The Merchant Of Venice – William Shakespeare, c. 1596-1597 ★★★

Shakespeare's Thorniest Play

Shakespeare didn’t make this one easy. Try to enjoy The Merchant Of Venice as a crafty comedy, and you risk being insensitive. See it as a subversive tragedy, and you trip over author’s intent.

Pretend as many do that the play isn’t anti-Semitic, and there is still a lot of weirdness to navigate, like a rich dead father forcing his daughter to marry the first man who guesses which coffin hides her portrait, and a man so lustful and greedy he risks his best friend’s life to hook up with that daughter (we are supposed to root for this guy, by the way.)

As for me, I like it, even more once it gets going. I just don’t feel good about saying so.

The Odessa File – Frederick Forsyth, 1972 ★★★★

A Humane Thriller

Introducing his first three novels in a 1980 omnibus edition, Frederick Forsyth called The Odessa File “the humane one,” to distinguish it from the pure craft of his debut and a nastier tone in his third novel.

More than 40 years later, I don’t think anyone has summed up Odessa File nearly as well. It is a very humane sort of thriller, all the more involving and exciting for that.

Take one modern fellow trying to right a terrible wrong, throw in a terror plot that realistically threatens an entire nation, and incorporate a knowledge of politics, bureaucracy, and automotive mechanics, and you have another Forsyth winner, but with more than a bit of heart this time.

Edmund Campion: A Life – Evelyn Waugh, 1935 ★★½

A Saint in Shackles

Evelyn Waugh doesn’t exactly exude humble piety. His fiction sneers with acid contempt at the foibles of his fellow man. So a serious, earnest, ever-so-respectful biography from this famous cynic about a saint martyred over 350 years before is a bit of a detour.

Waugh was Catholic; it is part of his legend. But mostly his faith is a matter of being against things: modern architecture, sex outside marriage, loud parties, and so on. Edmund Campion: A Life is a rare occasion for seeing Waugh putting forward faith as positive action.

As a book, it is minor Waugh. But as a glimpse at what made Waugh tick, Edmund Campion engages and reveals between its lulls.

The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian – Robert E. Howard, 2002 [Edited by Patrice Louinet] ★★★★

Loving, Slaying, and Being Content

Where to begin with Conan the Barbarian? You have movies, comic books, computer games. A number of fantasy writers have taken their hacks and stabs at detailing the Cimmerian’s gore-soaked adventures, either under the Conan name or else a thinly-veiled alternate moniker.

But forget all that. Real Conan begins here with Robert E. Howard’s original stories, set in a mythical long-lost age, which Howard churned out for the pulp-fantasy market. They drench you with a spirit of adventure and appreciation for the splendor and squalor of a unique world:

Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage Of Power – Robert A. Caro, 2012 ★★★★

Free at Last

It is amazing how each of Robert Caro’s four (so far) books on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson manages to create its own distinct identity, interlinked to the others yet separate.

In The Passage Of Power, LBJ’s story finally moves to the White House, where he is trapped for years as forlorn vice president playing stooge to the man who beat him for the Democrat nomination in 1960, only to win the office he craved for so long as the result of an assassin’s bullet and then do things with that office that would amaze detractors and allies alike.

Passage isn’t perfect, but it’s a fascinating, detailed account of and about flawed greatness.