Quick note before dashing out to complete Christmas shopping (it’ll be a PlayStation 2 for my boys, by the way, and not an Xbox, for reasons that will follow):

Ulysses: Concur with Amis and Derb. Unreadable. If you want a good Ulysees, read The Autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant.

<A href=”http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0140444173 “>War and Peace: Concur with Jonah. Wonderful. (Read during first term at business school as antidote to constant stream of numerical analysis.) More than enough battle scenes to get you through all the drawing-room stuff.

Anna Karenina: A terrible puzzle. If War and Peace is so exciting, how can Anna Karenina be so dull? Lack of battle scenes? Dunno. Can only tell you what when I got to the end, I felt that if I could have I’d have shoved Anna in front of a train myself–about 600 pages earlier.

Moby Dick: Who was it—K-Lo?—who said she’d never finished this book? Oh, how woefully, woefully in error. This is a stunning work, with prose that’s electric from “Call me Ishmael” to Ahab’s last, drowning bubbles. Try again, K-Lo, do, do, do.