The Trial – Franz Kafka, 1925 ★★★

Welcome to my Nightmare

It is a tad perverse recommending a book you don’t enjoy reading, yet The Trial makes a worthy exception. The crazier life gets, the more relevant it becomes.

But if you happen to think surrealism is something best enjoyed in the abstract, think again. The Trial is both abstract and surreal, but in such a way to render it less dreamlike than frustrating. Even its chapter order is up in the air.

A Midsummer Night's Dream – William Shakespeare, 1595-96 ★★★★

Love as a Mental Disorder

There is a book waiting to be written about literature’s worst employees. Near the head of this list I would like to nominate one Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After botching a big assignment, he has the cajones to look at his boss, no mere mortal but the fairy king Oberon, throw up his hands, and exclaim: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Yet he doesn’t even get a reprimand, let alone a performance review. Just a mild “Stand aside” as Oberon sets about fixing Puck’s mess. Such is the ease of life as practiced in this easiest of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Castafiore Emerald – Hergé, 1961-63 ★★

Held Captive by a Nightingale

The joy of a Tintin story often centers less around the story than the surrounding hubbub: goofy introductions, mistaken identities, Captain Haddock’s tantrums, the gags and pratfalls, an ever-shifting plot.

So why not forgo the story and just focus on hubbub? That’s what we get with The Castafiore Emerald: A story without a story.

Does it work? Not really. Certainly it isn’t one for newbies, and it hardly compares to the first-rate adventures of yore. More a mulligan, really.

Champlain's Dream – David Hackett Fischer, 2008 ★★

Bouquet for a New World Man

Say what you will of the human condition, but biographies are often more fun, and usually more readable, when written with an ax to grind.

David Hackett Fischer, a marvelous writer and a great historian, takes one of America’s most likable explorers and spends over 600 pages explaining just how magnificent Samuel de Champlain was. The result is sprawling, convincing, and dull.

From Russia, With Love – Ian Fleming, 1957 ★★★★½

Saying it with Roses

The novel that put James Bond on the cultural map holds up amazingly well. Other 007 books feature better remembered villains or Bond girls; From Russia, With Love gives you the best Bond story and, for maybe the first and last time, a fully invested author.

What can you say about a Bond novel that holds our interest for 100 pages while keeping the man himself offstage? I’m used to haphazard plotting in other Bond books; here the story builds effortlessly and ruthlessly from strength to strength until one is ready for Bond like a corrida is ready for the matador.

The Professor And The Madman – Simon Winchester, 1998 ★

Notes from an Asylum

There are good and bad kinds of crazy. This book features both.

The notion of capturing every word of the world’s dominant language from “aa” (an obsolete term used in the 1400s meaning “stream” or “watercourse”) to “zyxt” (Old Kentish for “to see”) with little more than a nib pen and foolscap paper has a germ of madness at its core. But there was more than sober, willful monomania in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. There was a certified lunatic at work as well.

My Ántonia – Willa Cather, 1918 ★★★★★

Nostalgia's Sweet Spell

American novelists of a certain time liked framing devices. Before beginning a book, they employed an involved prelude detailing how this story came into their possession, what led them to pass it along, some thoughts about their breakfasts or sleep habits, etc.

It happens with the “Custom House” introduction to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It happens again in My Ántonia, where we begin with a female narrator, perhaps author Willa Cather herself, telling us about a male friend she knew growing up in Nebraska.