The Code: Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-At-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct, Bernstein. Non-fiction. I can’t say I’m surprised, though I am a bit disappointed, that sports writing seems to be far more about the sports than about the writing. If I never see the phrase “For whatever the reason” again, I will never again be irritated by it (first, it’s pleonastic: it adds no content to the sentence. Second, it’s ungrammatical: it should be “For whatever reason” or “Whatever the reason”). It showed up in both Bernstein’s text and the interviews, so either he re-wrote his subjects or everybody in sports talks similarly. Really, it could go either way. Complaints aside, though, the book does a reasonable job with its topic—and now, back to the complaints—though it could have accomplished its job in many fewer pages.

Surveillance, Raban. No. This is the first (to my knowledge) Publishers Weekly starred review recipient I have given a “No.” For much of the reading, I thought I would go the other way with the verdict, but (doubtless due to my own lack of sophistication) on reflection I must conclude that Raban has merely wasted my time.

Mine All Mine, Davies. No. Davies seems to want this to be Soon I Will Be Invincible, or at least Bad Monkeys, but it’s just not. At the same logical point in the plot where I settled in to finish Half a Crown, I could very happily have set Mine All Mine down and thought of it almost never again. Davies is a decent writer, but he’s simply not good enough to succeed at the level of cleverness he attempted. Footnotes are especially not recommended.
Addendum: Turns out I hadn’t even finished the book; I was about a third of the way through the last chapter, and the book demonstrated its put-downability by letting me put it down and imagine I had finished it (I realized my misapprehension only when I was packing it up to take it back to the library and wondered why the bookmark was still in it). I think I like the ending I imagined it had better than the one it actually has.

Half a Crown, Walton. Yes. In most respects this last volume is the best of Walton’s “Small Change” series (Farthing and Ha’penny being the first two). I don’t know how long it’s been since I last burned through the final third or so of a book in one sitting, but Walton succeeded completely in making me need to know what happened next. My complaints are quite minor, arguably ironic, and outside the scope of my review

A Mixture of Frailties, Davies. Yes. I can think of only so many ways to praise the writing of Robertson Davies. The present work is up to the high standard, engaging if not quite compelling. This gem most caught my attention:

Wit and high spirits and a sense of fun—yes, they’re wonderful things. But a sense of humour—a real one—is a rarity and can be utter hell. Because it’s immoral, you know, in the real sense of the word: I mean, it makes its own laws; and it possesses the person who has it like a demon. Fools talk about it as though it were the same thing as a sense of balance, but believe me, it’s not. It’s a sense of anarchy, and a sense of chaos. Thank God it’s rare.

Ha’penny, Walton. Yes. Follows Farthing, which I think I read after I started writing reviews, but which I apparently didn’t review. They are more or less indistinguishable in character of the plot, quality, and structure . I’ll be reading Half a Crown as soon as my library can get me a copy, but I think I’ll be more than half hoping that there won’t be a Quid or Guinea in the offing unless Walton comes up with something a little more surprising or otherwise interesting. Walton’s lead is likable enough, and the writing is just fine, but the themes are nearly tiresome in their timeliness, and I prefer a bit more escape in my escapist literature.