This is a very funny book. It's short, maybe a 2-hour read. The author's style of humor is a major factor, as is the inventiveness of some of the absurdity.

Many friends of mine also liked it a lot. However, I have met those who simply don't get it. I think you can tell in one chapter if you will hate it. Adams has a lot to say and he gets a lot of it into this book. It's mostly comedy laced with social commentary in a scifi setting; I don't care much for scifi as a class, but I liked this a lot.

Everything I read which came after the Hitchhiker's Guide was pretty lame. You have to be fairly die-hard Adams fan to like them. It seemed to me the books were written because a deadline had to met, or some such; Hitchhiker's Guide is clearly not like that. I quit fairly early; it's possible that recent publications may be better.

This is an adventure story where the characters are rabbits trying to live and establish themselves in the presence of all sorts of adversity. They think and talk, but are otherwise rabbits with all sorts of rabbitisms. The story is pleasant and engaging, but it doesn't really leave you pondering much afterwards. The writing is good, solid, no complaints, but nothing to get excited about.

This is a collection of short stories which are OK-ish, but not very compelling. Very slightly interesting: the spanish background and the unusualness of the stories.

This a book of the American men in the field from D-Day through the battle of the bulge. It details their day-to-day lives, but is best for illuminating the personal relationships of the men with their war, their surroundings, their army, their comrades, and their enemies. There's enough of the big picture to make it all frightfully relevant, but the focus is quite narrowly focused on the men. Good stuff.

Ambrose, an accomplished military historian, has spent plenty of personal time on the Lewis and Clark Trail. This labor of love is really a biography of Lewis, but as it relies heavily on the journals of the expedition, and adds focus on Lewis' relationship with Jefferson, it tastes more like a history than a biography.

No matter. We go along for the preparations, the trip, and the aftermath, and it is fascinating all the way. You can almost feel Ambrose reining in a boyish enthusiasm. But he's honest and fair, and this book will endure and delight.

These books are pretty similar in description. They're about some well-raised young women (and their families and friends, of course) in early 19th-century England, trying to get married and juggle men and propriety and manners and such. They're full of dialogue and personal interactions, and are wonderful period pieces. Austen writes extremely well, but the matters at hand are consistent and can get tedious if you're not really into the manners of the day. There's tons of stuff about Austen and her books behind the links - go check them out.

(See also plain text)

Baker simply wanted to write porn, I think, and chose a quirky way to do it: this is the story of a man who can produce "fermata" - periods in which he can move about freely while everyone and everything else in the world is frozen in time. The activity of choice is undressing women, not any kind of crime-for-gain, and the maintained delusion is that there are no victims. This would have been quite nice without the two chapters of hardcore porn tossed in: stories "written" by our hero in order to be found by target women.

With incredible attention to minute detail, we follow an ordinary guy through an ordinary day. We spend pages on (eg) the fact that his shoelaces snapped today, that straws aren't what they used to be, men's room behavior minute personal interactions. About 25% of the book is footnotes. Interesting, good writing, quirky.

Banks is an extremely prolific modern Scottish writer. His works are pretty intelligent and they let you understand and figure stuff without spelling everything out. The drag is that most of his stuff is unavailable in the US. Americans' loss. Americans can order from the UK from The Internet Book Shop or Amazon-UK.

He also writes scifi as Iain M. Banks - someone told me but I forget what the M stands for.

Our heroine, a Japanese cellist, is caught on a ship in Panama Canal during some sort of severe war. Bad guys infiltrate the ship and action thriller stuff happens. Banks gets some good observations of life, especially in the omniscient flashbacks, but it's mostly thriller.

A serial killer is running about Scotland and environs doing nasty things to evil right-wingers. A single, leftist, Edinburgh journalist gets more involved than he'd like. The plot may sound stale, but it's fairly original. The journalist's tale is presented in the 1st person. Simple enough, but the killer's is presented in the (!) 2nd person, which feels pretty novel.

The book is fairly short, well written, intelligent, full of reminders that it's authentically Scottish, and can be hard to put down. On the other hand, it can get a bit crude and in some cases unnecessarily so.

Our protagonist is a Scottish university student who is from a small town where everyone's lives are intimately intermixed. Generations have grown up together, families intermarry, and all sorts of life happens. Banks injects a weakish mystery to keep the purpose alive, but the real value of this book is the journey, not the destination. It's modern and hip (well sort of), yet timeless and classic. A very nice read. See Ben's review.

A semi forgotten once-huge rock star has plenty of money, plenty of wacky experiences (and baggage) a good hold of himself, but hasn't figured out quite how to be happy in the world - but he tries. Full of philosophy and attitude from Banks, this is one of his best.

Quite a tale. The story is really about powers who think they know what's good for others, and who are willing to impose their views on them. The dramatic turn occurs when those powers get their comeuppance, but the fun is in the disagreement beforehand - there are those who disagree with the idea of teaching lessons to those who "need" them.

Unless you really despise scifi, I'd definitely recommend this book. If you love scifi, read another Culture book first (Player of Games would do fine) to get the setting.

Apparently this was Banks' first scifi effort. You can tell he's a good writer, but this is the kind of scifi that makes me dislike scifi. The techocrud is stilted, the story is an uncompelling vehicle for an alternative environment description, and I had to force myself to finish it.

Gurgeh is a guy who spends his time playing games. That's what he does. He lives in the Culture, an "ideal" society free of laws, wars, etc. Even so, even the Culture has its government spooks. One day he is approached with a suggestion that he go far far away to play the most complex game known to the spooks. He doesn't know what the stakes are, nor who is competitors will be....

Banks is really very good. The prose is well written and mostly interesting, but there are sections which are not up to snuff. Also, I want scifi to let me forget I'm reading science fiction. Banks does well, but could do better.

We're involved in a futuristic war in which England is taken over by anarchy and force. An aristocrat finds his ancestral home used as a bastion by an independent troop of soldiers, and learns a bit about himself, his S.O., and people.

A superwarrior trots about galaxy doing dirty work for well-intended Special Circumstances divisionof The Culture. An old and mysterious tale of familial issues woven throughout distracts and completely misses the mark at an attempted climax. For diehard fans only.

Seventeen-year-old Isis is the Chosen One in a small modern-day cult practicing in Scotland. The cult seems on the up-and-up, but we discover, through Isis' maturing eyes, dark secrets both past and present. Quality work, but not a compelling tale.

With beautiful language and haunting imagery, Baricco paints a world where we are confronted by the fact that our lives and our worlds are what we make them. But. Sigh. The end didn't add up for me, and the seams were showing.

If you're a Baricco fan, if you loved Silk, or if you're up for a bit of surreal, this is a good bet.

Very short condensed but not dense tale of a 19th-century French silk merchant who travels to Japan for silkworms. This is enchanting, riveting, lyrical, wonderful.

Modern (pub 1991) Japanese short stories - some very good, some a bit coarse. Worth a look. See also Yoshimoto and Murakami.

Nonfiction by Bligh; heavily flavored to his point of view. If you have historical interest in the mutiny or in the period, this can be a good read. I certainly got into it, but I wouldn't urge just anyone to read it. See the Nordhoff & Hall version.

Author Booth decides to walk from the northernmost point on Honshu to the southernmost, the length of Japan. Along the way, he wants to get to know the real Japan. This is a fine but ordinary journal of an admittedly extraordinary journey.:wq

Just after WWII, an apparently well-funded American couple and an acquaintance zip off to North Africa to travel around for an indefinite period. Via their encounters with the comparatively primitive (but most importantly foreign) culture, conditions, and accomodations, we are exposed to their thoughts, emotions, and psyches. We are shown that realities are just views, that our hold on these realities may be quite tenuous, and that we never really know. I suspect this is a book which will mean very different things to different people.

It's engrossing, but not a page-turner. Read it when you have emotional and mental cycles available.

Modern short stories - some very good. Some are a little hairy; they bring up day-to-day unpleasantries of life I'd rather left unnoticed for the nonce. Others are quirky; all expose some aspect of American life in the modern era. They're quite good but somehow uncompelling.

Bryson is an American who spent 20 years in the UK before returning to the US and writing weeklu columns for Brits aboutthe various inanities of American life. I was very hopeful for this book, based on the reviews as well as my prejudice in favor of the material, but the delivery was only so-so. About half of it is general stuff not particular to Americans at all and about half the rest is fairly banal and not insightful at all. I was hoping for a turnabout on Maloney but was disappointed. But it's not crap. Read it with mild expectations and you may be happy.

Fascinating history of the English language, liberally peppered with explanations of quirks and assorted oddities. Fascinating to me, anyway. Easy to read. If you think "geez, that must be so boring," then it probably will be.

A short thriller which has our hero romping around WWII Scotlnd trying to unravel a mystery in order to thwart a German plot. Who's good, who's bad, and what are the thirty-nine steps? Nice, and intelligent, this is a good shortie or excursion into (older) Scottishness.

Short (90pp?) fantasy about a dog who becomes a man for a while in postrevolution Moscow. Kind of a strange version of Flowers for Algernon... very well done.

Considered by many a masterpiece, this is a darkly humorous and very unusual book. Satan shows up in postrevolution Moscow, and some very weird things happen. Flashbacks to Pilate & Jesus are tossed in and the whole thing is quite unlike anything else I've ever read. There's an essay on the web by Dave Parrish.

Get the translation by Mirra Ginsburg.

This guy does the Connections TV show which comes out, I think, on The Learning Channel. (Or is it The Discovery Channel or ??)

Burke's idea is that history is not formed by single cataclysms of genius, war, or special occurences. Rather, it develops as long tangled relationships of small simple developments combine to yield unpredicted results.

This book is a rambling traipse around and through and back around history, mostly Western European. We start with some state or situation, and then follow some sequence of comparatively small steps, and find at the end a major shift in the course of the world. Burke leaps from era to era and from technology to ideas with little concern for linearity.

Actually, this is little more than a gimmick to expose a lot of history to an otherwise uninterested and unprepared audience. But it's fun enough, and Burke's style is informative, unpretentious, and full of wonder. I suspect many people would like it a great deal.

When Rome fell, most of Europe was taken over by various types of supposed barbarians who did burn or otherwise destroy much of the records of Greek and Roman culture and civilization; this pretty much led to the Dark Ages and the thousand years of stagnation, superstition, and the system of princes and clergy which ruled the continent. But wait, Ireland was moving the other way - from barbarism to civilization, thanks to Patrick and others. Records and other forms of knowledge were saved from oblivion by the Irish' comparatively tolerant thirst for knowledge, literature, whatever, and their tireless copying and development of anything they could find from the old days.

Effortlessly presented, engaging, and interesting.

A very short, very good book about an ordinary man who doesn't think or react like normal people (you know - like those who write laws and administer justice), and some effects of that difference. Takes place in Algeria.

Gee, why is it that any 12-year-old can whip any adult at Nintendo? Well, then why not use that ability to let the kids pilot space warcraft? This is a story about using games to train kids for interstellar combat.

The story is good, Card doesn't waste time on parenthetical crap, and the writing is fair. Scifi fans shouldn't miss it. For others, I'd recommend it if you are up for a dose of

Overrated story about a man in love with chivalric notions who bops about trying to be a Knight. The whole world thinks this is one of the all-time best books. OK, give Cervantes full marks for inventing the western novel, I guess, and writing one skillion pages without a word processor even though he wasn't Russian, but I didn't like the read like I expected to. So sneer at me. More info? Go look at this.

These are good, but I don't like reading plays. The Cherry Orchard is OK, as is The Seagull, but I'll take performances any time.

Chekhov's short stories are magnificent. They're usually about ordinary people in almost ordinary situations, but he extracts the essence of some aspect of human nature and suddenly ordinariness is fascinating. He knows people, he takes you to times and places, and he writes simply and effortlessly. Contrary to popular belief, he is often funny. I was once reading Chekhov while eating alone in a pub in Winchester when I busted up laughing. The pub guy clearly thought I was one strange American to be laughing out loud at dreary serious dull Russian literature. Well, maybe I am strange.

Most of my reading has been in Penguin editions; I can't speak about various translators.

Nonfiction account of Cheng's tribulations during the Cultural Revolution in China. High quality writing, engrossing.

Soviets and Americans chasing each other around in submarines and so forth, this is way better than the movie, and way better than Clancy's other books. He errs only a little in explaining too much (unlike his later work, which is full of "Gee, see what I learned yesterday?") In this book, there's lots of technostuff, but the presentation is comparatively seamless. One of the strengths is how well he makes the whole thing believable; his characters just seem real, like someone you know. Great story, spotty but decent writing.

Didn't like it. Story is OK; Clancy still makes the characters seem real - you get sympathetic with a senior Soviet general, for example - but the overall effect doesn't work. Too much failed detail - he gives lots of detail you don't want or care about and all his strategies and tactical operations seem directly derived from board games.

OK, I admit it, I like this guy's work. The stuff is long, in some cases too long, and sometimes too forced to fit some bookseller's idea of mass marketability. So, I feel like I should dislike Clavell and his overproductive word processor and his mass-market output. But for some reason, probably the settings (time and location) and the decent human interplay, I eat this stuff up. Clavell can get you to dislike putting the book down.

These are an ongoing saga of westerners in Asia. You don't have to read them in order.

Weakest of the lot, this is after Japan reopened to the west in the late 19th century. The westerners are establishing their settlement in Yokohama; the Japanese and Westerners are trying to comprehend each other. Clavell seemed to have no story burning to get out; the whole thing seems forced and somewhat hollow.

POW camp in Singapore in WWII, some character overlap with Noble House. The story is interesting; it's about pure capitalism and personal power in a very artificial environment- those who can adapt to take advantage of the system can win big; those who cannot (even those in power) lose. And among winners and losers there are different ways of looking at it.

1970s Hong Kong, the Noble House still in competitive war, going public, M&A worries, fighting off the other trading houses and dealing with the Americans.

Japan, 1600, just as Tokugawa Ieyasu is about to re-unify Japan. An English pilot (Will Adams) is shipwrecked in Japan and gets involved with the samurai culture and Ieyasu's civil war. All the names are changed; this allows Clavell to take some pretty loose liberties with the history, especially an impossible love affair between a Japanese Lady and Adams. You do get a decent glimpse into the times, and the story is certainly fun.

Better, in a way, is Yoshikawa's Musashi.

19th century founding of Hong Kong by the British. Opium trade and so forth. The protagonist's trading house is the Noble House of the later book. Hardest to put down of the lot.

I picked this up from the donation pile in the hospital when I had a pile of hours to while away. It's clear the author has talent, and some brains, but he writes down to a fairly unintelligent readership.

This book is a quick and dirty mystery, centered about golf, some golf people, and the U.S. Open. The plot is very well considered and the characters and storyline are quite good, but the writing is just too sophomoric for me.

The Sherlock stories are short stories, like 15-20 pages, usually written in the 1st person "by" Watson, the assistant. They are not mysteries for you to figure out so much as they are for you to wonder at Holmes' abilities. They're great as period pieces, great as short diversions, and interesting as a delivery vehicle for the kinds of arcana that Conan-Doyle uses to show us how brilliant Holmes is. They're pretty much the same. Read one - if you like that you'll like them all; if not, forget it.

Sheesh, this from the guy who brought us Sherlock? Give it a miss; third rate crud.

You probably know the story, if you've seen the movie at least. This is a story of Hawkeye and his Mohican family in pre-revolutionary American times. The Brits are fighting the French, there's a Huron Bad Guy, plenty of action and texture and a girl, of course. There's not much complexity here, and a 5th grader could zip through this and enjoy it, but it's fun. I liked the movie too.

This is about pirates, corsairs, and buccaneers mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries, with references to other pirates in other times and locales. The book does well to contrast the modern mostly-romantic imagery with the contemporary truths, and does so with authority and credibility.

However, I found the book a bit wanting. The style is OK, and the anecdotes are fine, but the material skips around and back, and I really didn't learn anywhere near as much as I expected and wanted to. (The organization of the book is a difficult problem; the material is a matrix yet must be presented linearly). I suppose some authors could have made the whole thing more dramatic, but Cordingly was explicitly trying to avoid the trap of overromanticizing the pirates. Also, Cordingly avoids getting us too sympathetic with characters who in fact deserve little sympathy.

So, I'm sympathetic with the author, and I think he's produced a worthwhile work, but that doesn't mean I'll be urging all my friends to read it. Now if you're after the facts, ma'am, this is for you.

Great story; exceptionally unimpressive writing. Even though, as usual, the book's story is better, see the movie.

See above.

Called by the publisher an omnibus volume containing Kiss, Kiss, Over To You, Switch Bitch, Someone Like You, and eight further tales of the unexpected.

Great stuff, sometimes fairly dark. War's impact on Dahl is quite present, but mostly just people stories. Quite English, quite good, never pretentious.

This is a 160-page collection of short stories, set in postwar rural England. The same likable characters appear throughout, in various aspects of village life which (by 1950) hadn't changed much for centuries. Poaching, farm life, scheming a la Fred Flintstone or Ralph Kramden but (!) believable - it's a good bet these stories aren't far from some actual truths. Some of them are very good. The style is similar to Mortimer's.

Early 19th century Harvard student gets sick and goes to sea for two years as a foremast jack, and keeps a journal, which is turned into a book. He tells of sailing around the Americas to trade at length in California, and gives the only written account of that area which predates the gold rush and the development of population centers. Great stuff.

We are in an idyllic village on a small Greek isle, before WWII kicks in. Through the eyes of a Doctor and his daughter, we meet the characters of the island and feel like locals. When the Italians come, it isn't as bad as it might be, the daughter falls into a love she really doesn't want to, and life starts to get complicated. But then the Germans come, the atrocities of the war come too, and the resulting mix of nobility and horror are quite moving.

The english is magnificent, but the story is only good, and if you're not in the mood for frank exposition of the physical and psychological horrors of war, it can get unpleasant.

Dexter is famous for a series of mystery detective novels which take place in modern Oxford. Chief Inspector Morse is middle aged, drinks a lot, has as many vices as virtues, is revered by most and always gets his man. Smarter than Mycroft, etc. The stories are OK, but the writing is too contrived, too patently revealing clues on a schedule, and too stilted. Also, Dexter gets downright insulting as he brags about his ability to spell correctly, to use proper grammar, and to quote accurately. There is the thinnest of veils covering his sneers in which (for example) he dares the reader to catch the three misspellings in the victim's note. You're expected to be impressed, I guess, by an author who knows the difference between their, they're, and there.

And that's not all. Another disappointment is the awkward presentation of Oxford, its environs, and its people. Dexter's opinion of detail is apparently to describe the plaque on the side of some actual door, or to explain in detail which street intersects with which. He completely misses conveying the sense that you've been there. Furthermore Dexter overdoes it when establishing Morse's rare and admirable qualities. It's as if he thinks that he can boast more if he only remembers to point out weaknesses as well. Enough, enough, enough.

I read two or three of these in situations when anything would do for a read. They were so well recommended. Well, I'll save the rest for another hard up moment.

It's Dickens, which is not a good thing, but the story is so classic, and it happens to be short, I like it anyway.

The whole English-speaking world loves Dickens, except me. He's full of himself and boring. Yawn.

As above.

Someone sent me a note saying that if I liked Rosling's Harry Potter books, I simply had to try Diane Duane's Wizardry books, which are really much better. Well, I tried, and tried some more, and this book just doesn't do it for me. Comparisons to the Potter books are really misleading; those are English school stories, and these are adventure stories. More things are different than similar; the common threads (age group, wizardry in general) don't make these series very alike.

It's probably worth noting that I didn't like the Duane material even though I was not doing a comparative read.

The three musketeers, much later. Uncompelling.

Good stuff, but Dumas tries a bit too hard; the story is a bit forced, or contrived, and this permeates the writing.

A really wonderful item from the father of the modern historical novel. Adventure, romance, treachery, intelligence, swashbuckling, the works. A good choice for people to find out if they care a whit for historical novels, unless you're a confirmed Asiaphile; in that case, consider Yoshikawa's Musashi or Clavell.

If you see the movie, my clear choice is the pair with Michael York, Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Charlton Heston, et al, from the '70s. It takes both movies to cover this book.

Well, some people like Eco, but I don't. To me, his stuff is egotistical showboating of historical and literary arcana. The works are long, pointless and actually quite unsophisticated considering their academic credentials. I don't find depth, purpose, wisdom, insight, fun, or any other reason to find my way back to his works.

Longwinded uncompelling pointless mystery takes modern academic back to the middle ages and byzantine medeieval conspiracy theories. There's no there there, and I felt I wasted my time with this one.

Overlong overslow overdetailed mystery in a middle-age monastery. Eco just puts all kinds of stuff in you don't care about. Give it a miss.

Collection of short essays and so forth. Pretty good, though often dry, Einstein's opinions on a very broad array of subjects are included.

Erdman's works are thrillers with a twist: his intrigues are all financial. Erdman has some kind of world-class high finance background, and his stories all revolve about some gigantic international plot to cripple the world's financial markets to bring about some end. Enter a hero in a banker's suit who displays financial and political brilliance, saves the world, and wins the girl. Who says bankers are boring?

Light read, unless international finance hurts your brain. The finance is really pretty simple: the US decides it needs to return to the gold standard, but in order to do so, it must put a reasonable dollar price on gold, and that price is going to be a huge leap from current prices. It's going to happen in a couple of days and it's top top secret. However, a Swiss banker finds out, and a Soviet finance minister, and some people have been betting on this all along, and....

If the above generic description sounds interesting, you should really like this book. A quick read, maybe 3 hours. The idea is that Latin America decides to default on all its debt to the US, crushing the dollar and shutting the Americans up once and for all. They can do this if they have help from Europe (more US-haters) and if they can get the Russians to agree to the accompanying management of oil and gold markets. Oops, can't forget Carlos and the Palestinian terrorists who aim to maximize the fear at just the right moment.... Whee!

Standard Erdman fare. American central banker circulating in the top of world finance ends up in a Swiss jail charged with heinous crimes. His beautiful wife is the only human who stands by him. With the help of Big International Gangsters, he gets away, foils the bad guys (all of them) cleans up the mess, and lives happily ever after.

Feinstein spends a year on the PGA Tour and describes the harsh and unforgiving life led by the not-quite-elite. Even though the golf stories are plentiful, they are there primarily as illumination of emotional and physical issues. Unless you're a confirmed golf-hater, this is fairly interesting.

Feynman was a Nobel-winning physicist renowned for being wacky, in and out of his discipline. This is a collection of anecdotes from his memoirs. It's a little self-serving, but entertaining.

Fabulous 1-year "diary" of a 30-something London woman who's having the usual suite of troubles with men, parents, friends, and career. The book is very funny, well executed, hard to put down, and makes women (to me) simultaneously far more understandable and more deeply unfathomable.

No, I haven't seen the movie.

A 1970s man gets wound up in a US government experiment which aims at allowing people to slide into historical times. Although this sounds like science fiction, it is more historical and social.

The tale is nice, the history impressive, and except for the inane mechanism for time travel, everything and everybody is quite believable. The writing, however, is not scintillating.

A young man starting out in what should lead to a upper-middle class career hangs out on the fringe of a crowd with serious money and serious roaring 20's lifestyles. He has a chance to get in on it, but maybe it's dirty money? That issue isn't really what this book is about - it's a portrait of the times and those kinds of social circles. Some have it, others don't, people are people. Frighteningly current. The book is very short, very clean. Tragedy that Fitzgerald couldn't continue to crank this kind of material out.

Fitzgerald's first novel, this is the story of Amory Blaine, elite Princeton student in the post WW-I era. Amory is a severe egotist, and as maturity settles in and brings illumination to the state of affairs, he struggles with what he sees. Though the book deserves praise for breaking new ground, that ground is not quite as novel today.

Don't be misled by the books and the movies having the same titles. With few exceptions, the stories in the books are entirely different. In some cases, there's some sort of common theme, but it doesn't matter. In only one or two cases, the movie is close enough to give some of the story away.

Fleming was a bit of a jerk, IMHO - he was really into brand names, status symbols, and such. (Look at his author's picture - gun, cigarette, pose - blech.) But the idea of a postwar spy guy who doesn't really care much about living, and who therefore gets life's relish by living on the edge all the time - this works well. Some of the books are really well done.

An acceptable but uninspiring biography of George Washington.

Until Patrick O'Brian came about, Forester's Hornblower was the nonpareil of historical fiction covering the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era. Forester's Hornblower was so good, and the field so rich (even when based on actual events), that others wanted to write similar material. But they had terrible shoes to fill; all but O'Brian are well back in the pack. You don't have to be militaristic or an Anglophile (I'm neither) to be fascinated by the things the Royal Navy would go through to get things done back then.

Apparently, Foster turned a dive bar in NYC's east village into a local mecca for modern writers. Reading Nights there became quite the thing.... This book is a collection of shorts from the KGB Bar crowd.

I expect books like this to be fairly solid, with an occasionally brilliant piece nestled among promise-laden stuff which is nonetheless rough, young, needing of improvement via maturing of authors' skills. Not so here. Almost all of these pieces are very very good.

The material can get harsh, and in some cases a tad pornographic. If that doesn't bother you, this is a find.

Another very unusual one. A young Englishman schoolteacher takes a job teaching English at a school on a Greek island. When he gets there, he meets a very strange (and very rich) man, and his life then gets very very strange. Nobody forces him to do anything; he makes his own decisions - or does he? Then there's a couple of gorgeous young women, some wacky history, and you end up in a bizarre psychomystery.

If that sounds interesting, go read this. If you're wondering "why would I be interested in stuff like that?" then give it a miss. The writing is pretty good.

Frazier writes a series of (very) humorous (often fictional) essays, all of which carry some incisive message about something ridiculous regarding our current living condition. He's pretty wacky, and the comedy is well done, but it didn't get me going like I thought it would. Maybe I was in a bad mood - it is good stuff.

This is the guy who played Jeeves in the Jeeves and Wooster BBC series.

First, see the first paragraph in the section on The Liar.

This book praises certain qualities and mocks others, but is not preachy and is certainly more than tolerant of the human frailties it exposes. As such it is quite nice, well written (except for the abundance of linguistic showboating and the coarseness mentioned above), and in the end, a good story.

As far as the linguistic showboating is concerned, I think we have some unintentional hypocrisy on Fry's part. He bemoans our current inability to make even tolerable use of our language, then goes on to overexercise a rather esoteric vocabulary. I share his unhappiness over the widespread poor use of language in writing as well as discourse, but I think better-chosen ordinary words are far preferable to the arcana employed in this book.

This is not sci fi, though it makes use of a sci fi construct: changing the present by altering the past. A Cambridge PhD student doing detailed work on Hitler's youth stumbles across a way to prevent Hitler ever being born. Stuff happens. But all along the way, we'reexposed to a great deal of mild current social commentary, with a dose of English/American contrasts as well. It's the social commentary and storytelling that move this book along, and Fry gets far better marks for this effort than his previous two attempts, without regard for the more politically correct themes.

Both this and The Hippopotomus are British social comedy, taking place in more or less modern times. Both have enough touches of mystery to make the endings compelling. They're not really suspenseful, but they do leave you wanting to see how it turns out.

Both books start out needlessly coarse and vulgar. It just isn't needed and the artifice makes it unpleasant. I'm no prude, but I know excess when I read it, and it's here. This was surprising, coming from Fry. Maybe it shouldn't have been, I don't know, but it was.

So, these are good though bad. Maybe I ought to give them one less star, but in truth I would recommend them to certain people, so given my rating system, I have to give them 3.

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The Liar starts out as a standard school story, boys in a public school, doing the things they do. Ultimately the title character gets in trouble, finds himself in the resulting walk of life, and struggles to find his place in society. Fry's Professor Trefusis plays a role.

I keep reading this stuff, why? I really don't need or want to hear about finer details of Fry's homosexuality and antics. Sigh. ButI do like his outlook, his intelligence, his skill with words, and all his nonsexual stuff is interesting.

This is a collection of short essays about life in general. Re the title, those lessons are: share, put things back, don't hit, that kind of stuff.

It's pretty much what you think, but less hokey than you might suspect. Not a bad thing to leave by the bed.

This is pseudoscientific hooey about classes in the US. Fussell claims there is a strong class structure in the US, then goes so far as to describe the classless class and guess what: it's huge. Given the US has so far less class orientation than anywhere else on this planet, this book is a stretch. On the other hand, if you want one man's views on this are, it's not terribly authored. Give this a miss unless you have some reason to want to read on the subject material. If you want some fun dabbling in this area, try Mayle's Acquired Tastes first.

This time-hopping tale tells of the interwoven destinies of a few people in modern-day Manila, with flashbacks to some of their backgrounds in the Philippine provinces. The activity surrounds a very brief period of intensity and action, but really deals with the emotions involved. Closely and carefully drawn, this is quite well done.

Gray's monologues and Swimming to Cambodia made me buy this book. Error. The book isn't very good, and I was really turned off by what I felt was unnecessary vulgarity. There wasn't anything there to make it worthwhile.

You know, most people think they know these stories, but reading them in their actual form, as an adult, can be really rewarding. I found a volume of these and Andersen's and some fables and it was great.

Someone talked Guinness into keeping a diary for a year; the result is this small charmer. Sir Alec is not without his annoyances (e.g. he's constantly wanting to win the lottery - go figure), but all in all he does very nicely.

Short (90 short pages), very charming. In 1949, Helene Hanff writes off to a London anitquarian bookseller looking for something she cannot find in quality in New York City. She doesn't have much money, but loves books and cannot believe the value she gets from England. The correspondence grows to include personal affairs, instigated by Hanff's holiday food parcel gifts to the London staff, and endures 20 years.

Hanff finally makes the trip to London, where she is given celebrity treatment.

In this memoir, Hanff takes us through times of obscurity, poverty, comparative success, the relationship with Marks & Co. (from 84, Charing Cross Road), ending up with 84's successes and fame. The title has to do with Hanff's ackowledged debt to Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch. Very nice.

A funny tale of a modern German woman who's fed up with men's major and universal (?) set of flaws. She takes out a personal ad for an impotent man, thinking a soul mate without hormones sounds pretty good. The story is stilted and gets fairly sophomoric at the end, but is funny and enjoyable anyway.

Heimel writes a column about women for Playboy, or did, and these are collections of them. At their best, they're witty, insightful, and illuminating. At their worst, some of them are a touch repetitive and some are a touch dry. Overall, she's fun.

These two titles are the same book; Leave Me is in hardback and Doesn't Ring is the paperback. I think I'll keep a strong prejudice against the publishers from here on.

A satirical masterpiece set in WWII. Yossarian is in the army and is upset that so many people are trying to kill him. Explanations that they're the enemy and this is war don't change the fact that people are trying to kill him and this bothers him a great deal. So he tries to get out, and can, because he is, as everyone agrees, completely bonkers. But there's always a Catch, and in this case it's a really good one: Catch-22. You can get out if you're crazy; all you have to do is ask. But if you ask, you're clearly not crazy.

This is brilliant satire, frighteningly funny situational concoctions, a wonderful world of personalities.

Not so good; Heller seems to have shot his wad in Catch-22.

See above.

Very unusual, very very nice. It's hard to describe, so here are some features: it's funny, warm, interesting, absorbing, and extremely well written. This is a story about a man and a horse and people and New York City. It's almost fantasy, but there's no wizards or elves or such - just NYC and snow and dazzling language. It's light without being superficial, meaningful without being heavy, fantastic without being silly or syrupy. Destined to be a classic.

Helprin manages to pour out all sorts of comedic comments on the random sillinesses of people and life, intertwined with a good yarn.

Hemingway was an ambulance driver in WWI in Italy. This story is about an ambulance driver who isn't into the war very much, who gets wounded, and then falls in love with one of the nurses in the hospital. An easy read, I zipped through it, and then it haunted me later.

A hard luck boat owner from Key West does whatever it takes to feed his family. We encounter various seedy characters in Havana and Key West. A sidelight is some moralizing about wealth and how it is attained. Hemingway's prose is fine, but the story is little more than a vehicle for chest thumping about certain aspects of machismo. The author's self-validation drips from some sections.

Fairly boring to me; an old man is out in a small boat and catches the great fish and doesn't have anything left by the time he gets it in to shore. Yeah, so what? English teachers all over will hate me for this.

A few American expats in Paris have too much time on their hands socialize, travel, and drink far too much. We follow their exploits in bars, in Paris and in Spain, and we get surprisingly intimate views into who and what they are. It would be difficult to pinpoint a wasted word in this book.

Wonderful short stories. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber alone is worth the price of admission.

An American goes to fight in the Spanish civil war on the side of the republicans. His assignment is to blow a bridge in some remote mountains; he goes there and sets up with the ragtag but proud local guerilla squads. A few days in the forests, caves, and cliffs go by and we get a load of Hemingway's views on war, honor, the Spanish people.

This is overlong and uncompelling.

These are a bunch of short stories written, if I recall, in the early 1900s or so. They're fairly popular for the twists in the end & overall they're not bad, but not great. Well, some are great; A Retrieved Reformation is a classic.

A really great story in a scifi setting. The story is really pretty much timeless and the science fiction does not get in the way. The tale and plotting and interactions are very good; unfortunately the writing is not. Herbert spells it all out for you, line by line, as if you cannot figure anything out for yourself. It is actually trying. On the other hand, a sixth grader could do well with it.

Nothing else I read of Herbert's was above abysmal.

This is a field-level view of Vietnam in the late 60s. Herr identifies with the soldiers, the grunts, not the brass. He is profane, smokes grass, and lies in the mud. You get the view of the Vietnam war that made it into Apocalypse Now - Herr was on that screenplay - and it's very real and harrowing.

This disturbing book is a fabulous piece of war journalism and a lucid exposition of combat as well as a bizarre time and place.

English couple start English restaurant in Lyon, gastronomic capital of France. We all know about grey boiled flavorless English food, right? We hear about starting a restaurant, refurbing the buildings, dealing with vendors, local hoods, an initially incredulous clientele, the difficulties of success, etc. Compared by many to Mayle's A Year in Provence, it too is a memoir of an Englishman who moved to France. But the topic and tone are very different. Mayle's a better writer, but this book is somehow more real. The restaurant is Mr. Higgins in the Croix Rousse district in Lyon. I've never been there.

Interesting in that it tells you in advance what Hitler was going to try to do with his life, including his attempt to obliterate jews. Otherwise dry. If Hitler hadn't become the leader he was, this would be forever forgotten.

This is a first-person mystery set in the 1990s in Denmark, Greenland and the seas between. Smilla is a 30ish half-inuit woman who is unhappy with the authorities' apparent disinterest in the death of a inuit boy. She sets out to find out what's really going on, and a fairly unremarkable mystery unfolds. The catch is that the author spends time on kinds and behaviors of ice and snow. Mixed with the unusual settings and characters, this is enough to make the book worthwhile. My sense is that the translation is fine; it's the writing itself which is only fair.

The deal with reading Homer for pleasure, as opposed to class assignments, is to get a good translation. Academic translations of Homer can make the stuff terribly distasteful. Forget poetry or fidelity to Greek. Get one which has interesting writing in English. Grab a few, open them up, and check out the beginning of a few chapters. If you get flowery pseudopoetry, or verse, forget it. If you get something that reads like decent storytelling, grab it.

This is a war story: the Trojan horse, Achilles versus Hector, intervening Gods, Paris, the golden apple, etc. I prefer this to Odyssey.

Adventure story, lots of subtales of wacky adventures in wacky places dealing with wacky critters like Cyclops and his buddies. Most people prefer this to Iliad, below, but I didn't.

Hornby has collected his favorite pile of modern human-condition fiction writers and produced a benefit. It's great.

Outstanding modern tale about a thirtyish North London man who decides that the way to get beutiful women is to chase single mothers. He ends up tangled with a mixed bag of people with new cares, concerns, and priorities, and goes through the classic dramatic hero shift.

This fabulous book was over way too fast.

This book is about being a fan of an English Premiership football club, Arsenal. It's not about the game, it's about the eccentricities and agonies of fandom. The book is pulled off by relating a life memoir in the footbal fan context.

The writing is first rate; the result is quirky, different, and quite good if you're in the mood.

This is Hornby's best-known work by far, probably thanks to the movie with John Cusack. Our first-person hero is a modern North London record shop owner, who knows his music in a big and serious way. The story is about his relationships with women, going all the way back to his first romantic thoughts. Many hail this book as a first exposition of modern decent-guy romantic and relationship hopes, frustrations, and all those feelings women wish men talked about. But the women in my life say "what's the big deal?" and don't know why I loved the book so much.

The good news is I loved it without needing the stupendous male relevance. Set your expectations down to "really good book" (instead of "life-changing depth") and you win.

This is sort of a mood book a la Remains of the Day by Ishiguro, except this is far more upbeat. This guy works in Hotels in various positions and builds a self-worth system based on service, etc, and finally has to deal with the fact that it, like any self-worth system, is simultaneously valuable and futile. Worth checking out.

I admit it: I read this. I was standing in a bookshop in Heathrow not finding anything and the guy next to me recommended it. He emphasized there's nothing even remotely related to or suggestive of scientology in it; it's just sci fi. I don't know much about scientology, but I can corroborate the "just sci fi" part. Anyway, I needed something for some long flights, so I took it.

It's a 3000-page pulp scifi monster. Fortunately, the pages go fast, very fast. It's Earth, much later, and the Bad Guys have taken over and Our Hero has to get the Earth back for the natives, overcoming the most powerful race in the galaxy. Stuff happens. You get the idea.

Fun to read. It hasn't lost anything. If anything, the legend of the legend is overdone, but it's still good.

Much the same comment as Sleepy Hollow, above.

This is a pretty quiet tale of a man who feels guilty about supporting the Japanese regime which took Japan into WWII. The man is an artist who helped with propaganda posters and now has serious misgivings about his success, but has no clue how to get past his past.

An English butler wraps his entire self into being a perfect butler and inadvertently forgets to have a life while pursuing his life. Along the way, he is tested by having to support and serve (without question or doubt) a lord who advocates what would be disastrous policies for Britain. Quiet, slow, like the movie. A mood book. Well written.

Fictional (!) account of an American (sorta) photographer who spends time in CUba on assignment, and falls in love. His guard against being used as a ticket out spoils everything, and the lady's concern about being a Cuban souvenir doesn't help. This all allows Iyer to paint a fairly vivid picture of life in Havana these days, but the entire effort is just that - a bit of an effort. While interesting, the tale is not arresting.

Well, Iyer is still good, but this time, it isn't a labor of love. Maybe he signed a deal, went on his trip(s) and set out to write the book, and turned the crank. Yeah, OK. With Video Night (above), it's as if he had to write it in order to get it out of himself, and thank God someone was smart enough to publish it. This time it's good, but not as scintillating as before.

Pico spends a year in Kyoto, pursuing Zen and something Japanese. But he hangs with a lot of expats, plenty of odd cases (not much surprise there), and wonders what exactly he's up to. (Meanwhile we're left curious about exactly what kind of deal he has with his empoyers.) Anyway he meets and befriends a Japanese lady - both gain considerably from the differences in the other. Nice, but (sadly) forgettable.

An extremely well done and well integrated collection of snapshots of southeast Asia. The writing, the insights, and the choice of focus all excel. I like to travel in ways similar to the kind Iyer uses as a medium and I've never read any sort of travel essay to touch this.

How good is it? Go to the store or library, grab a copy, open anywhere, and read a paragraph or two. That should be more than enough - Iyer's talent is obvious on every page.

I was lucky to pick this up before the Janowitz hype hit. It's a pleasant enough read, just some shorts about modern young folks in NYC struggling with roommates, friends, paying the rent, etc, etc. Considered very hip at the time, this kind of stuff abounds now. It probably appeals most to people who never had roommates and the who's-sleeping-where-tonight lifestyle.

This is a heartbreaking story told with a (very dry) sense of humor. I don't want to give the story away, so I'll just say it takes place in late 20th century China, and involves evolution of relationships and grass-is-greener and be-careful-what-you-ask-for tales. Since I'm being so vague, I'll add that it's a pleasant, quiet read.

I read this to bone up on my German. I'm sorry, but I just don't see what is so incredibly great about Kafka. Not bad, but no big whoop.

Stanley Karnow was a young foreign correspondent for Time in the 1950s. This is a memoir of the times is surrounded by insights into the essence of the culture, the city, and the history. The writing is simple and elegant, and the whole piece comes off masterfully.

This is a memoir of a few years in Karr's childhood mostly in Texas. She had a pretty rough childhood, with a hard-drinking mother who was a misplaced would-be cultured cosmopolite and a rough (though loving and, apparently intelligent) father, and not a lot of money. There's mom getting sent to the mental hospital and a horrible grandmother and plenty of childhood terrors familiar and not.

Karr remains upbeat throughout, like a child might, and has a nice attitude through it all. Some people claim this makes the book "funny" but I couldn't disagree more. No matter how I slice it, it's a downer. Though very well written, sometimes lyrical, I just don't think it was worth it. It's like a picture of an accident. OK, clear enough, but did I have to see that? What for?

We go scooting around history looking at all sorts of empires and the contortions they go through to remain in power. The lesson is: Your primary mission is to stay in power. This will require ever-increasing funding. As you tap each revenue source to its maximum, your long term strategy must be to discover or invent new sources of revenue. When you fail to do this, you will die.

The case is pretty strong. And the outcome (governments never shrink, inexorably consuming more and more until they die) is quite disgusting.

Kent's works are also-rans to O'Brian's and Forester's. Read them first. If you must have more, try these, Parkinson's, or Pope's.

I get bunches of mail asking why I don't read King's works. I guess I'm not attracted by the genre.

This story is in a book titled Four Seasons. Its a well written tale of an unjustly convicted man who displays great patience and planning to get out of prison.

This is a story of growing up Chinese in California. Via the family members' stories and interactions, we see conflicting cultures, differeing views regarding how hard to cling to cultures, and several vignettes of different stances along the spectra.

I was liking this book, but it lost its freshness about halfway through, and got old. I found myself thinking "you already made this point about 100 pages ago, why are we going over it again?" Oh, well.

Ack! All my Kipling entries got nuked somehow. I'll clean up this text when I have them replaced; sorry.

The prose is wonderful; the songs bore me, so I mostly skip them. Mowgli is indeed a boy raised by wolves in the jungle. He grows and encounters all sorts of firends and foes in the jungle. The Disney version reflects some of the characters, but different relationships and events than the Kipling original.

Kim is an Indian boy who delights in the complex life of the bazaar. Some people notice and decide to try to make use of him. The book is largely a portrait of the environment.

I expected pure farce and Wodehousian English humor from this author, and I got it. But I got much more- a well-developed, very engaging, and well told story. It's not a spy spoof, but it spoofs spies. It's not a farce, but it's farcical. The hero is not Wooster, not 007, but both and neither. Unless you absolutely cannot stand to hear another peep about CIA, arms runners, and international bad guys, you may expect a thoroughly good read.

But, I liked the movie....

Why did I finish this? Why did Le Carre? Completely uncompelling.

Lewis joined Salomon Brothers in the early eighties and was there for the great bond boom and Salomon Brothers was Bond Central. Remember the S&L crisis, leveraged buyouts, the junk bonds of Drexel's Michael Milken, the 1987 crash, etc? Well, Lewis saw it all, and the whole time, he was a moonlighting journalist and presumably therefore kept notes, etc, and we get this 1989 book.

This is fast reading though rich, believable though fantastic, good though profane, entertaining though distressing. I laughed a lot, though maybe I should have cried. Read anecdote after anecdote about boorish foulmouthed egomaniac gluttons who, apparently awash with adrenaline and testosterone, daily juggle hundreds of millions of dollars in pursuit of keeping their cut.

The title comes form one of the anecdotes regarding Gutfreund, chairman of Salomon Brothers, and Meriwether, one of his chief lieutenants and the best "trader" Lewis ever saw. Apologies for imperfect recall:

[G walks up to M]
	G: One hand, one million dollars, no tears.
[pause]
	M: If we're going to play, let's play for real money.
	   Ten million.
[G's turn to pause]
	G: [turns and walks away] You're crazy

Loh is a sharp and witty everylateboomer in LA. She observes the quintessential LA lifestyle - the gifted-child artistic type who remains just outside The Industry and therefore justifies doing what it takes to get by. She willingly admits her down to earth opinions- $8.99 represents a fabulously expensive bottle of wine, IKEA furniture is rapture, Nintendo is great fun, etc. I got a slight sense that the self deprecations were artificial, but no matter - the book is quite good.

An LA woman outgrows the student-style, bohemian, idealistic world of academia and ideas, which leads to some harsh realities of life, some indictments of the life and culture of LA, and some classic coming-of-age stuff. The story is fine, but predictable. Loh leaves a vast amount of LA's competitive and harsh culture untouched, but does nicely with LA's drive to appear to get ahead. Though there's too much emphasis on real estate, and a fairly narrow view, that view is fairly well done.

Ludlum wrote a pile of thrillers or "spy books" with or without spy. The general plot is: Joe Normal gets accidentally swept up into incredibly fast-paced world of high-stakes international intrigue. People shoot at him; people leave him strange messages; his past or ancestry suddenly becomes relevant. He meets the gorgeous rocket scientist woman and they become a team. Somehow living by wits and outdoing the incredibly resourceful and well-funded pros, Joe saves the world.

But Ludlum created a style. He writes very fast tense action, often in one word sentences. Many people claim that Ludlum costs them way too much sleep - they cannot put the books down. So, go try The Bourne Identity and if you like it, you'll be in hog heaven for awhile. If you don't, well, you don't like this kind of stuff.

Lukacs' theory is that there were five days in 1940 during which the results of WWII were decided. This was when Churchill managed to convince a very war-weary England (ok, the cabinet) that the right thing to do was to stand up to Hitler, even though France was in no position to carry much load and the Americans were decidely not in it. It's fairly convincing and a good read, anyway.

The topic is Adam Worth, who was a 19th century urbane criminal who earned considerable attention from the Pinkertons.

Apparently appealing, this book is a yawn. It has a few pages of interesting material which it rehashes repeatedly. There is no drive to get back to this book; indeed, you feel incented to put it down.

Written in 1841, this is as relevant today as ever. It's a history of several mass madnesses, including the South Seas bubble (England, early 1700s), Tulipomania (Netherlands, 1624), the Alchemists, the Crusades, the medieval prophets, relics, and more. Dotcom bubbles? Been there seen that, hundreds of years ago, several times. Crash of '29? S&Ls in the 80s? Ah, the repeats of forgotten history.

At points the exhaustive amount of information can get to be a bit much, but no matter - this is a great book for skimming.

Well, lovers of Harry Potter can read about the real Nicolas Flamel.

I searched Amazon and the IBS and couldn't find these books, even when I supplied the ISBN. They're published by
      Japan Times Ltd ;       5-4 Shibaura 4-chome, Minato-ku ;       Tokyo 108 Japan

Maloney was a Gaijin businessman assigned to Tokyo for his firm. He wrote a humor column for the Japan Times detailing all sorts of trials, tribulations, and conditions of foreigners in Japan; this is a collection. He's really very funny, so long as you have any amount of interest in things Japanese. These books are hard to find, but can be found in English bookshops in Tokyo and Kinokinuya and such.

This book is a perfect gift for someone going to (or recently gone to) Japan. Some help in locating:
ISBN 4-7890-0028-1 ; Library of Congress Catalog Card no. is 75-319087 ; Published 1975.

More of the above, ending with the Maloney's transfer back to the states, alas.

I picked this up on a lark; it's a collection of short mysteries all having a Christmas theme. I don't consider myself a mystery buff but I liked this quite a bit.

A short biography of Napoleon - it's a pretty good overview, and includes data not found until this century. If you don't want the standard 5-inch thick history of Napoleon, this is great. If you want all the detail, this isn't your book.

Californian English Professor buys Tuscan farmhouse with husband, refurbs it, falls in love with Tuscany, its food, traditions, lifestyle, and all things old. (Mayes gets the word "Etruscan" in as often as possible.) Mayes has a good command of English, and is clearly in love with her subject, but her love is not infectious, and this book is not compelling. A few factual errors contribute to spoiling the soup. So it's nowhere near as good as Mayle's A Year in Provence, but there are also many recipes added, several of which I want to try out.

Everything I've read of Mayle's - fiction and nonfiction alike - is very very close to the same central theme of expats' lives in Provence.

This stuff is enjoyable, but it's too selfsimilar to take in gulps. Spread it out and let a year go by between doses of Mayle and you'll like it more (or tire of it less).

More galavanting about southern France with money. Englishman takes ad in Herald Tribune and ends up housesitting in a fabulous apartment in Monte Carlo with instructions to spend plenty of money. Hmmm. You betcha, we got intrigue: international truffle cartel, a beautiful Israeli ex-commando spy, a Japanese superbodyguard, various mafias, etc ad gigglum.

The tale is brain candy and the money-is-cool thing is a bit overdone, but overall a decided thumbs-up.

A photographer unwittingly gets involved in the world of high-stakes art forgeries, gets the girl and saves the day. Good vintage Mayle.

Englishman sets up a hotel in rural Provence, finds lots of things to worry about (so we can laugh about) when dealing with locals and English expat community.

Like Anything Considered, this is brain candy. But so what. The story is pleasant enough, and has enough local quirkery to remain interesting.

Mayle sorts through a collection of things you get when you're rolling in it: servants, private jets, exotic clothiers accomodations and foods, etc. Overall spotty, but I'd say he just barely brings it off. Interestingly, he doesn't tell you how much the really expensive stuff actually costs.

Sequel to A Year in Provence. Uninspired, but Mayle's good enough to make it readable.

British ad exec takes early retirement; he and his wife move to inland Provence, take an old farmhouse, and set out to establish a life there. This book chronicles one calendar year in which the couple settles in, discovers the environs, and deals with a host of wacky contractors whose missions don't seem to include completing their work.

By far Mayle's best, this is charming, funny, and fun throughout.

Here's another disagreement I'm having with the prize people (Pulitzer in this case). This is a well-written but uncompelling memoir of a miserable childhood. I guess I ran out of gas some number of years into the litany of no food, no clothes, bare shelter, all because Dad's drinking the money although he loves us all dearly. My patience ran out.

Booker Prize? Sheesh. OK, it's well written. But I found this to be fantastic rather than enlightening fiction, and the sense is strong that it wanted to be the latter. Fortunately, it was short - additional length would make it worse.

The story is about some old friends (in England) who've aged enough to have risen to prominences in their respective fields. They're facing some common-enough difficulties: early and possibly unsustainable success, clashes between public persona and darker personal desires, intelligent and capable adversaries, and baggage from earlier days. Not wanting to give away the end, I'll just say I didn't buy it.

A guy I like recommended this and I hated it and he said "It gets good" so I kept reading. Finally, I asked "When does it get good?" and when I told him how far in I was, he was flummoxed that I wasn't completely in love with it. I have no idea what the appeal here is. Neither the story nor the writing drew me in.

A collection of writings about San Francisco by a fascinating array of authors, including Twain, Kipling, Kerouac, Wolfe, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Saroyan, Herb Caen, Amy Tan, Hunter S Thompson, and more. A few of the pieces are dreary or boring, but most are nice and some are quite wonderful. There are also some delightful surprises from lesser-knowns. But where's the piece from Dana?

Like San Francisco? Know someone who does, or who is looking forward to a trip there? This is for you.

Dark and disturbing, this is a story about a boy, his mother, and her boyfriend (the sailor). People can be cruel, and life can be harsh. This is a short book, written simply, and I still get the willies when I think of it.

Pulitzer-winning bio of TR from birth until he becomes president. The book is very good, extremely readable, and it somehow comes across that you're getting a painstakingly accurate view of TR's life, not a eulogy, even though the book is fairly overflowing with plaudits. It's a shame the book ends when TR gets the presidency; you get the idea we're just getting going but it's over.

A novel from the 50s, quite good, about a solicitor and his relationship with his grown (and gone) son and his wife. A little quiet, clearly postwar. I liked it.

Mortimer's first novel is about a young man who joins a film crew which is making an apparent documentary on soldiers and their training, just before D-Day. The story is about the kinds of people in that world: their intrigues, jealousies, talents and shortcomings are where the focus really is. Good, but not what I would recommend as an introduction to Mortimer.

Story of earlier part of Moritmer's adult life. Insightful, pleasant.

Dunster is a real pain the posterior, and won't go away. We hate him, right? Well, do we?

Felix is a mild mannered English novelist in love with his publicist. Someone seems hell-bent to make his life less boring, and the next thing we know, he acquires a lifetime of trouble in a few days.

Good for Mortimer fans, but not the best choice as a first read.

This is a sort of mystery masquerading as a social novel. An English family zips off to Tuscany for three weeks and discovers all sorts of local intrigue there - some of it real and lots of red herrings. If you're a Mortimer fan, read this - it's kind of a cross between Paradise Postponed and Mayle's A Year in Provence. The writing is quite nice, but the story is uncompelling.

Story of Mortimer's "second chance" - new career, new wife. Better than Clinging, quite well done. I'm not sure why I don't give these 4 stars, but if I did, I wouldn't be sure why they got them.

Well, I'll quote some: steers delicateley between satire and sentiment and an eddy of wisdom and comic resignation and then words like wry and eccentric are used a lot.

So, this is social comedy, a little mystery, and lots of use, misuse, and abuse of English country life. I had a little bit of a hard time getting going, then couldn't put it down.

This refers to a bunch of books about a British barrister who's unimpressed by artificial status or pomp. He likes to defend criminals in the Old Bailey, and you encounter plenty of that, but the real value of the stories is Mortimer's acute perception of human nature - the criminals, the other lawyers, the judges, his wife ("She Who Must Be Obeyed"), and, notably, himself. The writing itself is good as well. The stories are set in the time of writing.

The Penguin omnibuses are the way to go; there are three: 1, 2, and 3.

An early work of Mortimer's, from the 50s I think. An English couple encounters some questions and possibly strife in the marriage when a local tart is found dead. The story is about people's thoughts and relationships and the impact of social rules or boundaries we maintain in our lives - it includes a segment where a fellow shows up as asks the wrong questions and tells the wrong truths and makes people uncomfortable for example - but doesn't judge them very much. I wouldn't recommend this as a first taste of Mortimer.

A sequel to Paradise Postponed (above) and not as good.

This book is very well done, and quite good, but it may or may not be very entertaining. The story is a darkish tale of a leftist would-be politician in a small borough in England. Our hero gets a girl and, with the help of a once-powerful Tory minister, gets a parliamentary seat. But, somehow, the process has robbed him of his ideals and somewhere along the way enough means were justified by ends to make the whole mess quite questionable. In the end, the results as well as the philosophy are indicted.

I guess this tale was too true to life and too sad for me to like it. I'm not recently in the mood for exposés on institutionalized stupidities and injustices.

A memoir of a Doctor in late 19th to early 20th centuries, this tells of interactions with his fashionable, rich, titled clientele in Paris, then Rome, with some excursions intermixed. Munthe comes across as someone with keen insight into human nature, with a overriding love for animals, and with a strong sense of morality and conscience. As such, he is quite politically correct, and the book is from the 1930s. The title refers to the house he built on Capri. Munthe and his book were quite celebrated there, even among the barons and duchesses, and San Michele and other Munthe residue can still be viewed there.

The style is a bit pedantic and sometimes a touch preachy or self-indulgent, but not so far as to ruin the book.

Murakami is a modern Japanese writer; the genre involves detailed descriptions of everyday life, almost a celebration of the ordinary. This kind of writing creates a comfy mood, even when the tale is tense. Well, you'll see. Anyway, his books are all offbeat and slightly pleasant.

Murakami's work is blessed by translation which is simply outstanding.

Murakami is inventive and covers a wide array of themes in this large work. We cover personal relationships (of course), personal responsibility for one's place in life, Japanese postwar angst (not done well), and of course various aspects of pop culture and urban life, among other things.

Sometimes the ride feels a bit bumpy, but given the breadth, I am impressed by the flow. Anyway, Murakami is quite talented, the story itself is interesting enough, so we get a fairly compelling read. On the negative side, immersion via suspension of disbelief is very hard, thanks to a superabundance of supernatural events, capabilities, and situations. Oh, well.

Jay Rubin has replaced Alfred Birnbaum as Murakami's English translator. While Rubin deserves pretty good marks, Birnbaum is clearly superior at this particular kind of work. Sadly, the translation is occasionally noticeable in the reading.

Good stuff, but not up to Murakami's ability. This is a nicely written tale of a young man and how he's dealt with relationships through his years, but there really isn't much there there. It's a nice mood book, and has some revealing passages, but.... Also, I prefer his old translator; doubtless I deserve censure for saying so.

This is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, and better. Our hero is called back to Sapporo and more times of bizarreness. There's a good dose of mystery, plenty of strangeness, and plenty of intrigue to keep you interested. However, what makes this great is the extremely effective way Murakami creates a mood. Reading this is simultaneously exciting and peaceful, busy and calm. Nice.

This is a collection of short stories. They're nice, well written of course, and full of the Murakami mood, but short stories don't allow for the wackiness of his novels. There's a couple of stories here I didn't care for, but most of them are very good, and the book is getting.

Update: Murakami has released a new translation by Jay Rubin, which is easily available in the US. I haven't read it. This fuss was all about his hating the original (Birnbaum) translation. It wasn't Birnbaum's best, but it was good, so I'm a bit curious what the big deal was. If Murakami is right, the new edition must be very very good.

This unavailable-outside-Japan edition is an earlier, less-supernatural, and superior prototype for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Like much of Murakami's work, we have people struggling with relationships and loneliness and fitting in (or not), along with a mild dose of philosophising. My favorite Murakami so far.

If you find this (pair of small volumes) in a used bookshop, or if you visit Japan, grab them and extras - there's plenty of demand here.

This is a funny quirky modern tale where a young Japanese guy gets swept up in a vision of a sheep - a particular sheep that is, and next thing there's bad guys telling him to back off. This is a well-written story, and is very pleasant in its differences from normal western fare. Consider it quirky, offbeat, interesting, and decidedly a change of pace.

A wacky one. Here we have touches of scifi to show how a man manages to eliminate emotional troughs at the expense of the peaks, and the age-old question of the advisability of this. Well done and quite original, the book uses two parallel stories with chapters interleaved - and of course they're the same story.

I think this book is too well done for me. Vivid and occasionally grusome, it's a first-person account of some fairly intense days for a small mixed-sex squad of student buddies in Tokyo. They are into hard drugs and group sex and you get the idea that the only thing repulsive to them is the idea of not experiencing everything possible.

Well paced and delivered, it is possibly a confession but never an apology. I actually wish I hadn't stumbled onto this one - it was pretty disturbing....

The first Japanese novel, this is about court manners and such. Interesting as a period piece.

I like Bill Murray and I had high tolerance and low literary expectations dialed in for this book, and still it disappointed. There must've been a no-editors-allowed clause in the book contract: although the raw material is clearly there, the result is an unsatisfying jumble.

Musashi is Japan's most famous swordsman, from the peak of the Samurai era (early 1600's). His life is chronicled very well by Yoshikawa. There are some good notes in Victor Harris' introduction. Anyway, when he got old, he went and lived in a cave, and wrote this classic book of strategy, which every Japanese businessman allegedly reads all the time. It's full of esoteric advice like (paraphrased) assume the position and don't let your enemy beat you and keep your mind where it should be and practice hard.

I probably need to check this out again now that I'm older and wiser. Maybe I'm smart enough now that I'll find it better.

Nelson has given us the Revolution at Sea Trilogy, with the infant US Navy centered about Rhode Island.

Thanks to O'Brian, the standard for this kind of historical fiction is so high that comments are necessarily comparative and are therefore likely to sound more negative than they really should. That said, the writing, dialogue, and character development are simple. The situations and event development appear somewhat artificial at times. I could wish the British establishment not appear to be so uniformly monstrous. These books are pleasant, but could be enjoyed and probably fully understood by a 12-year-old.

Nelson certainly knows his history, his ships, and particularly the working of those ships - the detail is pleasing and authoritative. This, added to the American setting, makes the trilogy quite recommendable.

At time of writing, I've not yet finished the 2^nd book, which is better than the 1^st; things may improve yet.

1775, Rhode Island. Isaac Biddlecomb, a talented sea captain, is torn between his life goals and the demands of patriotic causes. Pressed onto a brig by a snobbish tyrannical British captain who is no seaman, Biddlecomb leads a mutiny, disses the local British frigate, and is generally very heroic.

Reluctant Biddlecomb is sent to Bermuda to capture powder badly needed by Washington. The ad hoc, improvised, chaotic nature of the 1775 colonial war effort is very well presented.

Same stuff, but author's skill is improving.

A moorish chess set given to Charlemagne contains ancient secrets of the universe, and has been hidden in a Pyranean convent for a thousand years. This book is two interleaved stories of the nuns who unhide it in the late 18th century and a 1970s Manhattan chess circle who go looking for it. You get to Russia, Algiers, Corsica, Paris, and New York, in 1970s and 1790s. The story is a great idea, but could have been done better.

Pretty poor entrant in the backpacker's travel essay sweepstakes. Try Iyer first, or Danziger if you've already read Iyer.

Family tribulations in modern San Francisco Chinatown. Fairly well done, but nothing special. I want to say something nicer, but the truth is this book can't touch Tan's Joy Luck Club. But if you liked one, and want more, the other will serve.

Collected writings, most short enough to take in small doses.

Nietzsche's masterpiece and though incomplete, a fairly complete presentation of his philosophy. The delivery is prose, having Zarathustra coming down off the mountain to be guru to the world. God is dead, (often miscontrued) will to power, and Ubermensch (superman), are all here.

An account of the infamous mutiny based on the journal of a foremast jack. As such, it offers a very interesting contrast to Bligh's account.

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This 20-book series is magnificent; you may savor every word of the first dozen or so; then they begin a slow decline until the last book, which is merely very very good. The setting is Royal Navy, early 1800s.

O'Brian's prose and dialog are amazing. His characters are diverse, complete, real, and engaging. They succeed and fail, win and lose. Some describe O'Brian as a masculine Jane Austen (with a bigger dose of intelligent humor added) ... these works are incredible period pieces, taking you completely to a time and place without artifice of any kind. You certainly don't have to care a whit about naval history to adore these books. On the other hand, if that's all you are interested in, you won't find anything better.

These books comprise a long tale around two men. One is Jack Aubrey of the Navy. He's not an atypical Post Captain of 1810. The other is Stephen Maturin, a Dublin physician of mixed Catalan descent who volunteers as an agent in order to assist in the overthrow of Bonaparte (Stephen loves France, hates Napoleon), Stephen signs on as Ship's Surgeon as a way to see the world (he's an ardent and somewhat known natural philosopher), and the two form a friendship which yields to O'Brian infinite material.

If you didn't already know it, the things the Royal Navy went through between, say, 1750 and 1812 are entirely amazing. There's no need to invent incredible accomplishments, feats, attempts, or situations because the history provides circumstances which, if not documented, would be beyond belief. If O'Brian's stories weren't available (with different names) in contemporary news, letters, etc, we might find his tales pretty well beyond the limits of credible fiction.

There are other authors who have attempted this kind of work. O'Brian is by far the best. Forester is very good in a distant second; Nelson is good; everyone else is behind in the pack.

Here are the titles:

1. Master and Commander
2. Post Captain
3. H.M.S. Surprise
4. The Mauritius Command
5. Desolation Island
6. The Fortune of War
7. The Surgeon's Mate
8. The Ionian Mission
9. Treason's Harbour
10. The Far Side of the World
11. The Reverse of the Medal
12. The Letter of Marque
13. The Thirteen-gun Salute
14. The Nutmeg of Consolation
15. Clarissa Oakes (in USA: The Truelove)
16. The Wine-dark Sea
17. The Commodore
18. The Yellow Admiral
19. The Hundred Days
20. Blue at the Mizzen

Based-on-fact story about Commodore Anson's mid 1700's circumnavigation in which his squadron took one skillion pieces of gold from the Spanish. In this precursor to the Aubrey/Maturin series, O'Brian is just finding his legs. You kind of wish he'd taken his time and maybe made this a much longer work. Anyway, it's very good - a stupendous sea story told very well.

Biography of Pablo Picasso. Evidently O'Brian knew him, but not much of that comes across in the book. The book carries a bit too much sterile recording of just the facts, ma'am, for me - I'm addicted to O'Brian's passion, and it doesn't come through in this book.

Well done, but you should be in the mood for this book. It's a quiet, slow, detailed story about a man and a woman in a Welsh valley populated by a few poor farming families who know each other altogether too well, yet sometimes painfully superficially. The heroes fall in love, but this is a time and place where people can get in trouble for a smile - forget sleeping around etc. If you're new to O'Brian, this isn't what I'd start with. If you don't want to dive into the Aubrey/Maturin series, try The Golden Ocean.

Another ship in Anson's squadron encounters difficulty at sea and goes its own way. Still early O'Brian, here we see the formation of Maturin, and the foundation of the Aubrey/Maturin series.

Told in the first person, this is about an aging professor who believes that every woman he meets wants him, and wants him bad. His behavior with women is pretty funny, though disturbing, and we follow him through several sitcomesque sequences while winding up our plot. That plot involves his ex-wife and True Love, and her brother, and their family, and it turns out that our hero may not be the sickest character in the book, or even close. Pretty weird stuff.

Though this book was very hard to put down, I don't find myself leaping to recommend it. I guess I feel like it was a wonderful pasttime, but its core comment and story didn't really stick in my head - I just moved on.

Harrowing tale of inner demons, holding secrets and maintenance of alternative realities, and the possible effects on a marriage. Well done, a compelling read, and disturbing.

Sadly, it missed the opportunity to paint the "two of us against the world" possibilities: costs, impacts, trust models, benefits, more. Maybe a sequel?

This is Monty Python's Michael Palin's first novel. We spend our time with a very English unassuming assistant postmaster and his village. Progress is coming our way and we have mixed reactions. Definitely a good read, it's quiet and pleasant as well as funny and provoking (but not too provoking).

Parkinson's works are also-rans to O'Brian's and Forester's. Read them first. If you must have more, try these, Kent's, or Pope's.

This book is sometimes found in one of: Biography, Philosophy, Self-help, New-Age (though published in 1974), or unclassified nonfiction. When I went to school at CU in Boulder, you had to have read this or you were just not hip.

This guy and his son are out on a cross-country motorcycle trip. The guy is really into understanding why everything is, and how and why he and others value everything they see and do. He quietly yet compellingly talks of simple things as simple things, yet seems to lay great import on them. He uses the motorcycle's state and maintainance along the way as metaphor for all sorts of life situations: care for the machine: it works; disregard or abuse it: it fails. Etc.

This book is 25% tale, 75% analysis. It's very interesting, but for some reason I never went back to reread even parts of it, and I never tried to follow up with similar works. Maybe it's a bit too new-age for me. Even so, it's far less self-serving than other stuff I've seen in the genre.

The Penguin version is a very readable collection of chapters of Greek history and biographical sketches and anecdotes. Pretty good.

Pope's works are also-rans to O'Brian's and Forester's. Read them first. If you must have more, try these, Kent's, or Parkinson's.

Quoyle is a large ugly clumsy oaf leading a miserable life in nowehere, New York. Of course, he's nothing but good, and we like him. He manages two daughters with a harlot who hurts him and dies. So, it's off to the ancestral lands in Newfoundland where he discovers a new way of life and a new kind of people. He encounters newfies, boats, fish, ice, isolation: think Northern Exposure with poverty. The bizzare mingling of modern life and ancient ways makes the setting interesting.

This is a mood book, essentially another view of the modern American family and life and love. I didn't like certain style effects: in the beginning there are a lot of (too many) non-sentences. Sentences without verbs. Or: Reading sentences without a subject. Happily, Proulx gets over these about 1/3 of the way through and you're left with headlines as the only literary weirdness, and the headlines work fine. Headline Style OK By Reader.

This book won the National Book Award ('93) and the Pulitzer Prize ('94). I dunno - it seems they could have done better. It's really not bad; it's even good, but it's hardly my idea of a must-read.

Quiller-Couch's books are long out of print; you'll probably have to search your antiquarian shops or try bookfinder to find them. Beware, you may have to choose between very expensive copies and copies which are so fragile you're afraid to read them.

This is a collection of lectures given at Cambridge sometime in the early 1900s. "Q" is full of attitude and opinion, and makes liberal reference to English and classical literature. Topics include the differences between verse and prose, the difficulties of each, and some generalities on the practice of writing.

I loved the lecture on Jargon. Q ridicules
    He was conveyed to his place of residence in an intoxicated state
preferring
    He was carried home drunk.

If you think this might appeal to you, then it probably will; if you think it must be quite dull, it certainly will be.

Another collection of articles on Women's issues from a Men's magazine. I bought this on a recommendation. Anka is younger, coarser, and more hip than Heimel, but I can't really say one is better than the other. In small doses, this is good stuff. I'd start with this one or Heimel's ... Dead Yet?.

Hoo boy. This monster book is the manifesto of the philosophy which Rand calls "objectivism" and which is hard to summarize, but let's say: reason and competence should defeat all else. Objectivism's politics are therefore not too distant from modern Libertarianism. The premise of the book is that the looters leech off those who are capable and/or hard-working, and the reason the looters get away with it is because we let them. Well, we can't let them starve can we? So we feed them. Thus, to get free food, simply don't buy it yourself. Meanwhile, government is all set up to maximize its ability to live off its consituents, etc, etc. Soooo, what to do? Easy: get the capable and hardworking people to just quit. Don't bust your butt trying to make their broken system work - that just gives them more to leech off of. So, one by one, the essential people who really make the world go round stop playing, and of course, the world falls to its knees - Atlas shrugs and the whole world shakes.

There's all sorts of things here which go a bit far, and some extremely preachy chapters (eg This is John Galt Speaking, but I think this is a worthwhile read. Even if you disagree with some or all of Rand's conclusions, there's some good stuff here and at least you'll get insight into the other side. I think this is really good for people in their early 20s.

A golf comedy: a bunch of hacks from the muni dive get exposed to the swanky club next door. A bet leads to scheming to crash the club, and the fun begins.

There's a lot of character and characters here, and you can tell Reilly has quite a command of English, though he keeps it well reined in. Also, the story is really a parable; Reilly has a few things to say in the social science arena and he does it quite effortlessly.

I could not get into it; this book seemed entirely pointless to me.

Same as Cowgirls.

I heard about these books when a newsworthy item appeared: some children's books had taken over 3 or 4 of the New York Times top ten bestseller list slots, and some publishers were shining that children's books didn't belong on the list. Never mind that adults were buying and reading the books; they had an excuse to whine, so they did. Anyway, meteoric success always scares me but the stuff is good.

Orphaned Harry Potter spends ages 1-10 as a very unwelcome resident in relatives' house. He then discovers he's a wizard (it's genetic), has been accepted to Hogwarts, the public school for wizards. (This is an English "public" school - very private.) The fun begins. We have all sorts of fantastic monsters intertwined with traditional English school stories (except they're co-ed), with prefects, masters, staff, school sports, the requisite old country estate, the works.

Though for kids, I enjoyed reading these, as did many friends of mine. You can proably read them to your kids when they're 7 or so, or wait until they're 9 or so and let them read them themselves.

Harry's second year at Hogwarts is another adventure, augmented by more delights of the new-and-different.

The first few chapters of this surpsingly long (734 pp) book were a very nice return to the world of Harry. Then you settle down into yet another year of school with the looming struggle with Voldemort.

Harry's growing up, noticing girls, becoming his own person a bit, and Ms. Rowling seems completely in control. She also manages to keep the wonder of new magic and new concepts going - but now it's augmented by the warmth of pleasantly familiar people and places.

Harry's 3rd year at Hogwarts is a good mystery for kids. Rowling keeps the material fresh; wizards and their environs are not yet in any danger of becoming boring.

  Amazon
We meet Harry Potter, who is miserable thanks to an unloving home. We share his learning the myriad delights of the wizard world, and get a pretty good school story to boot.

A wonderful and playful tale of a storyteller and his son (Haroun) who live in a city so sad it's forgotten its name. In search of the father's lost gift of gab, the pair ends up having wonderful adventures in magical lands.

Wonderful, and not at all what I expected.

A somewhat haphazard expository on Druids and old Celtic lore, slightly biased toiwards the Irish. Interesting, but there must be better (or at least more readable) works out there.

Nine short stories (surprise!) having to do with the human condition.

Magnificent character work. Written in first person, Holden Caulfield is a privileged kid who can't quite put up with the manifold phoniness of society and people and ends up always in trouble and ultimately in some undefined funny farm after yet another expulsion from a prep school.

A shortish collection of short stories about boyhood in the earlier 20th century. The boy and his extended family are poor Armenian immigrants in California's San Joaquin valley. They are poor but proud and eccentric, and the boys are all-boy, a laTom Saywer. The quite short stories are well written, often charming, sometimes brilliant, and usually insightful. Consider what you'd get if Steinbeck tried to imitate Twain and you get an idea of the style and tone.

Bruce Schneier wrote Applied Cryptography and either is very, very good at this stuff, or he has a magnificent staff. Either way, it works.

Fear this.

Here, we are convinced that:

Everything we were told in Applied Cryptography probably doesn't matter since crypto is hardly ever going to be the weak link in a security system.

Anyone who seriously wants to hack you will be able to do so.

The government is not your friend.

The big problem is that with omputer kinds of crime and nastydoing, methods are trivially reproducible and reproduced, and once one Jimmy Valentine learns how to crack safes (or take over major military systems, or modify your IRS data, or ...) the it is both trivial and inevitable that every 8-year old who can run a script is suddenly as powerful and far more dangerous than Mr. Valentine.

The problem is, he's right. A world-crippling hack may never come (does this sound like the nuclear weapon thing?) but most disturbing is the fact that it very easily could, and that the launch capability isn't limited to a select or trained few.

The original historical novel, so they say. Except for the anti semitism and other signs of Scott's times, this is pretty much standard knights and damsels. The Black Knight stuff is predictable but it really doesn't matter.

Good Guy commoner landowner leads common Scots against nobility and evil and (surprise) English.

This guy is supposed to be funny but I found him to be like an unwanted neighbor. I don't like much what he has to say, or how he says it, and I didn't find him funny.

Shakespeare's plays deserve their fame, but are much better performed than read. For a first encounter with any given play, I got the most out of them by listening to a tape and reading simultaneously. This slows it down but the value was greatly increased. With familiarity, this is hardly necessary.

Call me a cretin. I couldn't get into these without someone else carrying the interest.

Here's the thing: Shirer was there. He was there for the buildup, when Churchill was the only guy saying Hitler was a menace, when the buildup was in full swing, when the Nazis took Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Shirer was all over the Third Reich.

I was in study hall in high school once, bored, and I blindly reached behind me and grabbed a book. It was this behemoth and I groaned but opened it anyway, and I fell into the part where two generals come to Rommel's house in order to force him to kill himself (or face a state trial for treason). Rommel tells his son "I've just told your mother I'll be dead in a quarter of an hour." and I was hooked.

Six "pilgrims" are on their way to see the Shrike, terror of the universe, who is beyond the understanding of even the incredible (yawn) technological prowess of the future. On the way we hear each of the pilgrims' stories. These yarns are good enough to get you through the book, but even the bright spots are disappointing.

The story has promise, but it isn't delivered on: it's intentionally terminated just before the climax in order to force you to buy the sequel. A dirty trick, but somehow I can live without continuing on. Another big problem is that the book is full of heard-it, seen-it, read-it scifi, assumptions that the whizziest technology of 1996 is indicative of 2700, other abundant anachronisms, and very many stumbles through too-easy conditions or Earth references. All we're missing is the inevitable incipient armageddon with a superenemy threatening the very survival of all humankind. Oops, we have that, too! But maybe the Shrike can help us? Whatever. Prose: fair. Dialog: weak.

I've been told a lot of Sci Fi fans love this. Hmmm. This makes me think they're an easy sell.

In early 1900s Sinclair wrote this protest about the conditions of immigrants and their housing and employment and those who set out to take advantage of them. This is the kind of stuff that led to trade unions here and communism elsewhere.

The story is overdone, and severely dated. Sinclair was annoyed he missed a Nobel for this, but I agree with the Nobel people.

Smith was the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, and this is an explanation of how things really worked in Russia in the 70s. The style is pure expository - like a long article. I suppose the whole thing is dated such that this is historical. I've heard that a sequel is out, but it seems you could only keep up with today's Russia with a monthly.

There's a new one out called The New Russians but I haven't checked it out yet.

A humorous "do you know what you're in for?" book for prospective bridegrooms, written by an unmarried man. It's not all doomsaying, but it pulls no punches. I believe the author was actually quite sincere in his advice.

It's funny, a bit scary, and a great present for the newly-engaged (but the bride may have issues with this!).

An agent of later-USSR KGB is trying to figure out a mystery which involves murders in Moscow's Gorky Park, an American businessman, and, gee, the FBI and New York's finest.

From the perspective of the Russian detective, we live with locals balancing the advent of western modes against a tenuous grasp of the Russian way. The glimpse into this culture on the verge is the value of this book: it's quite well done.

A book on logic and logic puzzles by a well-known Professor.

This is the story of John Harrison, who dedicated his life to solving (and solved) the scientific question of his age - finding longitude at sea. In doing so, Harrison made several fundamental technological leaps and devised many landmark inventions. To win British Parliament's enormous prize, however, technical prowess seemed less important than navigating the political waters of the jealous power brokers of the day.

This short, easy-to-read history is a gem.

You've probably heard any amount of folklore regarding what's really happened between US subs and Russian subs in the last half of the 20th century. Well, this is, by all accounts, what the real poop is. The book is a chronicle of the sub aspect of the cold war, and is very well done: it isn'trepetitive, doesn't get old, and tries to refrain from overglorifying the subjects. I've talked to some actual sub people and they say "yup, it's pretty much spot on." (They don't say that about, eg, the movie Crimson Tide.)

Steinbeck's stories are about people and how they deal with each other. They almost all take place somewhere near the Salinas Valley in California, in the early 20^th century.

Cannery Row was a seedy part of Monterrey, CA. This is a book of characters who live there (most ne-er do wells) and how they relate to each other. The book is very short and the style is very simple, almost elegant. There is almost a complete lack of tone, which is oddly inviting.

Short, harsh, tale of reality. Lenny is the big lovable stupid ox and George is his thinking, caring friend. They struggle through life always dreaming of better times, which don't come. Life isn't fair, and sometimes doing the Right Thing is hard, and in real life, being noble just slides on by.

Sequel to Cannery Row. The character development isn't as good, but the story content and character interactions are better. (In Cannery Row, the story itself isn't very important.)

This book is two related stories, one set in WWII amng the mathematicians, cryptanalysts, and security spooks; the other about some Silicon Valley-style rocket scientists whose focus is networking and cryptography and general computer brilliance, in search of yet another killer business plan. The characters are related, of course, and a nicely crafted and very readable tale unfolds.

I know the silicon valley very well and Stepenson is spot on: he completely understands the psyches of the modern engineering nerd and wanna-be entrepreneur. I could have done with less explanation of crypto, math, and technical detail - I found myself thinking that, in this day and age, they ought to be able to produce a nerd's version of the book without techincal explanations.

Somewhere in the next 150 years, man has learned how to make any number of devices atom by atom, and also has figured out small power supplies and mechanics. So we have a world where nanotech dominates all. But wait, people are still very much people.

This story is about a kingpin's vision of training youngsters not to blindly obey the rules so much, to thjink for themselves, to survive as the fittest, not as the best clone of their elders, set among a new world of nanodevices and ethnic and cultural encampments and struggles.

Very well done.

Post cyberpunk scifi about the too-near future in which our heroic but humble and down-to-earth hero rambles about cyberspace and the real world to defeat one very bad-ass dude and set things straight.

The above description, while accurate enough, would never get me to read this book. So let be add that Stephenson knows not only his craft, but also a fair amount of modern techincal stuff, and he pulls it off very well.

The well-known tale of the scientist who invents a formula which turns him into a monster, and what he does about it.

This is a more adult book, and the heroes are quite real and likable, but the story itself is a bit slow and the Scottish dialog a bit tiring. It's 1750's, Scotland, and we get a view of life in that place in those times.

Adventure story suitable for youngsters. Pirates, ships, swashbuckling, Long John Silver, intrigue, the works. Light and short.

The original. Dated, to me.

Fictional biography of Michelangelo. Denies his homosexuality, deals with his important creations, avoids all controversy. This needed to be written, but I wish Stone had been more honest, or straightforward. His protectionism puts a veneer over the whole thing and makes it too unreal.

This international sensation was a letdown for me. An 18th century Frenchman has a sense of smell beyond exceptional. We follow his life through quite an aray of circumstances and get to gaze into several aspects of the human condition. However, the author overexplains as if I have no mind. Furthermore, the prose actually gets in the way of immersion. A good book that could have been great.

Four Chinese mother-and-daughter pairs in San Francisco, their interactions, hopes, fears, jealousies, joys. Very very well done.

Nowhere near as good as Joy Luck.

This is a good read and a great snapshot of a part of 60's Americana.

A young Thompson hangs out with Hell's Angels back when they were new and untethered. He encounters very rough stuff and writes fairly straight about it. Thompson can sling it with the best of them, but here he hasn't really gone overboard yet.

Wild drugs, wilder behavior, complete absence of control in Las Vegas. Much of this is invented tripe, but this is definitive gonzo journalism. If you want to know who is Hunter Thompson, or who is Duke in Doonesbury, this is the one to read.

Pretty much the granddaddy of fantasy. Elves, Ogres, Wizards, Drawfs, Trolls, the works; even a genuine Dragon. Lots of magic. The made really bad movies out of these books.

Furry small manlike critter (Hobbit) is shorter than elegant elf, more refined than blue-collar drawf, distict from large number of other kinds of "people" you'd find in such places. Hobbit likes to sit at home in front of a comfortable fire, yet ends up running all around Middle Earth having terribly exciting adventures and being the accidental hero.

Trilogy continues from The Hobbit. Our hero goes on a much bigger adventure this time, intent on the moral equivalent of saving the world. Involves original cast and much more, and expands the landscape considerably.

Another spy book, known for the movie with Clint Eastwood. Our hero, the retired assassin, has to find/kill the bad guy, conquer the mountain (and the women), and go back to being a good guy. Remarkably, the movie may be better than the book.

A spy book a la Ludlum. Mostly fair, but some very memorable parts, especially the section on Volvo-bashing.

Fun and frolic with an all-boy kid in a small town in mid 19^th-century USA. A classic, and deservedly so.

Another attack on prejudice, Twain has a pauper show up at Buckingham Palace who is a dead ringer for Edward, Prince of Wales, Henry VIII's son. They get switched. Edward is treated like a dog, and the pauper is treated like royalty, and we see that both are silly. Henry dies, the pauper is about to be crowned Edward VI, and it all comes together. A good tale told well. Even without the moral, this is Twain's best, IMHO.

See Huck Finn, above.

Modern (late 1800s) man somehow ends up in King Arthur's Court. His knowledge of science and engineering should make him the most powerful man of the times, but there's this nasty concept of nobility and birth and so forth always getting in the way. How could we possibly put you (or your best students) in charge, when men of higher birth are all over the place? This is a criticism of prejudice hidden in an interesting concept and quality writing.

Sun Tzu was this old Chinese strategic genius. Absolutely nobody who is anybody in China or Japan (and practically nobody in the West) is ignorant of Sun Tzu. His tenet is something like "the battle is won or lost before the fighting begins" based mostly on planning and understanding your adversary, and having honest assessments of them and yourself. This short ancient classic is frighteningly relevant today. Better than, but see also The Book of Five Rings.

Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat who liked 18th century popular Chinese detective novels. He chose Judge Dee, a real but legendary magistrate from about a thousand years earlier as his chief good-guy. These period pieces all involve detective storytelling in the older Chinese style.

This book is longer than most (they're all short) and relfects van Gulik's talent in a slightly raw state. BTW I think most of this work is gone over in the others. It's the only such case.

The mysteries are fine, but I'm not really a mystery buff - I like these for the storytelling and the period/culture work. If you don't like one, don't try the rest - they're pretty similar.

My recommendation: don't read them all at once. Save them and spread them out - and read them in chronological order.

Verne is considered by most to be the father of Science Fiction. He wrote in the 19th century.

Phileas Fogg bets his clubfellows he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. He sets out with his valet Passepartout and cross oceans and continents via every conveyance imaginable, facing all sorts of hurdles and delays. Meanwhile he's being chased by a detective who thinks he's a bank robber. A classic adventure.

Science Fiction from 1870. A fantastic submarine, Nautilus, commanded by mad and villainous Captain Nemo, goes on an underwater odyssey. We face exotic sea monsters, strange sights, and adventure galore.

Very short, very funny, very very good tale about Candide, a young gentleman of Voltaire's time who bops about the globe getting into all sorts of horrible trouble, having to escape, and always saying "well, it's for the best." This is satire trying to convince people: it's not always for the best, please stop using that wimpy way out and take responsibility for making things better.

I think I must have read Vonnegut when I was too young - I really didn't like him much, but I keep telling myself to try him again.

This is a strange novel on the horror of war. It delivers a strong message, but to me that's its only really strong point.

Social commentary set amidst interplanetary revolution and intrigue.

A man makes a deal with the devil in which he remains forever young, but the image of him in his portrait ages as the man should. Guess what? Deals with the devil don't work out.

British social comedy from near 1900. A very good play, but I'm not very happy merely reading plays.

The Dog Woman is an enormous, hideous, deeply ignorant woman (who does, however, understand people) who finds a baby floating in the Thames (17th century). The baby grows, and we are taken through bizarre fantasy in a historical context.

P.G. Wodehouse was an extremely prolific writer of very English comedy. Most of his stories are period pieces as well. He is most famopus for Jeeves and Wooseter, but I also like his short stories, his school stories, and the random doings of various Britons in the early 20th century.

There is nobody quite like Wodehouse. Give him a try.

Blandings refers to a bunch of stories and novels which are set at Blandings Castle with mostly the same set of characters. Wodehouse settled into a crowd here; I find these stories good but seldom of his best.

There are scores or hundreds of Wodehouse books. Go check out the Wodehouse shelf at any good bookstore and see. If you you'll get pages of entries, 100 entries per page.

Jeeves and Wooster are paired up in many short stories and novels. Jeeves is the perfect butler who is also a genius as well as an infallible judge of people and character. He furthermore seems to posess a crystal ball or some such. Bertie Wooster is a not-so-bright member of the aristocracy. He and his idly rich buddies (from the Drones Club, usually) are constantly in trouble, trying to avoid marriage, or somehow or other in perpetual need of Jeeves saving assistance.

A good place to start is The Code of the Woosters or Life with Jeeves.

Mr. Mulliner has countless relatives, all of whom seem to have zany lives full of merry mix-ups. Mr. Mulliner tells you about them.

Wodehouse's early writings were about a few boys at English public schools. There are The Pothunters, The Gold Bat, Mike at Wrykyn, and we might as well include any story with Psmith in it.

The comedy is more subtle but the human angles more true. I liked all of these.

See my note on Chinese classics

One of the all-time great Chinese classics, this is like Chinese Shakespeare. You have two very wealthy and powerful families living in splendor in the capital. They appear to have it all in a very sophisticated and rich culture. No struggles for survival here - the daily grind is manners, style, subtle inclinations, peaks of ecstasy and oceans of tears over incomprehensibly irrelevant minutae - the struggles of the very rich.

The story involves tons of Chinese period detail which is nice. You see again that times and places are different, but people aren't, via star-crossed lovers, family politics, successes and failures, hopes realized and dashed, and lots of dialog and personal interactions. In short, there are about a dozen tear-jerker movies in here.

This story is very long. (Penguin does this in five paperback volumes.) You can do very well to get an abridgement. This will give you the story and more than enough detail. Remember that, as Shakespeare's characters come primarily from the most upper classes, so do these, and you get the same sort of limited view. But so what.