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.