Longitude

Dava Sobel's entertaining and brisk account shows how a carpenter and craftsman beat astronomers and mathematicians in the race to accurately determine longitude. John Harrison, a determined tinkerer who produced accurate clocks, won out in a decades-long struggle over star-gazing academics.

The Gropes

Tom Sharpe at 80, this novel demonstrates, is no match for the Sharpe of the 1970s who produced such viciously funny books as Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue. The Gropes has all the ingredients of a "savage and sidesplitting" tale, as one review has it, but they never come together.

The Sand Child

Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Sand Child will appeal to a certain kind of reader: one who enjoys prose scented with poetry and magical effects. The majority, I suspect, will feel left out of this tale of a girl made to live as a man.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

Roddy Doyle's portrait of a marriage, told in the woman's voice, is punishingly bleak. But the light does peep in, and Paula Spencer becomes a kind of heroine.

Headlong

The best parts of Headlong are the historical digressions into Netherlands history and Pieter Bruegel. The novel's action feels bloated, covering nearly 400 pages when 250 would probably do. 

This Way, Miss

It is hard to imagine Louis CK owning the country's largest collection of books on a subject, or Jim Gaffigan being a friend of Philip Glass. But George Jessel owned an enormous library on world religions (and read much else besides), and Jessel knew George Gershwin and scores of others (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Harry Truman, John Barrymore) who were not simply "personalities." In This Way, Miss, published in 1955 and framed as an offering to his 13-year-old daughter, Jessel ranges over issues great and small: close calls in airplanes, McCarthyism, theology, the newly born state of Israel, fellow entertainers, opera.

Today an intellect is something to be hidden, if it exists at all. A comedian must never make the audience feel dumb. Jim Gaffigan wrote a book called Dad Is Fat.