The Third Man – Graham Greene, 1949 ★★★½

Dirty Deeds in Vienna

Trust no one. Believe nothing. Whenever you imagine the worst possible outcome, rest assured the final result will be worse.

Paranoia as art had been around for most of the 20^th century; in The Third Man Graham Greene transformed it into entertainment, a mass-market hit on its own which connected to the unsettled postwar zeitgeist. A seminal work, unquestionably; but how good, really?

As a movie, which is how it is best remembered, The Third Man holds up quite well with a striking visual approach and engaging performances. As a book, what you get is a lean, well-paced mystery story enveloped in postwar atmosphere and European ennui.

North And South – John Jakes, 1982 ★★

Too Thick for its Own Good

Why do big, thick fiction novels invest in me a sense of awe that smaller tomes do not? Do I not recall Hemingway’s thoughts on the value of concision? Or how a tight narrative framework often works best, even when the subject is the American Civil War?

You can fit The Red Badge Of Courage in your pocket or purse. Good luck trying that with North And South.

John Jakes followed up the amazing success of his eight-volume “Kent Family Chronicles” by kicking off what proved an even bigger commercial triumph, the story of two American families united in duty but driven apart by war and the “peculiar institution” known as slavery. The result is a hodgepodge of crafty plotting and loose writing, of flat characters and engaging storycraft.

Uncle Vanya – Anton Chekhov, 1898 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★

A Play about Nothing

How can one put this gently? Many if not most people of education and culture regard Anton Chekhov as the master of modern drama, and if his Uncle Vanya is any indication, they are all horribly wrong.

Chekhov wrote for an audience that wanted, as he did, the ambiguity of real human experience, that sought a mirror held up to everyday life and molded into something that held its own on stage. He wrote to a specific Russian mindset that understand life was harsh and short.

I get all that. I want to embrace Uncle Vanya because not doing so marks one as a knuckle-dragging philistine. But I can’t. I really hate this play.

Babe: The Legend Comes To Life – Robert W. Creamer, 1974 ★★★

Too Much Perspective

Visiting his home turf of Yankee Stadium for what proved his last time, on Opening Day 1947, a cancer-stricken Babe Ruth rasped out what seems in retrospect a bittersweet epitaph on his singular life:

“The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball.”

By then, Ruth’s life had become a shell of what it was, both from the disease slowly killing him and his exile from the game that gave his life its meaning, purpose, and glory. Robert Creamer’s 1974 biography puts in all in perspective. Or as Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins once put it, as he beheld the grave of another idol, “too much bleedin’ perspective.”

Paradise Regained – John Milton, 1671 ★★½

Satan Strikes Out

There are a lot of challenges in reading 17^th-century literature; add to Paradise Regained a basic question as to what exactly is being read. Is this a stand-alone pocket epic or intended follow-up to another epic?

Yes to both is the best answer I can offer. Whether you read it for the history, the religion, or the craft itself, John Milton serves up a challenging, engaging, if unfulfilling treatment of New Testament themes, modelled on how he did the Old Testament in Paradise Lost.

Farewell, My Lovely – Raymond Chandler, 1940 ★

Falling out with Chandler

Few genres are as evocatively articulated in a single prose passage as is detective-noir in the novel Farewell, My Lovely. Those few short paragraphs would prove yet more memorable when transported to film.

It happens all at once after some sudden if typical violence. Our protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe, is getting the business from two heavies he thinks are cops, only they aren’t very law-abiding. After roughing him up and warning him away from a crook, they kick him out of their car in the middle of a deserted road.

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: Master Of The Senate – Robert A. Caro, 2002 ★★★★

Breaking a Few Eggs

The more I read about Lyndon Johnson, the more I see how much one can do if heedless of needs for self-reflection, sleep, or a real friend.

Even as Robert A. Caro offers up some admiration for the man who would become the 37^th President of the United States, as Johnson aligns himself to causes Caro holds dear, the author does not try to sugarcoat the fact LBJ was first and last a deeply-unpleasant SOB.

Asterix The Gladiator – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1964 ★★★★

Rome is Where the Heart is

Seeing a classic comedy series hit all cylinders for the first time is a sublime feeling. You may know all the jokes and slapstick gags, but seeing all the ingredients blending in the right proportions tickles more than the funny bone. It does the heart good, too.

Asterix The Gladiator is where it all comes together for the “Asterix” French comic- book series. Art, dialogue, premise, resolution, side characters, sly parodies and goofy pratfalls: it all just flows from Goscinny & Uderzo like they have been doing this sort of thing for years.

And they had, too. Just not this well.

The Catcher In The Rye – J. D. Salinger, 1951 ★★

American "Classic" Undone by Flaccid Narrative

Before he wrote this, his most famous work of fiction, J. D. Salinger wrote a short story entitled “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise.” Which is funny, because an alternate title here could be This Novel Has No Plot.

It features a problem student stuck in a rut. Either Holden Caulfield is stumbling through serious adjustment problems, or he is pretending they don’t exist, but those issues are there and form the basis of the story.

The real problem is that story, or lack thereof. Salinger’s remarkable abilities at developing characters and settings are on vivid display, because his one and only novel is a dead loss in the plot department.

Exclusive! The Inside Story Of Patricia Hearst And The SLA – Marilyn Baker with Sally Brompton, 1974 ★★½

On Tania's Trail

Cultural changes flash by too quickly and imperceptibly to pinpoint. But growing up in the 1970s, I remember knowing when everything went irrevocably insane. It was when that newspaper heiress held up a bank and denounced her parents as “pigs.”

I was wrong a lot when I was a boy, but I wasn’t wrong about that. Patty Hearst was a death knell for the America I knew.

Marilyn Baker must have felt that way, too. Even while Hearst was still on the run, calling herself Tania the urban guerilla, public-television newswoman Baker collected her thoughts around this mind-bending story. The result, Exclusive!, combines a sardonic, self-important tone with an honest attempt at deciphering the Hearst riddle.

Suddenly Last Summer – Tennessee Williams, 1958 ★★★

Insanity is Relative

Tennessee Williams had a knack for giving his plays lovely, off-beat titles. This one has perhaps one of his most evocative and mysterious.

What does it mean, Suddenly Last Summer? What exactly happens? I wondered about this long before I heard of the play, back when it was the title of a sultry, ominous pop hit that seemed always in heavy rotation back in 1983: “It happened one summer/It happened one time/It happened forever/For a short time.”

The Motels didn’t give me much to go on there. For the first three scenes of this one-act play, Tennessee Williams keeps you guessing, too.

Paradise Lost – John Milton, 1667-1674 ★★★★

Eve of Destruction

Literature is a subjective medium, so defining greatness in it is tricky. Time makes this trickier; one generation’s masterpiece might just leave their descendants dazed and confused. Scholars are Beowulf’s main audience now; does anyone still read Pilgrim’s Progress?

Paradise Lost had a time capsule feel not long after its creation. Religiously, John Milton’s Puritan form of Christianity had already fallen out of favor in his homeland by the time of its publication; stylistically, its use of blank verse was even more out-of-step.

Why then, has it mattered as long and as deeply as it does?

The Day Of The Jackal – Frederick Forsyth, 1971 ★★★★★

Anatomy of a Thriller

Genre fiction is easy to take for granted; when you pick up a thriller or a spy novel, you expect a certain kind of experience. It’s not about becoming a better person or learning something; it’s about satisfaction.

But when a novel delivers consistently in just about every facet: suspense, structure, logic, atmosphere, climax; and does so in a way that elevates the form, you need to take a step back and ask: How did he do it?

At least that’s what I do every time I finish reading this masterpiece.

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: Means Of Ascent – Robert A. Caro, 1990 ★★★½

Snatching the Middle Rung

Means Of Ascent begins as a high-spirited adventure tale of a risk-taking politician gutting through a deadly illness and campaigning from an early-model helicopter. It ends as a whodunit, complete with menacing gunmen and courtroom misdirection ploys.

What connects the two parts is Lyndon Johnson, an 11-year member of the U. S. House of Representatives desperate to be where the action is in American politics – the Senate – and willing to do anything to get there.

See Them Die – Ed McBain, 1960 ★

Death in the Afternoon

That Ed McBain never served up any two 87^th Precinct novels exactly the same way rightly delights many of his fans. Pick one up, and you don’t know what you will get until you are well into it.

So when I read a book of his that annoys me like See Them Die, I have to remind myself that here was a man who took chances, who never stuck to a set formula, who dared throw things up in the air without knowing how they’d land.

It’s just too bad this one wound up such a mess.

Casualties Of War – Daniel Lang, 1969 ★★★★½

Blood Brothers

Truth was called the first casualty of war way back in 1918, but other losses also factor into this real-life account of one U.S. soldier’s experience confronting atrocity and silence during the Vietnam War.

The most immediate and devastating was that of Phan Thi Mao, a young woman raped and murdered by four U. S. soldiers on a recon mission in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in November 1966. Casualties Of War details how killers and bystanders become war’s victims, too.

The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh – Evelyn Waugh, 1998 ★★★

Novelist Keeps it Short

Being a bad guy has its uses. In fiction, Evelyn Waugh dished out cruelty in a way that kept readers both delighted and coming back for more.

No wonder he was so cynical.

The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh collects everything fictional Waugh ever published short of novels. The result is a train wreck of dangerous travels, bad marriages, family insanity, and death which showcases the range of one of the last century’s literary masters.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1984 – Bill James, 1984 ★★

The Stabby Side of Sabermetrics

They look and feel like old phone books, but don’t be fooled. Not all vintage Bill James Baseball Abstracts are alike. The sport changed, and so did James, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

Take The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1984, where evergreen analysis and solid insights regarding the 1983 Major League season are undercut by a snarky, defensive tone. Was success spoiling Mr. James? Or was it not coming fast enough?

Thrilling Cities – Ian Fleming, 1963 ★★★

Come Fly with Me

Air travel was fairly new in 1959; many still lacked the nerve or the money to go up in a plane. What better way to promote round-the-world adventure than in the company of the man who invented James Bond?

This may be the idea behind this pleasant curiosity and footnote in the career of Ian Fleming, as envisioned first by the editors of the Sunday Times and, years later, the publisher of the Bond thrillers. The title hastens to assure you some really exciting places await you inside.

Do they?

King John – William Shakespeare, c. 1596 ★★½

When Ruthlessness Fails

The more I read Shakespeare’s history plays, the more I feel I am watching a debate between the author and another Renaissance legend, Niccolò Machiavelli, over what constitutes effective leadership.

Is it better to be loved or feared? Is religion a useful prop, or something more meaningful and lasting? Is there such a thing as being too ruthless, or can one only err on the side of mercy?

Time and again, Machiavelli clearly states one thing; Shakespeare gently suggests quite another. Take Shakespeare’s King John.

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: The Path To Power – Robert A. Caro, 1982 ★★★★★

Seeming a Saint While Playing the Devil

When it comes to DNA analysis, Robert A. Caro was way ahead of the field in 1982 when he identified a specific human genome for ruthlessness and dubbed it “the Bunton strain.”

A line of legendarily cold and selfish Texans, the Bunton family left a mark on their lineal descendent Lyndon Baines Johnson. Along with the unforgivingly harsh environment of the Lone Star State’s Hill Country, the Bunton strain formed LBJ in Caro’s telling to become one of the nastiest SOBs ever to win his nation’s highest office.

White Jazz – James Ellroy, 1992 ★★

Losing the Plot

Life is a subjective, scattershot experience lived in the moment. How can a fiction writer present this on the page?

Most don’t, understanding reading is enough of a challenge without subjecting their audience to real-time fog of war. Others, most famously James Joyce, employ a method known as “stream of consciousness,” of an endlessly percolating series of wildly disparate thought bubbles.

Then there’s James Ellroy, who seems to craft his plots with butcher paper and Post-It notes, and shoves that into his typewriter wholesale for readers to dope out. Life comes at you fast and hard; so does Ellroy. At least that’s how White Jazz goes down.

Daddy’s Boy – Chris Elliott with Bob Elliott, 1989 ★★½

Man-Child Looks Back in Anger

What’s it like being the product of an overbearing celebrity parent? You know the type, pushing you into the public eye and molding you into their own image, to the point of dressing you in an ascot and shaving your head to match their own receding hairline.

This was the fate of one Chris Elliott, son of fabled entertainer Bob Elliott, as he relates in this no-holds-barred pity party of a memoir, subtitled “A Son’s Shocking Account Of Life With A Famous Father.”

Before the short memoir is completed, Chris has survived morbid obesity, a capsized ocean liner, a humiliating thumb-wresting match, and his father skipping his high school graduation to get his neck hair trimmed at the barber shop next door.

Outland – Alan Dean Foster, 1981 ★★

In Space, No One Can Hear You Yawn

In an alternate future, people still smoke in public and sit at desks to telecommunicate. They also live in constant fear of decompression and being sucked into Jupiter’s gravitational pull.

Rest assured, evil mega-corporations and hating on peace officers are still things, so it’s not all that unrecognizable a future.

In 1981, Sean Connery adapted his movie persona to play the hero of what amounted to a space western, a remake of the classic Gary Cooper film High Noon, but employing a setting similar to Alien two years before. Outland was a vehicle designed to work off established success.

Winchell Exclusive – Walter Winchell, 1975 ★½

The Airing of Grievances

Once he ruled the world, or a significant portion of it he helped to create. Near the end, he had fallen so far that even those who followed his path remembered him but faintly, and with a shrug.

Another person might take stock. Walter Winchell took umbrage. In this posthumous memoir, the proudly pugnacious pundit has some bones to pick, and spends a lot more time venting than explaining:

Before I go to hell – which can’t be too far off – I want them all to know that I’ve wearied of the mutual deception. I have forgiven, but I don’t have to forget. I’m not a fighter, I’m a “waiter.” I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, and then I take a picture of it.

Journey’s End – R. C. Sherriff, 1928 ★★★★

Where Poppies Blow

War is hell. A hell of a bore, for one thing. Imagine endless days sitting in a trench somewhere while the rain and muck and rats have at you, trying to think of anything to take your mind off the prospect of sudden, violent death. Maybe even getting numb from it after awhile.

World War I had a reputation for that, on account of the long-static lines of the Western Front and the work of writers who survived, men on both sides including R. C. Sherriff, who ten years after getting wounded in combat wrote a play about both the dying and the waiting.

Old New York – Edith Wharton, 1924 ★★★★½

Casualties in Crinoline 

Short-story collections can be like concept albums where individual pieces flow together to create a thematic whole. At their best, these collections contain dialogues not only within the stories, but between them.

I have seen it happen with Hemingway’s in our time and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room. In Old New York I got to see it again, in perhaps its most successful version yet. Here are four novellas that, terrific as they read in isolation, develop when read together a unity of setting and message that transports you to another place and time.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century – Barbara Tuchman, 1978 ★½

All Pain, No Gain

War, plague, poverty, religious doubt, the rich being totally evil and getting away with it… If you think this century has it bad, just imagine all that in the 1300s. Barbara Tuchman takes us through the ordeal of life in Europe just before the Renaissance; the result is pretty painful.

Also messy, confusing, and not at all fun to read. In fact, this is Tuchman at her toughest and most pedantic, a book lacking a thesis or character to latch onto.

Tuchman offers snark instead, lots of it: “If the fiction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent, it did not, any more than other models that man has made for himself, transform human nature.”

L. A. Confidential – James Ellroy, 1990 ★★★

Hollywood Swinging

James Ellroy’s Los Angeles is a depraved sinkhole of villainy and vice where a cop’s idea of bracing a suspect is breaking his skull or mangling his hand.

Women trade on male weakness for easy money. Everyone is ultimately corrupt. “You want to know what the big lie is? You and your precious absolute justice!” a rape victim tells her avenger before making sure she hurts him where he lives.

If you are into that sort of thing, I can’t imagine a better Charon for your journey to the underworld than Ellroy. And if there is one novel of his to push you on that journey, it would have to be this.

With Rommel In The Desert – Heinz Werner Schmidt, 1951 ★★½

Running with the Fox

During its brief lifespan, victory and defeat were close companions for the German Afrika Korps. Experiencing both firsthand was one young officer who would fight on the front lines and ride in a staff car with the unit’s legendary commander, Erwin Rommel, a. k. a. the Desert Fox.

As a memoir, With Rommel In The Desert offers color and a fair amount of candor, but is a loss when it comes to context or depth. If you grew up like me watching World War II movies or TV shows like “The Rat Patrol,” this is engaging if somewhat breezy and episodic.

Despite the title, Rommel is a background figure most of the time.

For Your Eyes Only – Ian Fleming, 1960 ★★★½

Cherchez la femme

Other than being insanely hot, Bond Girls are not all of one type. For Your Eyes Only is a chance to experience some of their variety in a collection of five short stories that feature Agent 007.

This was the first Bond book of a new decade, a decade Bond helped define but hardly rated in this soon. For Your Eyes Only is a quiet book that way, and for its lack of baroque storycraft or campy exaggeration. For once, Ian Fleming was writing carefully and on the level; the result is a fine short-story collection that may even please some non-fans.

Nose To Nose – Joe Klecko, Joe Fields & Greg Logan, 1989 ★★★

Trench Warfare with Jets

Touchdowns may be its public brand, yet American football is ultimately more defined by brute force, broken bodies, and the battle of attrition that goes on at the line of scrimmage. And in the long run, no one beats Father Time.

That’s the version of the game experienced by professional linemen as related in Nose To Nose, the story of two such linemen who each played for over a decade on the same team, the New York Jets.

Asterix And The Goths – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1963 ★★

Taking It on the Road

After keeping it French for the first two Asterix adventures, creators Goscinny and Uderzo took their heroes out of the country for the first of many times in this third installment of the series. This time the destination is Germany.

How did it work? Okay, I guess. You get another dose of the humor and visual splendor that still captivate young and old, including me. The story is a soft one, but it did set a successful template for the series it would return to again and again, of visiting a foreign land and having fun with its customs and culture.

Fanshawe – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1828 ★★

The Debut that Wasn't

If American literature were allowed its own debut novel, it would have been The Scarlet Letter, bursting with quintessential Yankee ingenuity and Puritan wrath. Certainly if Nathaniel Hawthorne had his way, that would have been his debut.

But it’s not. More than 20 years before publishing what he claimed was his first novel, Hawthorne produced a shorter fiction book. So traumatic was its memory that he not only disowned it, but burned every copy he could find. Despite his efforts, Fanshawe still exists to be read today.

Though not in the class of Hawthorne’s best-known works, Fanshawe is hardly worthy of the pyre. A creaky romance overdone in some places, underbaked in others, it does have its charms.

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway – Ernest Hemingway, 1967 ★★

Artist on a Deadline

For generations, Ernest Hemingway was like a patron saint of newsrooms. Reporters aspired to be like him in manner and style. His writing persona was whittled down to a few essentials, whispered like rosaries: Write what you know. Eschew verbiage. Direct is better.

But what is his legacy? Today we know him for his books, fact-based but usually fictional. Yet articles he actually wrote for newspapers and magazines do exist, and were collected by William White in this collection published six years after Hemingway’s death.

As pieces of writing, Byline: Ernest Hemingway showcases much of that lean, terse style reporters once held dear, for better and for worse. As reportage, however, they are often bloated, meandering, and focused to a fault on a single subject, Papa Hemingway himself.

The Big Nowhere – James Ellroy, 1988 ★★★★

Nice Cops Finish Last

Even some mystery-book fans short-change the subgenre known as the police procedural. Who needs all that cop detail and minutia taking focus away from the killer? Mysteries work best when the investigator is someone outside the system, no?

But James Ellroy is after bigger game than a cozy afternoon whodunit. In The Big Nowhere, he pushes the police-procedural formula into a dizzying array of social, sexual, and racial tilt zones. The amazing thing is not his hubris but how well it comes off.

Return Of The Jedi – James Kahn, 1983 ★★

Back when We Thought it Was Over

Funny all the crazy things we believed in back in 1983: imminent nuclear holocaust, supply-side economics, Hitler’s diary, and the Star Wars franchise coming to an end after just three films.

Return Of The Jedi was not the end, or even the end of the beginning; later Star Wars movies have been set chronologically both before and after this. But Jedi does conclude the original story arc about a farm boy who discovers himself to be the son of an evil galactic overlord, and how he and his friends restore good to the universe.

As a movie, it’s widely regarded as the weakest of the original trilogy, but it does something no other Star Wars film ever attempted by wrapping everything up.

The Empire Strikes Back – Donald F. Glut, 1980 ★½

The Force is Weak with this One

You just broke box-office records, redefined special effects, and kindled sci-fi mania in an entire generation. What to do for an encore?

In the case of George Lucas and the people behind Star Wars, you take a sledgehammer to expectations and give the audience what no one thought they ever wanted. Less thrills, less humor, no happy ending.

That’s the conventional take on The Empire Strikes Back, joined to the fact this risky gamble worked, galvanizing its fan base and transforming a blockbuster into a franchise. So why is it so unimpressive as a novel?

Star Wars – George Lucas, 1976 ★★★½

Another Galaxy, Another Time

Reading an adventure story after seeing it as a movie might seem a waste of time. You already got all its thrills in more visceral form.

But back in the day, when home video meant Super 8 or slide shows, a novelization of a just-released movie was something to own, and read. And when that novelization was of this amazing cinematic experience which had become our generation’s Beatles-at-Ed-Sullivan moment, you even brought it to school to wave around in homeroom.

How to review Star Wars the novel? For me, it’s not about ignoring the nostalgia as much as contextualizing it just enough to appreciate a first-class adventure story with more strings attached now than in 1976.

Red Duster, White Ensign: The Story Of Malta And The Malta Convoys – Ian Cameron, 1960 ★★★

Steaming against the Odds

For want of a nail, the boot was lost. New life got breathed into a tired old adage in 1943 when the failure to secure a narrow island fortress just off the coast of Sicily wound up costing the Axis the entire Mediterranean and that biggest and most famous of boots, Italy.

How did British naval forces and the people of Malta, then a Crown colony, pull off this amazing upset? Ian Cameron lays out just how close matters came to falling Hitler’s way.

Jude The Obscure – Thomas Hardy, 1895 ★★

The Cruelest Art

As is so with butchers and lawyers, being a good novelist requires more than a little healthy sadism. Needs of drama and conflict require putting characters through the wringer, even (especially?) those you like.

Perhaps Thomas Hardy minded that as, after Jude The Obscure, he left novels behind and switched to poetry.

If so, he made sure he got every last dreg of cruelty out of his system by spilling it on the page of his final manuscript.

You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters – Ring Lardner, 1916 ★½

Just Getting it Over

People who talk classic American fiction sooner or later get round to Ring Lardner.

Many talk about how unfairly underrated he is, how he made slang not just respectable but lyrical, or perfected such techniques as the unreliable narrator and character humor into staples of the form.

Then there are a miserable few who think he was rated just about right as a short fiction specialist, where his gifts for colloquialism, narrative voice, and irony shine brightest.

Sorry to say, I’m one of them, admire him though I do.

The Russian Revolution – Alan Moorehead, 1958 ★★½

Ooh, Those Russians

Every country gets its own kind of revolution. For the French, it was bloody and romantic. For the Americans, it was lucky and idealistic. For the Russians, well, it was very Russian.

That’s the take in this popular history that both tells a good tale and showcases a then-prevailing Western mindset regarding its Soviet rival.

Crime Wave – James Ellroy, 1999 ★½

Baby, I'm a Star

James Ellroy had graduated to the big time as a writer by the late 1990s; Crime Wave reads like a victory lap that goes a few loops too long.

The first problem with Crime Wave is summarizing it. A collection of articles originally published in GQ magazine, it includes a short story and two longer stories, but true-crime reportage and commentaries dominate. All this seems a good fit for Ellroy the crime writer.

Yet even when centering these pieces around his hometown and favorite city, Los Angeles, the results too often read like clunky self-parody:

The Merry Wives Of Windsor – William Shakespeare, c. 1597 ★★½

Forced Farce Still Amuses

Farce does not age like fine wine or mahogany furniture. But it can still draw a chuckle with the right mindset. Part of that involves some grounding in the material; more depends on not expecting too much.

With The Merry Wives Of Windsor, I find I enjoy it more accepting that it is a minor work. Critics do rate it fairly low in William Shakespeare’s oeuvre, a royal command sketch best known for its title and the way it uses (or misuses) Falstaff, one of comedy’s great characters.

All in all, though, as weak plays go, it’s actually not bad. It is chock full of loose ends and bad puns, yet it does put on an entertaining and diverting show, the final goal.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke, 1968 ★★★★

Life, the Universe & Everything

Usually seeing the movie helps me figure out the book. Here it’s the other way around.

Published in 1968, the same year as the movie of the same name, 2001: A Space Odyssey is Arthur C. Clarke’s fictionalization of how man might at last unravel the mystery of his being – and his purpose.

In the process, Clarke does indeed unlock an even more imponderable mystery – just what is going on in that Stanley Kubrick movie.

The Silent Clowns – Walter Kerr, 1975 ★★★★

Flickers of Glory

Greatness has a habit of arranging itself in sets of three. From the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, it seems atavistic. Not sure if it’s safe to count the U. S. government anymore, but there are three branches of that, too.

Three also rule the world of silent film comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. In The Silent Clowns, legendary culture pundit Walter Kerr explains why the trio came to dominate in a way that still resonates decades after sound and punchlines took over.

Work Suspended – Evelyn Waugh, 1942 ★½

Not Ready for Prime Time

When I gravitate to a particular author, I can find something worthwhile in nearly anything they have written. The more obscure, the more potential to surprise or even flatter me by revealing something I can briefly fancy no one else ever noticed or appreciated.

Even a work that is boring or unpleasant to read, or obviously flawed, may reveal aspects of the author a better book will not, like stylistic quirks or habitual framing devices you don’t notice as much when a ripping yarn or brilliant descriptions soak up all your attention.

Landscape Turned Red: The Battle Of Antietam – Stephen W. Sears, 1983 ★★★★½

Playing Rope-A-Dope with “Tardy George”

Sometimes it takes a setback to produce victory, a nasty punch in the nose that restores focus and the will to win. It can even be a simple matter of attaining purity of purpose through suffering.

Still, if sounds unpleasant, that’s because it is. Such was the American Civil War’s bloodiest single day, the Battle of Antietam, presented here in a book that is equal parts morality play and combat story.

Goldfinger – Ian Fleming, 1959 ★★★

Cool but Dumb

James Bond got much cooler, and a bit dumber, with his seventh novel. Subtlety got ejected as pure escapism took the wheel, delivered with gusto and without apology.

It’s not Ian Fleming’s best novel, or even a particularly good one. But Goldfinger is closer in spirit to what we think of today as a 007 adventure, an adrenaline-charged thriller with a campy twist. It also became the springboard for the most culturally important of Bond films, unleashing superhuman Korean henchmen, gorgeous lesbian gangsters, and a plot to steal billions of dollars in pure gold from Fort Knox.