The Red Sea Sharks – Hergé, 1956-1958 ★★★★

Sail Away with Tintin

If I could give a person one Tintin book to explain my love for the series, it would probably be The Black Island. But if pressed which volume best showcases the classic Tintin formula, I might pick this instead.

The classic ingredients are here in force: Active support from Captain Haddock and Snowy, slapstick, intrigue, globetrotting – all held together by a smoothly-functioning engine of a plot. Some supporting players are underrepresented, but to be fair, you won’t find a broader range of recognizable characters in any other Tintin book.

All this, and a total charmer to boot.

If At First... – Keith Hernandez & Mike Bryan [Updated 1987 Edition] ★★★★

Game-by-Game with Captain Clutch

No sport tests endurance like baseball. There are 162 games in a season, not counting the postseason. Each game consists of nine innings, with a possibility for unlimited extra innings. Even marathons have finishing lines; not so baseball.

Baseball can be as much a mental drag as a physical one, especially when you have a divorce and drug accusations hanging over your head. Such was the case for Keith Hernandez in 1985, the season chronicled in this memoir.

Dead Skip – Joe Gores, 1972 ★★★

The Streets of San Francisco

In detective fiction, sometimes it’s less the destination than the journey getting there. The same can be said of repo-man fiction, if this noted mystery is any indication.

Dead Skip is the first of six novels about a San Francisco-based repossession agency that works some crime-procedural mojo into the private-eye realm. Not a great novel if you go by endings, but there’s a nifty build-up and some spicy, sharp-tongued characters to enjoy.

The Aspern Papers – Henry James, 1888 ★★

A Polite Form of Rape

Who has the right to decide how best to honor a historical figure’s legacy, the woman who loved him or a scholar who has transformed personal appreciation into a kind of portable altar?

That’s the nub of this Henry James novella, a story which takes a good idea and makes it into something people can enjoy arguing over at least as much as they do reading. More so arguing, I think; The Aspern Papers is frustratingly reticent about involving the reader in anything so banal as a forward-moving plot.

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury, 1953 ★★★

Playing with Words

Books will mislead you even before you ever read them.

Take Fahrenheit 451, a very famous book understood by many to be about censorship. In it, books are commonly burned for containing dangerous ideas. Even the author noted the irony of it being banned by school boards decades on.

So it’s about censorship, right? Not exactly.

The Proud Tower – Barbara Tuchman, 1966 ★★

Arranging the Deck Chairs

Did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand cause World War I? Was it rather another assassination which took place hours before the war began, that of French socialist Jean Jaurès?

Or perhaps one too many feisty tone poems by Richard Strauss?

Maybe if the post-Victorian British weren’t so snooty and class-conscious, or the Americans had just heeded their anti-imperialist Speaker of the House, circumstances would have been different and mankind would have avoided one of its greatest calamities. Somehow.