to-comprehend protagonists and thinnish plots make reading him a chore at times, and that aspect of his work becomes especially problematic when inspiration is not working.

Such was the issue I had with Crowned Heads.

The Beatles: Recording Sessions – Mark Lewisohn, 1988 ★★★★★

Peeking Behind The Beatles' Curtain

It's natural to hesitate at seeing how something you loved was really made. Like that scene in The Wizard Of Oz when Toto pulls open the wizard's curtain, the result may be somewhat deflating.

So when Beatles fans like me got a chance to see what really went on when the Fab Four recorded their famous records, excitement came with more than a dollop of wariness.

It wasn't warranted.

A Magic Summer – Stanley Cohen, 1988 ★★★½

When the Mets Ruled the Earth

The summer of 1969's beautiful reputation is largely unwarranted.

Woodstock was a traffic and public-hygiene nightmare. The Beatles proved the love you make isn't equal to the love you take if Allen Klein is allowed in the mix. Billy and Wyatt demonstrated why it was hazardous for long-haired motorcyclists to tool around the Deep South.

But for fans of the New York Mets lucky enough to be there, 1969 was a blissed-out trip of heavenly delight.

Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton, 1990 ★★★½

A Few Bugs in the System

I never thought I'd want so much to see a little girl die. Then I had the chance to meet Alexis Murphy, maybe all of eight years old, in the pages of Michael Crichton's famous franchise starter, Jurassic Park.

What an hateful brat!

I know science fiction is supposed to make you feel strange things, but wow, I was not expecting this.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962 ★★★★

Life Under Article 58

The usual superlatives one wishes to bestow upon One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich fall away after one finishes reading it. Is it fair to describe as a statement to hidden hope, or of the irreducible dignity of man?

It sure doesn't feel that way when you finish it. Hardship is endured, yes, but hardly the ennobling kind.

What One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich does get across rather well is the human instinct for survival. It's all our protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, has left to him as we join him in his Soviet prison camp on a winter day early in 1951.

The Brethren – Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong, 1979 ★★★★½

Courting History

Like the Cosa Nostra and the Vatican, the U. S. Supreme Court is an institution of vast influence which nevertheless gets to operate largely under the media radar. It isn't often one gets to peak behind the curtain.

Give authors Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong points for not just getting such exclusive access, but using it so well.

Covering the years 1969 to 1975, The Brethren documents a time of significant transition, both on the Court and in the wider sphere of American life.

Sackett's Land – Louis L'Amour, 1974 ★½

Weak Start to Sackett Series

Louis L'Amour is commonly called the most popular novelist of the 20th century, with some 260 million books sold by century's end. But he wasn't critically well-regarded, and there are times reading him you understand why.

Sackett's Land presents him in surprisingly weak form given the pride of place this novel enjoys in his oeuvre.

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine – Tom Wolfe, 1976 ★½

Wolfe at Play

It takes a brilliant writer to write as badly as Tom Wolfe. The author of such far-out titles as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby decided to go all out with a title that makes even less sense when you trouble yourself to read the book.

Just what in hell is Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine supposed to mean, anyway?

It's not even catchy. Now, Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers, that was a pretty opaque title, too, but at least you didn't have to read it off the page to say it properly.

Killing Lincoln – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2011 ★★½

Sic Semper Something-or-other

Does a work of popular history actually impede one's deeper understanding of the past? One might think so from the hoopla surrounding the original release of Killing Lincoln.

Across America, historians blasted Killing Lincoln for being a poorly-researched font of disinformation. Museum gift shops that sell Honest Abe coloring books determined it to be beneath their standards. The deputy superintendent of the Ford's Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, D. C. cited numerous errors and a lack of footnotes in recommending Killing Lincoln be kept off its book store shelves as a disservice to Lincoln's memory.

Meanwhile, the actual murder weapon used for killing Lincoln is on display at Ford's Theatre, under glass.

Titus Andronicus – William Shakespeare, 1592-94 ★★½

Death by Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus presents us with one lasting and undeniable truth, that commercial success doesn't translate into critical accomplishment.

Said to have been the first big hit in the career of playwright William Shakespeare, it had already been staged by three different performance companies within two years of its apparent debut. Yet it's rarely staged now, and when it is it's presented more in the form of post-modern irony than as gripping drama.

The reason for that is simple: Titus is not a good play. But as a revenge fantasy with a strangely pungent sense of cosmic injustice, it kind of, sort of works.

Frank: The Voice – James Kaplan, 2010 ★★★★

Sinatra: Lust for Glory

If you someday find yourself at a buffet table in Heaven and Frank Sinatra happens to cut in front of you for seconds, you'll know two things from reading James Kaplan's Frank: The Voice.

1) It is useless to complain. 2) Don't even think about taking your place back.

Sinatra in The Voice is an extremely narcissistic, selfish, cold-blooded, tyrannical womanizer for whom the word no was only a slower version of the word yes.

The Return Of The King - J. R. R. Tolkien, 1955 ★★★★½

Closing the Ring

The last of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Return Of The King strikes me as one of the great payoff books in Western literature. It may not be a perfect novel, yet it rewards the investment paid by the reader of prior LOTR installments, deepens and broadens the insights one gleaned from reading the other books, and, unless you are a goblin or troll, sends you away happy.

The one caveat I would offer is that the narrative is bogged down, more than somewhat, by the author's deep fascination with the various mythological facets of Middle Earth, and more specifically his eagerness to impart this upon you. I for one could have done without the welter of information regarding who married who centuries before the plot elements of Return Of The King occurred. 

Am I the only person who feels that way?

The Two Towers – J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954 ★★★

The Murky Middle

Any great trilogy would seem to require a strong middle piece, something that deepens one’s engagement with the material being explored.

So I’m struck at how J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy manages to be so spell-binding despite the murky muddle of a middle piece that is The Two Towers.

The Fellowship Of The Ring – J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954 ★★★★

One Ring to Rule Them All

The first book in J. R. R. Tolkien's epic trilogy makes for a fine scene-setter and a bit of a puzzler. 

Enormously different in tone and content from his earlier novel set in Middle Earth, The Hobbit, The Fellowship Of The Ring challenges you to read closely and pay attention. It often rewards you for the effort, but make no mistake, this ain't no pleasant Misty Mountain hop.

The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien, 1937 ★★★★

A Tall Tale that Gets Bigger and Bigger

A quaint, bucolic story about a little fellow who meets with big adventures, The Hobbit is the kind of book one expects to read to a young person over the course of several lazy Sunday afternoons. Is anyone else surprised it became the foundation stone for one of modern culture's most popular mythologies?

What struck me recently reading The Hobbit was the small-ball stuff, its readability and charm. Yes, its legacy lies with it being the forerunner of fantasy fiction's greatest trilogy, a trilogy that does much more than The Hobbit giving life and breadth to its fantasy setting of Middle Earth. But what strikes me is not how meticulous a myth-maker author J. R. R. Tolkien was, but how instinctual were his pacing and craft.

Harvest Home – Thomas Tryon, 1973 ★★★

Hawthorny Horror Tale

It's the Season of the Witch, the month of Halloween, and I was in the mood for some seasonal fiction. Rather than try something new, I opted for something I knew already, or thought I knew, Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home.

It turned out less than I hoped, specifically in the story and scares departments, but impressed me nevertheless as the work of a solid literary craftsman.

The Keys Of The Kingdom – A. J. Cronin, 1941 ★★½

Inheriting the Earth 

Sometimes you want to believe in something so bad it doesn't really matter if the message is a bit off. A famous novel made into a successful film starring Gregory Peck, The Keys Of The Kingdom presents an admirable message and a saintly protagonist.

But I found the story off.

License Renewed – John Gardner, 1981 ★★½

007 Greets the 1980s

I remember my excitement seeing the blurb in Time magazine back in 1981. Glidrose Publications, Ltd., owners of the literary copyright of the world's most famous fictional spy, had granted permission for a brand-new series of James Bond novels.

But was James Bond ready for the eighties? John Gardner's initial updating of 007 kinda, sorta, sometimes works.

The American – Henry James, 1877 ★★★

Undone in the City of Love

It’s not the most riveting or engaging novel ever written, but Henry James’ The American does boast one of literature’s great put-downs: “I mean to show the world that however bad I may be, you are not quite the people to say it.”

Before there was such a thing as air travel, Henry James was defining what could be called the transatlantic literary genre. Putting Americans in Europe and having them figure out what was what seems a regular theme of his, if novels like Portrait Of A Lady, Daisy Miller, and this are any indication.

It’s an odd thing reading an American author to learn about European mores, but James is unique that way.

Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail – Borden Chase, 1948 ★★★

Cowboys' Work Is Never Done

When the tough get going, when is it better not to go along? That’s the question that underlies Borden Chase’s Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail, a western novel better known by its other name, the one they named the movie after, Red River.

While Red River the movie is regarded as one of the finest westerns made in an era marked by western movies, there is a knock on it playing things too soft, especially at the end. Director Howard Hawks liked his comedic male-bonding, and sometimes that is seen as intrusive.

Reading the source novel gives one a chance to experience the story in rawer, sterner form. How does it compare?

Love's Labor's Lost – William Shakespeare, c. 1588-94 ★★

Losing the Game of Love

Shakespeare comedies are often tough reads; you need to be aware of the difficulty of humor to translate well across the centuries.

Even with that necessary caveat, Love's Labor's Lost seems overly dense and caught up in itself; the thin plot begs a title the Bard used in another of his works: Much ado about nothing.

The Old Patagonian Express – Paul Theroux, 1979 ★★★★

Rolling and Grumbling

For one of the most recognized travel writers ever, Paul Theroux doesn't seem to go in much for the genre. His 1979 account of riding the rails all the way from Medford, Massachusetts to Esquel, Argentina is loaded with disdain for travel-writings conventions and expected pieties.

"The literature of travel has become measly," he tells us close to the beginning. "The joke opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody...What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing."

Innocent Blood – P. D. James, 1980 ★★★★½

Living without Meaning

A departure from P. D. James' famous run of detective novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh, Innocent Blood is a stand-alone mystery less about crime than those who are its victims. It's a satisfying read, well-plotted and suspenseful, that raises unsettling questions about identity and love.

The Complete Beatles Chronicle – Mark Lewisohn, 1992 ★★★★

Fab Days

It took Mark Lewisohn 12 years to gather the research that informs this book, and it shows. If he doesn't capture every little thing that set the world at the Beatles' command, it's not from lack of trying.

Late Innings – Roger Angell, 1982 ★★★★

Baseball in the Jacksonian Era

This collection of baseball essays by Roger Angell details baseball during one of its pivot periods, 1977 to 1981, an era where free agency and player strikes dominated sports headlines. 

It was an era personified by the player who also dominated headlines while leading the New York Yankees to three World Series appearances, Reggie Jackson.