Jaws – Peter Benchley, 1974 ★★★

Divine Judgement on Long Island Sound

When the people of a Long Island resort town abandon themselves to lives of carnal frolic, suburban complacency, and underworld corruption, only a 20-foot Great White shark can set them on the path to righteousness. So goes one reasonable takeaway from this bestseller.

Another would be that this is nothing like the classic movie it would spawn the following summer, though that isn’t so a bad thing. Jaws the novel is just a different kind of fish.

Martin Brody, the sheriff of the economically struggling shoreline town of Amity, has two problems. One is the shark that has begun feeding off its population. The other is the community would rather the beaches stayed open, just to keep tourist money rolling in.

Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh, 1930 ★★★½

Aiming for the Gut

So much of what made Evelyn Waugh great, including the decade he blossomed in and the smart set he dished so ruthlessly about, is on display in this, his second novel, a triumph of form over substance.

No doubt Waugh intended it just so.

In many important ways, Vile Bodies marks a turning point in the author’s career. He already had his signature voice worked out. Here he aims for scope and bite, casting a wide net on the social antics of the jaded aristocratic scions dubbed the “Bright Young Things.” These were people he knew and loved best. And they loved him back, even more after he pilloried them in print with this mordant, often acid book.

The Divine Wind – Rikihei Inoguchi & Tadashi Nakajima with Roger Pineau, 1958 ★★

Survival Was Not an Option

Call it bushido, call it warrior spirit, call it wanton military terrorism, there is something about the idea of young men willingly flying their planes into enemy ships that is hard to process, even more than 80 years after it was part of daily life in World War II.

To read the story the way it is told by two principal architects of Imperial Japan’s kamikaze program, the problem wasn’t finding volunteers for these suicide missions. The problem was saying no to those who had to wait for another opportunity.

Believable? Not entirely, to be sure. But two things about Japan in 1944 helped make the kamikaze idea reality. One: Their people were steeped in a tradition of honor centered around self-sacrifice. Two: They had already all but lost the war by any conventional metric.

Calypso – Ed McBain, 1979 ★½

Who Feels Like Dancing?

Has this ever happened to you? You re-read a book you remember really disliking, only this time you can’t recall what it was that put you off. What you are reading flows really well and keeps you engaged. Was it you? A bad mood, say, or an uncomfortable chair?

This happened to me with Calypso, a novel I remember being a nadir of my previous jaunt through the 87^th Precinct. But blow me down; what a strong start! It has what you look for in a police procedural: a compelling murder victim, a sense of authentic urgency and sundry aspects of police process brought in with smooth clarity.

Then with no warning it takes a hard left into Silence Of The Lambs territory, with a crazy subplot that more or less renders all prior conventional police work meaningless. This isn’t the worst 87^th Precinct novel; it does pull one in. But it may just be the most disjointed.

Suspiria de Profundis – Thomas De Quincey, 1845 ★

A Second Helping of Opium

Over a century before Timothy Leary told a generation of young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” a conservative Anglican beat him to the punch, sparking a tide of self-idealization, impiety and riotous psychedelic expression that became known as “addiction literature.”

Would Thomas De Quincey have recognized himself as its instigator?

The book that made it happen was his 1821 Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, which made De Quincey an overnight sensation. But as if sensing his title as literature’s reigning hophead might be in jeopardy, he later produced a sequel nearly as famous: Suspiria de Profundis.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams, 1979 ★★★★

The Lighter Side of Global Annihilation

Never underestimate the creative resourcefulness of a human being utterly out of options.

Douglas Adams was a struggling writer low on cash. One evening far from home, drunk in a field after a day of hitchhiking, he found himself looking up at the twinkling sky, thinking deeply. What would it be like if there was a guidebook for people wandering across the stars?

Several years later, that idea became a BBC Radio series, and eventually a five-volume science-fiction “trilogy.” In it, we meet one Arthur Dent, adrift in an uncaring cosmos, bouncing from absurdity to absurdity after everything he knew and loved has been utterly destroyed.

Somehow Adams found the funny in that, and with this novel, launched an enduring comedy franchise that lives on after his death.

Troilus And Cressida – William Shakespeare, c. 1601-1602 ★½

Not Giving a Fig

This is a play which leaves many questions. Is it a comedy, a tragedy, or a mash-up? Is it pro-Trojan, pro-Greek, or anti-both? Are we supposed to hate or pity the main female character? What about her beau? And why does it end with everything still in the air?

For me, it may turn on a question bleaker still: Did Shakespeare not care enough to work this into something sharper?

Troilus And Cressida is magnificent in its language, its diversity of tones and contrasts, its philosophical arguments weave and wend with Hamlet-level depth. As a play, though, it falls way short. I find it a tedious read, lacking focus as it cribs from Homer and Chaucer.

The Devil’s Alternative – Frederick Forsyth, 1979 ★★★½

Doomsday on the North Atlantic

While the world keeps turning on the same axis, old problems persist. Back in 1979, subjects of popular dread included Russo-Ukrainian conflict, high seas piracy and a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe.

They even wrote best-selling thrillers about them.

After a five-year break, spy fiction master Frederick Forsyth was back with a twist. This time he was Tom Clancy, even though it was the 1970s and no one had heard of Clancy yet. The Devil’s Alternative is a Cold War cliffhanger set on a global scale with a variety of players conducting their own intrigues that feed into the overall plot.

Rossetti: His Life And Works – Evelyn Waugh, 1928 ★★½

Making a Splash

In his own lifetime, Evelyn Waugh tells us, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was “the bogey of many Victorian drawing-rooms,” scandalizing society with his splashy, vibrant paintings. Few then were ready to appreciate a true romantic who brought a new way of thinking about beauty and life.

His Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists blended hyper-realistic detail with medieval-inspired treatments, resulting in a highly individualized style which remains unique and widely admired. While often messy when came to personal matters like money and women, Rossetti was the right artist to challenge a stale period for British culture.

Waugh found this still true nearly a half-century after Rossetti’s death: “By no means the least of the advantages to be gained from a study of Rossetti is the stimulus it gives to one’s restiveness in an era of competent stultification,” he writes.

The Johnstown Flood – David McCullough, 1968 ★★★½

The Price of Fish 

When the dam holding storm-swollen Lake Conemaugh collapsed on May 31, 1889, David McCullough writes how the result was like unleashing Niagara Falls upon the urban sprawl of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Over 2,200 people perished that day.

The survivors’ anguish turned to anger when the full reason for the unprecedented disaster was revealed. The water held by the lake wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. It was an artificial lake, a playground of privilege for Midwestern tycoons to enjoy their summers.

It was like the Titanic disaster a generation later, but in reverse; the water landing on people instead of people landing in water. Still, there was an anti-capitalist angle in both stories.

Blood Relatives – Ed McBain, 1975 ★★★

One Body, Too Many Suspects

The more Ed McBain novels you read, the more you discover there is no such thing as a straight Ed McBain novel. He avoided the easy path of working to templates or formulas. He wrote police procedurals, yes, but always changed them up with crazy twists or skewed angles.

Blood Relatives may be his closest stab at a routine police procedural, centering on a single murder where suspects and testimonies are worked over until a culprit is found. Yes, he delivers real surprises, but plays his cards straight from the deck.

The results are rather good. McBain’s ability to involve the reader through plot turns and digressions works just as well when he isn’t striving as hard to keep you off-balance.

Big Screen, Little Screen – Rex Reed, 1971 ★★★

Pen as Sword

Harshness is no virtue, but sometimes it comes in handy for an entertainment critic. In that line of work, you make a stronger impression by taking a jab now and again. Making friends is not the objective. Critics who get that can be fun to read.

Back when he was young and bratty, Rex Reed was an expert jabber. Often this worked to the detriment of his craft, a lack of restraint that made him come off more nasty than honest. Yet spiciness did make him colorfully readable, especially when traversing a broad array of culture.

Big Screen, Little Screen is a series of essays and capsule reviews that first appeared in journals like Women’s Wear Daily, Holiday, and The New York Times. Mostly about movies, with some television reviews, Big Screen, Little Screen is an incisive, unabashedly opinionated round-up of cinema as it entered the golden auteur era of the late 1960s-1970s.

Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour An Introduction – J. D. Salinger, 1963 ½★

Losing the Plot

After effortlessly crafting a bestselling book by combining two previously published short stories, J. D. Salinger went back to the well here. This time, the link between the pair is much less apparent, and the result less happy.

Man, do I hate this book. To be more specific, I really hate the second half, “Seymour An Introduction.” It’s a car wreck of an abortive fictional profile that, instead of making the more disciplined first half read better, magnifies the same narcissistic, undisciplined qualities.

John Updike wasn’t kidding when he wrote: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.” This is what happens when a previously brilliant writer literally and completely loses the plot.

R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – Karel Čapek, 1921 ★★★ [Translated by Claudia Novack]

Prometheus Unhinged

A play that famously coined a word for the ages is also a pioneering science fiction work with a vision of a future we are catching up to over a hundred years later.

Just imagine a world where people create artificial devices to do their work, only to find themselves displaced by the same machines faster than you can say “Sarah Connor.”

There was no such word as “robots,” or, to use its original Czech form, roboti, before a young writer named Karel Čapek used it to categorize the menacing non-humans who loom over his play. Karel gave credit to his brother Josef for the word.

Guerrillas – V. S. Naipaul, 1975 ★★½

Uncovering Danger and Lust in the Tropics

Under a haze of bauxite dust and resentment spurred by foreign exploitation, a Caribbean island nation is revealed to be a ticking time bomb, only we never quite know when it will explode. If ever.

Guerrillas pulsates with menace if not a lot of action. Instead, there is much talking and cigarette smoking. Finely written if mostly inert, Guerrillas is less a story than a portrait of attitudinal ennui.

Did I like it? Yes, V. S. Naipaul was a brilliant writer, who here cements his reputation as a keen-eyed hybrid of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Conrad. Even more than them, though, it’s hard to care about his people.

Decline And Fall – Evelyn Waugh, 1928 ★★★★

A Devilishly Delicious Debut

A famous first novel that holds up on its own merits as well as a signpost for a stellar career, Decline And Fall introduces readers to the scathing satire of Evelyn Waugh, where hope is folly, life is a joke, and people regularly suffer for the sin of being alive.

All that, and it manages to be a lot of fun, too.

Often the pleasure of reading first novels by noted authors is twigging onto themes and motifs developed with greater success in their later, more mature works. But Waugh’s debut has no youthful awkwardness to shed. It is a fully accomplished work, somewhat facile in places and heavy-handedly abrupt in its ending, but capable of mastery in terms of dialogue, description, and mordant observation.

Washington’s Crossing – David Hackett Fischer, 2004 ★★★★★

America Rolls the Dice

History books that revel in detail can be turn-offs for casual readers. But not always. Washington’s Crossing transforms footnotes into adventures, and academic disagreements into entertaining theater. People say history is fun, but they are rarely proven as right as here.

In the early days of the American Revolution, the war could have gone in any direction. David Hackett Fischer details the travails of the Continental Army in 1776, from its defeat on Long Island to its rebirth in New Jersey by launching a risky attack across the Delaware River.

Today we may think of 1776 as Year Zero of a grand adventure, a rosy dawn of hope and common purpose, whatever came after. But Fischer points out the contemporary outlook was very glum:

Sadie When She Died – Ed McBain, 1972 ★½

Sex and Death in the Big City

The 1970s were called the “Me Decade” because of its tendency for hyper-individuality. Families and communities became untethered by a personal need for self-fulfillment. At least that was the popular view. In Sadie When She Died, we meet a casualty of that culture.

At first the homicide of Sarah Fletcher appears to be the result of a burglary gone wrong. The trail from broken window to bloody corpse is straightforward enough; there’s even a junkie’s confession in Chapter 3. But for lead detective Steve Carella, it’s all too neat.

The more he investigates, the more he learns about Sarah, about a restless life lived on the edge, about a marriage that had fallen apart, about lovers meetings in strange bars. He realizes much more is at play than a simple silverware job.

Biography Of A Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey – Robert “Mack” McCormick, 2023 ★½

On A Guitar God's Tortuous Trail

As the years pile on, true knowledge about a dead legend often melts irretrievably into the realm of myth. If that legend toiled in relative obscurity while alive, the chance for objectivity gets thinner.

Whatever one can say about the merits or intentions of blues scholar Robert “Mack” McCormick, his posthumous account of the life of Robert Johnson makes this clear, for the author and subject.

In the early 1970s, McCormick set out to find the real Johnson by using the living memories of friends and family. In the process, he wound up creating Rashomons of both subject and himself.

Whether you see Mack as a heroic researcher or a greedy exploiter may depend as much on you as on him.

Franny And Zooey – J. D. Salinger, 1961 ★★★

Pilgrims Progress on the Upper East Side

There are books I enjoy reading that I will recommend to anyone happily, unreservedly, because I feel pretty sure you will enjoy them, too. Then there are books like this, which I find diverting and worthy, but also somewhat dubious of merit and selective in appeal.

It is one of its authors most beloved works, but is Franny And Zooey any good? I don’t know, I guess, maybe. Sure.

Essentially a novel in the form of a linked short story and novella, Franny And Zooey is where Salinger converted from writer to spiritual advisor. His fluid writing style always followed its own mystical channels, but this marks a clear break from conventional storycraft.

Merrily We Roll Along – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1934 ★½

The Backwards Journey of a Heel

The mechanics of stagecraft are fairly basic. Performers recreate moments of life heightened and condensed for dramatic/comic purposes. Events play out as if in real time, without cuts, on a raised platform where another place and time is brought to life for an audience.

But what if one of the critical elements of standard dramaturgy was altered? What if a play moved backwards? What if you start at the ending, and then rewind it all to the beginning?

That is the concept behind Merrily We Roll Along, a serious play by two comedic writers, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Instead of introducing characters, then bringing them to some conflict or crisis, we first see the conflicts play out, then learn about the characters.

Where Eagles Dare – Alistair MacLean, 1967 ★★★★

Gunplay in a Lighter Vein

It took awhile to appreciate one of the great adventure novels of its day. I think I get it now. A masterclass of immersive yarnspinning, Where Eagles Dare is a clever plate-spinner emphasizing fun and thrills at every turn, a game writer’s playful take on the wartime thriller.

Does it help or hurt this book that it was made into a classic movie? After years of struggling with this question, and preferring the film, I have reached the happy conclusion that the book is its own thing, quite a different sort of entertainment, and all the better for it.

Reality takes a holiday as commandos banter over gunfire while implausible ploys find ways of succeeding in the end, but for me this time, it comes back to the plate-spinning. Alistair MacLean defies gravity and logic across 219 pages, and I found myself enjoying the ride.

Labels: A Mediterranean Journal – Evelyn Waugh, 1930 ★★★

Voyage of a Misspent Wife

While still a young man, Evelyn Waugh struck upon his method for success: it pays not only to be witty when writing, but shocking, too.

That Waugh was, not right away, but early out of the gate. Part of a celebrated circle of upper-class wastrels known as “the Bright Young Things,” he was recognized while still a student for his talent and rapier wit. After launching himself with a ruthless satire about British society, Decline And Fall, that offended many and made his name, he was left with the problem of what to do next.

His answer: Mock the rest of Europe by way of a travel book.

Stilwell And The American Experience In China 1911-1945 – Barbara Tuchman, 1971 ★★½

Anatomy of a Misadventure

A book about historic failure needs a deft hand to keep from being more than a drag for a reader, especially when the topic is the Allied effort in World War II. During the march to final victory, who wants to dwell on an endless spiral of ignominy going on in China?

Stilwell And The American Experience In China is not easy to ignore. It was a history of great occasion when it came out, a Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of American policy in the Far East. This came out at a time when young men were being shipped home from Vietnam in body bags by the hundreds every month.

That the book would be seen as all-too-relevant to the politics of the 1970s was not something author Barbara Tuchman avoids. She makes her feelings clear enough in the book’s Foreword:

Jigsaw – Ed McBain, 1970 ★½

One Piece at a Time

The concept behind Jigsaw, book #24 in the 87^th Precinct series, is that standard crime just doesn’t cut it anymore, not even for criminals. Sometimes they must play their own little games, spicing things up to keep life interesting.

That was true for Ed McBain, too. Already inclined to experiment in his police procedurals, the author pushes the envelope further with an offbeat tale about long-dead hoodlums and their unrecovered loot from a bank heist. Instead of providing us with prose pictures, he gives us an actual picture, a photograph cut into puzzle pieces by one of the goons. It’s up to the detectives of the 87^th Precinct to put it all together again and find the money.

The trick is finding all the pieces.

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract – Bill James, 2001 ★★★½

Subtraction by Addition

Any book crammed with more a century of lore can’t help but fascinate. That is especially true for me when the subject is baseball and the writer is Bill James, a scholar who brings both a deep analytical perspective and sharply heterodox views to his writing.

In 1986, James took time out from his annual takes on the best and worst of the year in the sport to publish his magnum opus, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Running over 700 pages, it reviewed baseball’s evolution decade by decade, then ranked top players at each position. As James’s mind can go off in so many fruitful directions, it was the reference book equivalent of potato chips for diamond buffs.

Fifteen years later, James went back to do it again. The result was even more players, more pages, and more insights, specifically around the concept of Win Shares. You know what? It isn’t quite as good.

Three Early Stories – J. D. Salinger, 2014 ★★½

Trickles from a Logjam

The total official literary output of J. D. Salinger was expected to grow considerably following his death in 2010. Legend had it that the famously reclusive writer spent his decades of retirement from public life toiling on fiction only his passing would allow to see the light.

If those manuscripts exist, they remain locked away. But in 2014 there was a brief trickle of posthumous output, three more short stories to add to the nine we have, along with Catcher In The Rye and four novellas.

These, still the newest Salinger stories as of the beginning of 2025, include two of the oldest, first published in magazines in 1940. The other appeared for the first time in late 1944, by which time Salinger was a combat intelligence officer on the Siegfried Line.

Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare, 1600-1601 ★★★★★

There's Something about Cesario

A Shakespeare comedy both highly regarded and sometimes overlooked, Twelfth Night, or What You Will grabs you both with humor and insights undimmed by time. Even more famous works of more recent vintage lack its evergreen nature.

The play centers on Viola, stranded in the strange land of Illyria, chancing upon Duke Orsino, whom she loves at sight. Only he knows her as “Cesario,” his faithful manservant, whom he sends to plead his love to the Countess Olivia. When Cesario shows up at court, Olivia’s heart melts for “the invisible and subtle stealth” of the envoy’s beauty.

Telling Olivia she’s all woman would spoil Viola’s plans for winning the duke. So she tries to reject her without giving away her identity: