The Spy Who Loved Me – Ian Fleming, 1962 ★★★½

 Living Dangerously

Writing popular fiction can be a dangerous art. Keep too close to a successful formula, and you risk becoming stale and predictable, and eventually less popular. Stray from what you typically do and you risk losing your audience even faster than by going stale.

In writing his ninth James Bond novel, Ian Fleming went with option #2.  He soon regretted it.

Both his regular readers and many critics were put off by a Bond book where 007 himself only appears in the last third. Who is this Vivienne Michel and why the concentration on the sordid details of her love life? And where did all the globetrotting spy stuff go?

As You Like It – William Shakespeare, c. 1599 ★★★

Love, Shakespearean Style

This play has divided critics and enthusiasts of Shakespeare for centuries; it has divided me, too. Some fifteen years ago I believed this not a comedy but a troll job by a bitter, disengaged author. Just this past week, though, I found myself chuckling along and enjoying it.

As You Like It’s playful spirit and pastoral setting have won over many critics; so too has one of Shakespeare’s most dynamic and voluble characters, Rosalind. Back then I was checked in my pleasure by a bitter, persistent undertone of betrayal and disappointment. Perhaps time has conditioned me to accept such bleaker notes now.

The narrative is still choppy and its finale a rushed, nonsensical mess. George Bernard Shaw described the title as a dig at an audience too easily pleased; it’s hard not to agree when much of the action involves offstage conversions and rescues.

The Making Of The President 1960 – Theodore H. White, 1961 ★★★★

Tarnished, But Still A Classic

Can a book’s credibility be hobbled by privileged access to its primary subject? Can that same access, used to its fullest degree, redeem the book’s faults and render it an enduring classic?

Yes, and yes. Here’s the proof.

Covering the 1960 Presidential election, Theodore White interviewed John F. Kennedy, flew with Kennedy, ate with Kennedy, gossiped with Kennedy. He did everything but sleep with Kennedy, though he does wind up in bed with the guy here, figuratively speaking.

It was for a good cause. This book remains not only a vital record of one of the country’s most charismatic politicians but a deep dive into how a presidency could be won. Even White later admitted he got carried away, but his invested narrative and sense of purpose pull you in.

The House Of The Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★★½

Gingerbread Gothic

A memorable title and immersive setting are the main takeaways people get from this American classic, which seems fair to me. When a novelist accomplishes one thing so brilliantly, why carp about the characters or story?

A fiction set around a real building, still extant in Salem, Massachusetts, The House Of The Seven Gables concerns the Pyncheons, once a proud Puritan family now brought low by poverty and greed. How low we discover early in the book, when scowling spinster Hepzibah Pyncheon takes the radical step of turning part of the mansion into a cent shop.

She needs money to support herself and her mentally-impaired brother, Clifford. At the moment, the only money in her family belongs to her cousin Jaffrey, a judge and politician who embodies the Pyncheons’ cruel legacy. Hepzibah knows too well not to trust his offers of help.

The Battle For Gaul – Julius Caesar, 58-50 B. C. [1980 Translation by Anne & Peter Wiseman] ★★★½

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

How often do you think of the Roman Empire? It’s not just a question; these days it’s a meme, mocking dreamers in no hurry to grow up. Imagining a world brought into clearer order is tempting. Reading about it as it happens can satisfy the hopelessly boyish at heart.

Julius Caesar had no such agenda when writing these episodic narratives of his conquests across France and parts beyond. His objective was political. Romans had long suffered from barbarian attacks. Now Caesar was doing something about it, at a time when his main rival Pompey enjoyed a 20-year head start conquering the rest of the known world.

Caesar sought glory and dictatorship. What he achieved instead was a work of history that would endure in Western culture long after the empire he helped to build had collapsed into ruins and darkness.

The Golden Gate – Alistair MacLean, 1976 ★½

Hijackers with Manners

This is a singularly strange action yarn where the bad guys are more likable than the good guys and the crime scene includes jape-filled press conferences and hostage-takers who pause for photographs.

“I’ve never been responsible for anybody’s death in my life,” says the top hijacker, a fellow named Branson. It’s a kind of villainous boast you don’t expect, but he really means it.

In the opening chapter, Branson and his henchmen executes a plot that nets him not only the President of the United States and two Arab oil potentates but also the Golden Gate Bridge. His price to release them: half a billion dollars, as well as pardons for him and his team.

Death In The Afternoon – Ernest Hemingway, 1932 ★★★★

Baedeker of Blood

Imagine the life of a Spanish bullfighter, circa 1931. You risk life and limb in an era before modern medicine can treat your worst injuries or video can store away your finest kills. There’s a depression on, civil war looming and a fanbase that tends to throw things at you when annoyed.

Now add to all this pain some know-it-all American who wants to immortalize you by calling the world’s attentions on your shabby technique in the ring, your homely face, and even your lack of courage at doing something no sane person would try.

The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett, 1930 ★★★★

A Gumshoe Who Sticks

Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction know what they want. Fast plotting, snappy patter, just enough violence or the threat of same to keep it interesting, and not too much of the mushy stuff.

The Maltese Falcon not only delivers on all those points, it works the template to perfection. Just reading the first two chapters awakens you to the fact that before they were tropes, such things as mysterious dames and foggy crime scenes could be so evocative and alive.

Making it all snap together is the dynamic central character of Sam Spade, a tough-talking detective with honest-to-God principles, most especially that no one’s gonna make a sap of him.

The Three Sisters – Anton Chekhov, 1901 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★★½

Misery Loves Company

If I have to recommend one Anton Chekhov play, it would probably be this one. If you want consistency, this is a remarkably consistent and harrowing examination of the human condition at its most tragic. If you want wit, you get ample sidelong observations, pithy and quotable.

If you want compelling characters and an involving narrative, well, you do get the best examples of both from him here. But it is Chekhov, after all, at his most dreary. This is the man who inspired the lyric “I’ve found more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play/Could guarantee.”

If that play was The Three Sisters, Ira Gershwin must have been in one hell of a thunderstorm.

One Of Us: Richard Nixon And The American Dream – Tom Wicker, 1991 ★★★

Tricky Dick and His Critics

Presidents are not well-balanced people. They go out of their way risking derision, abuse, even murder to affect miniscule changes in how things are; at best making compromises, at worst committing crimes. Such an impulse must be questioned; either they are corrupt or insane.

Few presidents wore that derangement so openly as Richard Nixon, a childhood misfit who ran for national office five times and looked more miserable and awkward each time at it. In a business that demands compulsive socializing, he was a proud loner who cultivated many strategic allies but very few friends.

Yet he made himself the most consequential president of the second half of the 20^th century, an era which gave us several.

Mosses From An Old Manse – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1846 ★★★★★

 A Writer Arrives

In the annals of American literature, no eminence put himself down with more avidity than Nathaniel Hawthorne. Titling his second published collection of writings Mosses From An Old Manse after calling his first Twice-Told Tales is a clear sign of low self-esteem.

Which would you rather read? Some choice, right?

Mosses From An Old Manse is the less-known title, but a better book. Though not narratively connected, having been originally published over a number of years, they lay out Hawthorne’s compelling visions for the nature of art in society and the whole meaning of life. Not every short story in it is a masterpiece; not every masterpiece in it is a short story.

A Stillness At Appomattox – Bruce Catton, 1953 ★★★½

A Somber Last Waltz

The third and final volume of Bruce Catton’s “Army Of The Potomac” series winds up the story of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest fighting force as it struggled to its ultimate victory. Like nearly all such grand culminations, it can’t help but be at least a little disappointing.

Part of that is due to the natural deflation of finding oneself at the end of a long journey, wondering if all the toil and pain was worth it. Part of it is because the last year of the American Civil War, at least in Northern Virginia, was as dull as it was deadly, mired in an early form of trench warfare which put an end to dashing assaults and quick successes.

The author is also at fault. Catton, for all his factual command, his poetic turns of phrase, and his masterful word portraits, comes across somewhat more the way critics have painted him, moralizing and windy. The book is still good, very good in places, but a modest comedown from the fantastic first two volumes.

The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights – John Steinbeck, 1976 ★★

Random Acts of Meaningless Violence

Sometimes I enjoy a book so much I don’t want to finish it. The tone, voice, and story cast such a spell I fear it can only end in disappointment. Should I put the book down forever, to hold onto that brief feeling before the author drives it off a cliff? Or do I press on?

The only time I actually chose Option A was while reading this. Just 12, I found myself swept away as John Steinbeck retold the legend of King Arthur in all its gnarly glory. As Arthur stood at a riverbank somewhere in England, having vanquished his enemies after a hard fight, I suspected the book would turn grey and depressing. So I put it away.

It would be decades before I returned to The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights. Dammit, I was right:

Asterix And Cleopatra – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1965 ★★★★

One for the Ages

Many classic serials have early peak moments, single entries that make their claim for greatness and set a bar for all future installments.

Consider that hallmark of American culture, the sitcom. There is always that one episode people point to, like Seinfeld’s “The Contest,” Community’s “Modern Warfare,” or for us older folk, M*A*S*H’s “Sometimes You Hear The Bullet.” Fans know them well. Some argue their primacy, but not their place in the pantheon.

The same goes for bandes dessinées, or Franco-Belgian comic books. With Asterix, the first great book to call out is fairly clear. It’s this one, six books into the series, which not only made its mark as a favorite back when it came out, but set the tone for all that followed.

After all these years, it must be said, Asterix And Cleopatra is still fun.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways – Errol Flynn, 1959 ★

Confessions of a Debauched Swashbuckler

When it comes to getting a manuscript published, most times an author’s sudden death won’t help it to the finish line. In the case of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, I think Errol Flynn dying helped get it out. Hard to imagine him ever wanting this version of himself exposed in public.

Maybe it was the spirit of the 1960s. True, the decade was still days away when My Wicked, Wicked Ways was released, two months after Flynn’s October 1959 death. The author’s desire to shock and offend readers with his wild life feels more in tune with the coming decade.

Whatever era you are in, it’s hard to like this guy. In his own telling, Flynn was a rank bastard. What starts out as candid recollections over drinks soon feels more like an exclusive audience with a sociopath.

As he so charmingly puts it late in the book: “Ts-t! Ts-t! It takes some ladies so long to realise they have been raped.”

Period Of Adjustment – Tennessee Williams, 1960 ★½

Manly Men and Women Stuck with Them

Two youngish couples struggling to find Christmas Eve contentment in Eisenhower-era suburbia may not seem like fertile ground for an outsider’s artist like Tennessee Williams. And it isn’t.

Written both as a send-up and a genuine appreciation for the American middle class, Period Of Adjustment is billed as “a serious comedy,” when it is really neither. Williams has a sense of sarcasm about his characters, but his need to convey their basic goodness dampens any edges he might have had. Maybe on stage the right actors could inject a spark of life, but on the page it makes for a stiff, mawkish read.

Before The Fall – William Safire, 1975 ★★★★

Run of the Milhous

From 1966 to 1973, William Safire was one of Richard Nixon’s top speechwriters. In Before The Fall, Safire makes use of his vantage point as crafter of the Nixon message to relate everything he saw, and much of what he didn’t, of Nixon’s triumphant, calamitous presidency.

Among the things he missed was the Watergate break-in which forced Nixon’s resignation. As that was dark ops and Safire was in the business of public relations, his orbit lay well outside the infamous Plumbers breaking into Democratic headquarters.

Yet this didn’t protect Safire from being bugged when Attorney General John Mitchell pegged him as a potential security leak.

Nightwalk – Bob Shaw, 1967 ★½

Crossing the Genre Streams

Science fiction stories fall into two broad camps: fantastic adventures and conceptual thinkpieces. What happens when someone brings them together by writing a captured-spy escape adventure that incorporates abstract theories about human vision and infinity?

Give Bob Shaw credit for never taking the easy way. Nightwalk may not be engaging or convincing, but the author’s ambition to blend the categories of rugged adventure and quantum physics is something to behold.

Never mind its jerky pace, strained narrative, thin setting, and dull characters; you do go on a ride.

Glory Road – Bruce Catton, 1952 ★★★★★

Death Before Victory

War is hell, a fact even honest combat histories often sidestep. Not to deny its ugliness, but rather to craft a narrative palatable to a broader audience. Bitter reality is acknowledged, but details not dwelt upon.

Glory Road is different. It is the Saving Private Ryan of American Civil War histories, a blow-by-blow account of the terrors of war not for the squeamish. In his depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg, the war’s turning point, Bruce Catton describes a Bosch-like canvas where eyes are shot out, maddened horses gallop on three legs, and men duck bullets behind the bodies of dead comrades.

One soldier is so horribly maimed that he is described putting a gun to his head and blowing out his brains. Meanwhile, others are directed to throw themselves into an exposed position, just to buy a few precious minutes after one general had put his part of the line too far out.

The New Thinking Fan’s Guide To Baseball – Leonard Koppett, 1991 ★½

Change for the Worse

When someone creates something widely regarded as a classic of its kind, the impulse to go back and touch it up should be stubbornly resisted. Even if you are its creator, there is something in the way your work engaged the public that no longer belongs to you alone. Whatever that is, it should be respected.

Back in 1967, a beat reporter named Leonard Koppett put out a book about baseball that crystalized the way many people thought about the game. The Thinking Man’s Guide To Baseball took in a range of topics, analyzed them in depth, explained why managers and players did what they did, detailed the roles of owners, umpires, media, scorers, and more. It was thoughtful, original, and highly praised.

I wish I had gotten to read that, but I didn’t. Instead I had this 1991 revision, a grab bag of sententious truisms with zero flow and an occasional 1990s player sprinkled amid heaps of anecdotes spotlighting players from much older times.

The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh, 1948 ★★★½

Death Be Not Cheap

A novel easy to enjoy but hard to love, The Loved One demonstrates how able a novelist Evelyn Waugh was when he didn’t give a hoot about any of the characters in his book.

It may well be the bleakest satire Waugh ever crafted, plunging his readers into an utterly alien and forlorn land known as California. There celebrity reigns supreme, death is the ultimate arbiter of social status, and empty chatter replaces serious conversation. This is a point in its favor, our English protagonist Dennis Barlow is told:

“They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.”

Tune In: The Beatles – All These Years, Vol. 1 – Mark Lewisohn, 2013 ★★★★

Waiting for Ringo

The truly fab thing about this book is how close Mark Lewisohn makes you feel to the Beatles, not as a musical legacy or cultural institution, but human beings you get to know better than just about anyone you will ever meet.

Yet it keeps reminding me of that old maxim: never meet your heroes.

To put it plainly, these guys played rough pushing their way to “the toppermost of the poppermost.” Most people picking this book up will know the sad tale of Pete Best, but many others were used and discarded for much less cause. “The Beatles weren’t sentimental types,” Lewisohn writes, in his typically understated way.

Antony And Cleopatra – William Shakespeare, c. 1607 ★★★½

Love as a Losing Game

Making sense of a Shakespeare play can be a challenge; it usually takes me a couple of readings to get a handle on it. Antony And Cleopatra is much murkier; I need to peruse the scholarly criticisms before I could decide whether it was terrific or not very good at all.

This is not too embarrassing an admission. The play is famously hard to classify. It has the build-up of a comedy and the ending of a tragedy, so maybe label it a comi-tragedy, but then consider it’s also a history play built around a famous romance. With motivations changing all the time, it’s easy to bounce around on what is supposed to be happening.

It is also a rare Shakespeare sequel, stuffed to the rafters with some of the Bard’s most vibrant and beautiful language outside the sonnets:

Three Blind Mice – Ed McBain, 1990 ★½

A Different Point of View

Ed McBain mastered a specific type of mystery genre, the police procedural. But he wouldn’t be pigeonholed. Twenty-two years into his white-hot run of 87^th Precinct cop novels, McBain launched another series celebrating a guy who got people free of the law.

Matthew Hope may not have been the same kind of publishing success story, but the series did go for 13 books and three calendar decades. More important, it allowed McBain to indulge in a different kind of crime fiction in a more tropical locale: sunny Florida instead of a big bad city somewhere in the American Northeast.

I think it possible to appreciate the man’s willingness to spread his wings while acknowledging something less satisfying in the result. From their winsome nursery-rhyme inspired titles to a fawning self-indulgence in McBain’s presentation of the main character, the Matthew Hope books never quite clicked for me.

Asterix And The Banquet – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1965 ★★

Lost in Translation

The appeal of Asterix comics is universal, yet the humor can often be highly specific to a particular time and place. Such is the case with this gorgeous and charming but scattershot send-up of regional cuisine and the Tour de France.

The puns are worse than usual, the story is a mess, and a lack of tension exposes the flabby narrative. But Albert Uderzo’s art keeps getting richer and more vibrant with every change in scenery, while René Goscinny’s joyful spirit goes a long way toward getting a reader to look past his slimmer-than-usual ideas.

Plus you get the arrival of a major character in Dogmatix, the compact but courageous canine who will keep Asterix and Obelix company from here on out. Dogmatix doesn’t actually do much in this book – but no one else does, either.

Mr. Lincoln’s Army – Bruce Catton, 1951 ★★★★½

Dying to Learn

Many books about the American Civil War begin with the Battle of Bull Run. Mr. Lincoln’s Army does, too, but not the normal way. It opens with the Second Battle of Bull Run, a contest which settled nothing except the plain fact the Northern Army was being run by idiots.

Ineptitude is a common theme of this first volume of a famous trilogy focused on the Army of the Potomac, specifically its painful struggle to find its feet and strike the decisive blow against the Confederacy.

It was all a question of leadership. “There would have been unqualified disaster if the generals had not been commanding men better than themselves,” Bruce Catton writes.