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.