Dubliners – James Joyce, 1914 ★★★★★

The Stuff of Life

Short-story collections come in all types. Some are hodgepodges, some genre exercises, some focus on specific characters. Then there are the stories of Dubliners, connected by both a setting and something less a theme than a tone.

Call it a concept album in prose.

That is one of the amazing things about Dubliners, how James Joyce crafts a unified tone poem while the stories themselves traverse all kinds of territory. Not geographic territory – it’s all happening in Dublin – but territory of the soul.

A Shilling For Candles – Josephine Tey, 1936 ★★

Murder, She Shrugged

There is a certain type of mystery reader for whom the mystery itself is secondary. The mystery services a formula, follows a pattern, and provides background contrast to whatever aspect of the book it is the reader cares about. It is not taken seriously.

I don’t understand these kind of mystery readers, but they evidently exist in fair-enough number to promote the legacies of writers who cater to this approach. Which leads me to Josephine Tey.

The Master Builder – Henrik Ibsen, 1892 ★★½

Make Way for Youth

Henrik Ibsen was not the most playful of playwrights, but he did pull off an occasional head fake to confuse his audience. Case in point: The opening act of his later work, The Master Builder.

King Ottokar's Sceptre – Hergé, 1938-39 [Revised 1947] ★★★

Eih Bennek, Eih Blavek

Welcome to Syldavia, land of beauty, intrigue, and one of the craziest regime-change mechanisms ever put on the books. You are flying in the company of an intrepid young reporter, his pet dog, and a noted sigillographer who’s not been himself lately. Before landing, let’s take a moment to appreciate the lovely scenery. Here, the pilot shall drop you in lower for a closer look…

Oops! Sorry! Good thing we attached a parachute to your seat. Well, happy landings, and see you at the palace.

The Selected Poetry Of Keats – Edited by Paul de Man, 1966 ★★★★

The Long and Short of John Keats

Near his end, John Keats took a line from his hero Shakespeare: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

         

Just as he was winding down one of literature’s greatest too-brief careers, Keats put pen to paper and wrote a poem about exactly that, not in anger or grief but rapt serenity. Considered one of the greatest poems in English, “To Autumn” is impossible to top as a swan-song: