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.

---

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'