That Thomas Berger's name and books are not mentioned more often--or, seemingly, at all--is a mark of shame on the literary scene. He's such a great writer. I've been reading his stuff for years and was in the middle of rereading Sneaky People when I read of his death in 2014. I had corresponded with him many times and he always returned wonderful and long letters about his work--and also asking me about mine.

But enough about me. Killing Time is a novel that gets exponentially better every twenty pages. It's Berger's pastiche of true-crime (parts read like The Executioner's Song), philosophy lecture (parts read like the Apology), police procedural (parts read like Ed McBain's 87th precinct series). But it never devolves into parody for the sake of a laugh. Berger's theme--how can one fight the progress of time?--is serous. What's great is that the conversations between Detweiler, the killer, and other characters never solve the issue because you can't solve it. You can only talk about it.

The book is also filled with Berger's trademark asides and authorial finesse. Here's one sample, when a lawyer, is being strangled:

Melrose had never been seized by the throat his life long. He had not engaged in physical violence since boyhood, and then, undersized, he did not favor it as a mode of intercourse with his fellow creatures, as he had implied in the story he told Detweiler on their first meeting. Later he had fleshed out, but from his early twenties onward he had rarely show more taken any exercise worth the name. He habitually ate rich foods and drank hearty wines. In the bathtub he was not as sleek as when buttoned into his English suits. He was quite corpulent, his blood pressure ran high, and any quickening of foot pace cost him effort in breath. He had never received instruction and techniques of self-defense. Added to these disadvantages, his present role is victim of an attack was an absolute reversal of values to him and hence severely shocking; his profession was to be above the battle.

There are dozens of passages like this and more seemingly throwaway asides, as when a detective is looking in a shop window for a Christmas gift: "His son had asked for a basketball, but Tierney resented being told what to buy. It was alien to the spirit of Christmas." Or when Berger notes of an attorney, "He was a lawyer, trained to not show his feelings except as a device." Or when he depicts a character's thoughts about her husband: "Betty's trouble had always been that when she found a man with whom she felt intellectual affinity, he did not appeal to her physically, and vice-versa. She could hardly bear to be alone in Arthur's presence unless he was pawing her." These are the kinds of sentences, always elegant, that knock me out when I read Berger at his best.

I reread it for the first time in twenty years and it stands up well. Time hasn't touched this one. show less

Read this on vacation—started in the morning and finished it in the afternoon. Entertaining and satisfying. If I had read it over the course of a week, I may not have liked it as much.

A well-done sequel of sorts to Miami Blues, this one like its predecessor in its dark humor and deadpan style but unlike it in terms of the plot: there’s no equivalent to Junior here and the book is more leisurely paced. There are some crimes and Hoke solves them, but these are secondary to the portrait of a middle-aged detective trying to reclaim some of the dignity he lost so long ago that he can’t remember where he put it. There are also a few truly shocking moments where I covered my mouth with my hand. By any yardstick, Willeford’s a good writer.

The title essay is not only the best in the collection but pretty much the last word on the bomb, as far as I'm concerned. Other highlights include a really sharp appreciation of Orwell, a look at "naturalist" beaches, and a critical but not condescending appraisal of the Indy 500. If you don't get the book, at least read the title essay online. It's incredibly well done.

Quit after 150 pages and after I had to consult the family trees in the opening pages for the 937th time. Each person is spoken of as if they were in our family, which they aren't, the result being that the reader (or at least this one) never gets a solid sense of character and has to keep flipping back ("So wait ... Agnes is whose daughter?") I looked forward to reading this but I wish Mealer had just dealt with half the people.

Wholly enjoyable. Can't believe this isn't a movie, with J. K. Simmons as Dortmunder, Joe Pesci as Murch, and Danny DeVito as Kelp. Great caper book to listen to on walks or read on an airplane. Or at the kitchen table, for that matter. Why did I try to qualify the enjoyment I got from this? It's not up to Parker levels, but neither is anything else. (BTW, I wrote this before I knew that there was already a film version from 1972 with Robert Redford as Dortmunder, which, as a piece of casting, seems like having Tom Arnold play Don Corleone.)

"It frustrated him hopelessly that every move he made seemed to turn into an inevitable thing." That's the essence of The Assistant, a modern version of Crime and Punishment set in a turn-of-the-century Jewish grocery. The portrait of the suffering Morris Bober is perfect and Malamud avoids the kind of sentimentality or easy answers that would make a novel in this setting unreadable.

If you've never read Berger's works, start with this one, which I just reread after about twenty years. Still holds up--and better. Berger is so good at dramatizing the internal monologues of small-town losers that you can't believe how good he is and how funny, even when the writing isn't laugh-out-loud. He homes in on their cliches, values, and assumptions so well. A friend of mine just said, "Berger should be and should have been given full Postwar Literary Lion treatment. They're all fading now: Go to the store and the only one who still commands half a shelf or more is Kurt Vonnegut. But Berger should have shone alongside John Updike and more brightly than Philip Roth." Amen. This is Berger at his best.

Come for the title; stay for the story. Other reviewers here have complained that there's too much about the Ledo Road--but I thought that was all pretty interesting and a reminder of how much of modern warfare is simply slogging through awful terrain. It ain't all Steve Rogers beating up the Red Skull. This was an illuminating and genuinely interesting story. Who knew?

Bailed after 150 pages. Couldn’t get into it or care about what was happening.

How anyone cannot wholly love the Jeeves and Wooster books is beyond my comprehension.

This is one of the best, in which Bertie tries to out-Jeeves his valet in terms of hatching plans to get everyone out of the usual trouble (matrimony, losing the skills of a chef, presenting prizes at a grammar school, etc.). This one also treats the subject of gestures as a means to gage others' intentions but, like PGW's other books, does so incidentally: the only real "theme" that PGW ever really treated is that we need not think of the world as a wholly miserable place. I smiled the whole time I read this and laughed out loud more than once. It's just about perfect, and anyone who pooh-poohs Plum as "light reading" doesn't get it: that's like scorning Brian Wilson because "Wouldn't It Be Nice" isn't the Jupiter Symphony. And be wary of anyone who tries to tell you that these books "say something" about the class system in England or any of the other dull approaches people take in order to ruin their enjoyment of literature. None of PGW's books take place on the planet Earth, which is part of their charm. PGW knew this, and delivered.

If you've never read a Jeeves book, this one is a good starting point. There's no need to read them in the order in which they were published. But you do need to read them, immediately.

A fun, old-fashioned noir about s guy who works for the organization, know what I mean? The audio version on Hoopla is very good.

I wanted to like this more than I did. And there is much to like: Dubois knows his stuff and offers some interesting histories of various rules (offside and not fouling the keeper) and people (like Zidane and Maradona). The writing is clear and lively and the book moves from anecdote to anecdote. I’m sure that some readers who know more about the sport than I do will complain about what’s left out—in his chapter on forwards, for example, there's scant mention of the GOAT debate revolving around Messi and Reynaldo. But I am not nearly as much of a superfan as those who have watched the sport since infancy. I learned a lot about how Drogba intervened in Ivory Coast’s civil war and how the Rules of the Game were formed.

What marred my experience of The Language of the Game was how Dubois peppers the book with political asides in order to display his bona fides to his like-minded readers. Can't we get a day off? For example, in his chapter on the referee, Dubois describes the introduction of goal-line technology in the 2010 World Cup:

Its introduction was a concession to the fact that referees had, with some frequency, made mistakes about this in the past, by giving a goal when the ball hadn’t crossed the line or else claiming the ball hadn’t crossed the line when it did. The latter was famously the case in the 2010 men’s World Cup, when a goal scored by the US against Slovenia, which clearly went over the line, was disallowed by the Malian referee Koman show more Coulibaly. The decision was a lightning rod; suddenly all kinds of people who never seem to care much about soccer before were enraged that this referee—who, some noted, didn’t even speak English!—had stole a goal from the United States.

Of course anyone who complained that the referee didn’t speak English is an idiot—but Dubois throws that aside in here for no reason other than to demonstrate his own superiority to them, which is like claiming one’s superiority over a caveman. At the time, the language of that referee was not a major issue and the crack serves no other purpose than to call to mind the cliché of the Ugly American. He does this also in his chapter on the fan, in which he states that the Gold Cup tournament “causes occasional outbreaks of xenophobia among some US fans” and offers Tim Howard’s foolish 2011 complaint that the trophy ceremony was held in Spanish. Again, Dubois offers the argument of a lone blockhead as if it were representative of Americans as a whole. And are the US fans the only “xenophobic” ones? I've seen the USMNT play Paraguay and Ghana and both were great times with lots of friendly hi-fives between different countries' supporters. And if there’s any institution in which Americans do not fall into racism or xenophobia, it’s sports.

Dubois also speaks of the lawsuit brought by the USWNT that their earning less money than their male counterparts is discriminatory. But surely he knows that this is a matter of economics. If talent and trophies determined pay, the women would be paid much more than their lackluster male counterparts. If I could do what Neymar does, I, too, would be the reason for a $300 million transfer fee. But, for good or for ill, it’s the market that determines the salaries. Once more eyes are ready to watch ads during halftimes of women’s games, the salaries will rise.

These moments are not enough to ruin the book, but one of the great things about soccer is that, for ninety minutes, we can be free of hashtags and bumper stickers and virtue signaling. Dubois seems to want the experience of watching soccer to resemble that of reading the Washington Post. And that’s a shame, because he clearly loves the game. There are great stories to be told about how soccer has influenced (and been influenced by) national events; Dubois is solid and engaging when he sticks to them. show less

Abandoned this halfway through. There's more on the folk scene than I wanted, although if anyone wants to learn about the split between the real folkies and those seen as posers, this is a good source. I just have a hard time getting excited about "the sixties."

Not as good as the first one. I didn't mind that the plot doesn't really begin for 150 pages, since the pages move pretty quickly. The problems:

1. There's really no big mystery to be solved, since the author simply withholds information from the reader. The plot hinges on the identity of a mysterious figure named Zala. Salander and other people know who he is--so all that has to be worked out are the connections of who-knows-him-when. The book becomes an exercise in our catching up to what they know. This is not like other mysteries, where the reader is presented what the detectives know and thinks alongside of them. And maybe the mystery in Dragon Tattoo was like that, too, but I remember the solution being more satisfying. In that book, the solution is elegant and hinges on something the reader doesn't imagine. Here, the solution hinges on things that happened thirty years ago ("All the Evil"), like a folder dangled just out of the reader's grasp.

2. There are a lot of names thrown around--of people and places. A lot. We get passages like this:

Jurgensonn knew that the connection between Stalstrode and Bjork had to be there--there had to be a way for Blovnisky to reach Leppenstrode by Tuesday. And if Upsalla and Nevesterdomm couldn't make it, then Jungensoon and Sonarelstrom would have the upper hand. He decided to hack into Hoffenshammel's laptop and look for the file named [Yagermondormn].

I'm exaggerating to amuse, but this necessitates a lot of flipping back to look show more for past conversations. It also creates a lot of question marks over the reader's head. Small example: when Salander has to track the white Volvo, how does she know the name of the rental place?

3. This is one of those mysteries that moves along well enough with episodic action and dialogue--but then ends with thirty pages of paragraphs and speeches. And we get the classic example of bad-guys-catch-hero-but-decide-to-wait-and-stall-before-just-pulling-the-trigger, as is so well-parodied in the first Austin Powers movie when Dr. Evil won't simply kill Austin, but insists on placing him in the trap with the angry sea bass.

And as for the book's containing an Important Social Message--good grief. Imagine getting your social mores and opinions from mystery novels. I'll read the third one someday, but not any time soon. show less

When I started reading this, the B&W was a novelty; by the time I was finished I wondered why comics have color at all (or at least Batman ones). This collection of twenty stories is remarkable: there's a great array of styles, from hyper-realistic to impressionistic and the stories are almost all good, some with O. Henry endings and some a bit stranger. There are interesting headnotes about each artist and writer and sketches of outtakes and layouts what helped me appreciate how complicated telling a story with words an pictures can be. I really enjoyed the whole experience of reading this and looking at the artwork.

Hemingway can do in 7 pages what takes some writers 400--but this proves the obverse to be true. I'm 250 pp in and there's been about 7 good pages so far. This is the same man who wrote The Sun Also Rises and "The Killers?" The dialogue is often painful. Who talks like this? This is dull, dull, dull. I can't do another 250. Definitely a book widely praised because it has been widely praised. I'll honor it more in the breach than the observance.

The first essay, a history of Dallas intertwined with a history of Dallas, is brilliant. None of the others are as good, and McPherson inserts some self-congratulatory remarks to show his progressive bona fides; he's better writing about fracking than he is about Ferguson and his Monday-morning quarterbacking the use of the atomic bomb is both predictable and myopic. (The quotations he uses are fine but cherry-picked to suit what I assume was his position long before beginning his essay on Los Alamos, which is a shame, because so much of that essay is terrific.) Still, there's no denying the guy can write.

You go to work and try to get stuff done and someone screws up and now you have to fix it.

This isn't the first Higgins book to read; that's probably The Friends of Eddie Coyle. But it may be the best of the ones I've read so far. There are some monologues that go on a bit too long, but the scenes with Cogan are perfect--pitch perfect. The whole mechanism of the plot is something I've never seen in any other crime novel. The scene with Cogan and Frankie in the bar is worth the whole book. There's also a great recording of this on Audible. It's probably the most obscene thing I've ever read, but how often do you finish a book and genuinely wish it were much, much longer? I could read about Jackie Cogan for a thousand pages. And he has the best last line in American literature.

There is much to like about the first half: the internecine conflicts in the psychology community were news to me and the debates between behaviorists and cognitive scientists are well-detailed, as are earlier ones about whether or not psychology belongs properly in the lecture room, the lab, or the living room. The problem with the book is that Seligman constantly speaks about "positive psychology" and "optimism" without ever getting into the details of what these ideas entail, other than the vague assumption that mental health is not simply the absence of mental illness. By the time I reached the last hundred pages, I was ready for the book to end. (There are also two chapters in which Seligman defends himself again the charges that he worked in some secret psy-ops branch of the CIA or a secret branch of the Army. He spends far too much time defending himself there, but I guess he had a score to settle.) At bottom, this is a book about an idea that never really gets into the idea itself; it's like a book about Einstein's theory of relativity that talks about the formulation of the equation and its context but never explains why E=mc2.

I liked the first 75 pages and worked through the next 75, but then bailed. The book became too much a nest of quacking ducks, with people on the page for a minute and then vanishing. I honestly don't get all the glowing reviews. Bribes in a hotel room over TV rights? That's not a recipe for suspense. I kept waiting for the big turn, but it never seemed to arrive. Maybe it would have been better if Bensinger concentrated on one person, like Chuck Blazer. Maybe I'm just wrong about this one.

A good, short look at the collision of two momentous egos. Beam comes down hard on Nabokov in a way to which I'm unaccustomed: everyone (myself included) fawns over him (damn straight)--but Beam isn't in the same camp. I didn't realize how much of a big wheel Edmund Wilson was until I read this. Ultimately, it's a story about a friendship broken because of disagreements not over politics or adultery or money--but quarrels about Russian prosody. If you like Nabokov, this is worth a read.

For two weeks, I couldn't wait to read this. An hour into it, I couldn't wait to put it down. Wholly mannered, self-congratulatory writing that calls attention to the author more than his creations. And I love David Mamet.

Someone on Amazon called Sowell "Hammer of the Ignorant." That's perfect.

Here's how good this book is: I listened to it and also read parts of it of it on a copy I borrowed from the library--and as soon as I finished, I ordered the new, second and expanded edition, on Amazon so I could read it again. (I almost never, ever buy books brand new.) This treats themes that Sowell has been exploring for years, but the real focus of this one is that the world is not a level playing field, geographically or in any other way--and that we don't do anything to provoke progress by lying to ourselves about human history. At one point, Sowell offhandedly states, "If you want to help someone, tell him the truth; if you want to help yourself, tell him what he wants to hear." That's the core idea of the book. Highly recommended.

Nabokov can do no wrong.

It's hard to reconcile the facts that the author of these Dortmunder novels is the same as that of the Parker ones. The two Dortmunder books I've read are amusing enough for audiobooks in the car, but they're also pretty corny, with lots of forced humor. But the Parker ones (of which I've read the first nine) are ultra-cool. I also laugh much more while reading the Parker books, even though they don't have any jokes: I laugh at the over the top toughness of Parker and how he talks to those he finds beneath him.

Far be it from me to criticize the work of someone with the breadth of learning possessed by Andrew Pettigree; I've read his The Book in the Renaissance, which is great. This one is not: there's almost no narrative and almost too much about dozens of German printers whose names flee from one's memory after a page is turned.

Also--if you aren't familiar with Luther or what he did, this book won't help. Pettigree assumes you know about Tetzel, indulgences, justification by faith alone, etc. He also never gets into these ideas, instead offering ways in which Luther got out his word. We get the means of distribution but not what was distributed. The comparison to modern advertising--the "Brand" of the title--doesn't really work.

The art is striking and there are some good surprises, but be warned: this is only the beginning of the story and it seems that there is no way to get volume 2. (I know, I know: I can hunt down the single issues on eBay, but I'm not doing that.) Imagine watching a movie that grows on you and that gets you interested and then stops rather than ends. That's what it's like to read this. Or imagine reading Watchmen without the last two chapters.

Pros: Clean, crisp, evocative artwork. Interesting premise.
Cons: Too much teasing the reader: we get hints of this and that, but there's no payoff.

Truly awful. Bond-listening-to-complete-scenes-and-long-passages-of-dialogue-through-a-champagne-glass-pressed-against-a-wall awful. My threshold for Bond books is very low, but this is a real stinker. This is the kind of book where the villains pontificate about their plans and which Mike Meyers skewered so well in the Austin Powers movies. And the big threat is ... gambling in Jamaica! With possible KGB involvement! It's over before it even begins and reads like it was written in one sitting without ever having been reread or edited. Yet again, 007 proves that sometimes the movie is better than the book.

He who tires of Wodehouse is tired of laughing and life. How affirming to read about young people who aren't wringing their hands over microaggressions or sulking in Starbucks trying to finish their screenplays about the quest for social justice. While this isn't as good as any of the Jeeves books (because we don't have Bertie's narration), it's great fun to read and light in the best sense of the word. It's a musical comedy where the reader supplies his own songs or, rather, where the PGW touch on many of the sentences supplies them for him. It includes the Wodehouse staples of imperious aunts, eggheaded academics, cute girls with hearts all a-flutter, deadly hangovers, and a plot more complicated than that of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The title character is what the criminals in The Friends of Eddie Coyle call "stand up." I had a million things to do this morning but put them off so I could finish the last 100 pages in one sitting. I'm glad I read this as a tonic to the depressing news of the world.