Ragtime

On reading Ragtime for the second time (the first being 36 years ago), what stands out are Doctorow's beautifully chiseled sentences and his cool intelligence. There is a debt to be paid to Dos Passos for the kaleidoscopic and intersecting story, and like that earlier author a clear-eyed realism reveals a mostly dark landscape. Still, a bit of light is allowed to emerge.

A Tokyo Romance

Ian Buruma's memoir of his time as a young film student in Tokyo in the 1970s is a vibrant and instructive look into Japanese culture and customs.

Astral Weeks

Ryan Walsh has excavated 1968 Boston to uncover the origins of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. A prominent role in the account goes to the Mel Lyman "family" and its compound, which although it had little to do with Morrison, was a centerpiece of the city's alternative and radical milieu. Walsh does a fine job of placing the reader into the social, political and artistic world of the time.

The Mangan Inheritance

The perils of romanticizing ancestry are on display in this Brian Moore novel, which has agreeable gothic elements. 

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

A stray mention of this title in a book about Van Morrison's Belfast sent me down a path to a probable new favorite writer. I knew of Brian Moore, but not by name. Meaning, Black Robe has always been a favorite film, but I never bothered to find out who had written the screenplay (and the book). Moore's Emperor is set in World War II Belfast and centers around the young Gavin Burke, a member of a first aid team who is a middling academic performer (but loves poetry) and can't get very far with his girlfriend. War has left Belfast unscathed as the novel opens, and many Catholics are in fact rooting for Hitler against the British. Moore excels in the use of gentle humor, irony, and sharp characterizations. A dramatic set-piece leads into a tremendously satisfying conclusion.

Go

Kazuki Kaneshiro's novel tells of the ethnic Korean experience of living in Japan. It is both instructive in cultural and social senses, and a winningly told story of young love.

Pure Hollywood

These short stories by Christine Schutt are appalling. The characters are inhuman literary constructs. And the writing is, as another reviewer put it, evasive.

In Praise of Wasting Time

Alan Lightman's short book on the need for the brain to wander, and rest, to be productive is timely. Yet it was Pascal who wrote 400 years ago that most of the world's problems can be traced to a person's inability to sit quietly in a room, so Lightman would have done better to include a bit of context, or at least a tip of the hat, to earlier thinkers. This topic was also covered more entertainingly in Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle. Still, Lightman's scientific observations are welcome, even though he and everyone else on this campaign is almost certainly doomed to failure.

The Neighborhood

Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel tackles issues of privacy and power in 1990s Peru. Into the mix he adds a fair amount of eroticism. The Neighborhood serves as both a critique of declining Western institutions and a template for the defense for liberty. A book that will never be ranked among his best, it is nonetheless a bracing effort.