Operation Shylock

Philip Roth the writer becomes Philip Roth the character in this novel, bedeviled by an impersonator in Israel. It is a dizzying and exhilarating trip in which, to the author's great credit, both cockamamie ideas and their refutations are equally convincing.

The Revenge of the Analog

Subtitled "Real Things and Why They Matter," David Sax's book argues for the superiority of physical, analog artifacts over their digital counterparts in several areas: for example, Moleskine notebooks, vinyl records, classroom teaching, and print newspapers. It is a necessary argument and, when dovetailed with a book like Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle, could form a useful philosophy of turning one's back on the digital world.

Zero Zero Zero

Roberto Saviano caught my attention with Gomorrah, an account of how Naples was fouled by drugs, crime, and pollution, and here he widens his lens to explain international cocaine trafficking. Widens, and helpfully focuses: for example, with microscopic detail on the ways in which drug gangs disguise and ship their product. His form of using traditional explanatory journalism woven with a personal narrative takes some getting used to, but ultimately it succeeds.

The Noise of Time

This Julian Barnes novel about the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich hits, forgive me, all the right notes. It presents biographical information, the political background, and a credible account of the composer's inner thoughts all in a compact, three-movement "sonata" package. The scenes describing a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District, its rejection by Stalin, and the mortal fear this caused in Shostakovich are particularly effective.

Adjustment Day

The themes in this Chuck Palahniuk novel are intriguing enough: another American revolution, a new nation segregated by race (or sexuality), a misunderstood guru. But the execution has a dashed-off quality that never succeeds in lifting the characters or the concept off the page. A novel that is not believable cannot be called a success, no matter how entertaining the special effects.

Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death

Alexander Cockburn puts chess on the psychiatrist's couch with mixed results. The stories of the lives of some unusual chess champions (Alekhine and Morphy) and other figures like Stefan Zwieg will be of general interest. Plumbing the depths of Freudian theory in relation to chess, less so.

The Only Story

Julian Barnes's novel reminded me of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. Both are about young affairs that sour and a man who settles into a humdrum life. Barnes falls into the trap that just about every novelist falls into -- including especially English ones like McEwan and Graham Greene -- in treating love as a noun, a freestanding wondrous entity that someone "falls into"; instead, it should be seen as a verb, something that is done, worked at, the art of placing another person above oneself. If  a novelist could read Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving and base characters on its truths, that might be a great book.

Wonder Hero

J.B. Priestley's novel came out in the 1930s, long before the "15 minutes of fame" quip. Here, an ordinary worker is turned into a hero for something he didn't entirely do. Earnest, a little plodding, but pleasant.

It's a Battlefield

Graham Greene's early novel concerns a Communist bus driver who struck and killed a policeman during a demonstration and who is scheduled to be hanged. Something about the style of this one rubbed me the wrong way: congested and unnatural and showoffy are adjectives that come to mind.

Double-Barrel

Nicolas Freeling's inspector Van der Valk heads out to the boonies to investigate a poisoned-pen campaign that has resulted in suicides. The story provides an excellent picture of small-town life, its jealousies and pettiness. The solution to one of the two "barrels" of the title was evident to me long before the end; the other proved more surprising.