Sheckley's 1960 novel postulates a future in which the criminals of Earth are stripped of their memories and shipped to a prison planet where crime rules and from whence there is no possible return. While the action surrounding prisoner Will Barrent is interesting, and Sheckley's commentary on human society amusing, the prison planet has neither reality nor absurdity enough to hold the plot together. It's all too clean.

Written in 1911 by Arthur Train, onetime assistant district attorney for New York county, later known for his humorous stories about the fictional lawyer Ephraim Tutt, "the best-known lawyer in America," these fictional reminiscences describe early 20th-century law as recounted by Artemas Quibble, a successfully shady New York criminal lawyer. The story is most interesting in the beginning, when Quibble recounts his early life and how he came to practice law, rather than later when it settles into a series of anecdotes about his cases and pettifogging legal slight of hand. But there's not enough action or humor to sustain it all the way through.

This epistolary novel covers the deaths of an heiress, her husband and her sister, all of whom have come under the influence of the sinister Baron R***, a mesmerist. The mechanism of the murder seems unlikely, but it becomes very obvious quite early on.

Much of the text of this absorbing 1905 novel about a presidential campaign shows how little American politics has changed, or perhaps what it has reverted to. Candidates no longer campaign cross country by train; the "West" no longer begins east of Chicago; and election news is no longer carried by telegram, but Wall Street robber barons who know little of the worries of the people, and care less, try to dictate policy to the candidate for the sake of their own vested interests using their fat purses as carrot and stick just as they did more than a century ago; news media are today as nearly partisan and prone to slanting the truth; and pomposity and bombastic rhetoric abound. The presidential candidate in this case is Jimmy Grayson, a relatively young man from the West, who makes up as an orator what he may lack in experience in office. He travels with his wife and their niece Sylvia Morgan, both of whom assist the campaign, plus a retinue of reporters, one of whom, John Harley of the New York Gazette, becomes increasingly important to the campaign, and to Sylvia, who, regrettably, is already engaged to marry a much older man, a prominent supporter of her uncle. Although Grayson is his party's nominee, his party is greatly divided on various issues, among them the influence of financiers. This and other questions of what is right vs. what is politically expedient to keep the party together and win the election come up again and again. U.S. politics at the outset of the 20th century were aligned differently than today. (Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was president then, opposing monopolies and promoting land conservation, but the GOP moved so far rightward after his second term that he founded the Progressive Party.) However, whatever the parties stood for then — they are not named in this novel — anyone reading will certainly find parallels to the present day in passages like these: “It was a gathering of the great, moneyed men of the party, eager to see the attitude of (the candidate) upon affairs that concerned them intimately, and prompt to take action in accordance. They were the guardians of ‘vested’ interests, interests watched over as few things in this world are, and they were resolved to see that they took no harm....“They were men of power, men whose brief words went far, and they held in their hands strings that controlled many and vast interests when they pulled them, and their hands were always on the strings.... They worked, by choice and by opportunity, in silence and the dark....“(The public) heard the candidate tell of mighty corporations, of a vague and distant place called Wall Street, where fat men, with soft, white fingers and pouches under their eyes, sat in red-carpeted offices and pulled little but very strong strings that made farmers on the Western plains, two thousand miles away, dance like jumping-jacks, just as the fat men wished, and just when they wished. These fat men were allied with others in Europe, pouchy-eyed and smooth-fingered like themselves, and it was their object to own all the money-bags of the world, and gather all the profits of the world's labor....”“The conversation was exclusively commercial and financial. (The financiers believed) the whole science of government pertained to the development of trade, and it was the business of a people, as well as of a man, to stick to the main point. It was for this reason, too, that Mr. Crayon incidentally let it be understood that he did not value a college education. He had several university graduates working for him on small salaries, while he had never been inside the walls of a university, and that was the beginning and end of the matter; there could be no further discussion.”

The trio of Penelope (now married), Francesca (engaged) and their older friend, Salemina, are once again traveling in the British Isles, this time in Ireland. It's not really successful as either a travelogue or a novel. The travel is sketchier than in the previous volumes on England and Scotland, and the romantic element — a reunion between Salemina and a long lost swain — takes place so much offstage that it adds little interest.

A 1953 story on something of same theme as C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons": Post-war anti-intellectualism has put deliberate "Illiterates" in charge of the country, with stigmatized, uniformed "Literates" they hire to do the dirty work of reading and writing when absolutely necessary. Most of the Illiterates aren't unintelligent; they merely don't have book learning. Technology seems to have escaped censure, so there are plenty of machines, recording devices and other mechanisms in use by both classes. The Literates, though deemed a necessary evil, are so hated they must go armed and with bodyguards to defend themselves. Yet they are entrusted, among other things, with medical care, reporting for news broadcasts and teaching schools for Illiterates' children. The implications of that are obvious, and not everyone is what he seems. The action centers on an Illiterate department-store mogul who is running a senatorial campaign, his children, and the political plotting and divided loyalties among both Illiterate and Literate camps. It's not a bad read, if you can ignore the logical fallacies, but it's far from Piper's best work, and Kornbluth handled the concept much better.

The 19th century abounded in books about the royalty of obscure little principalities, which let young girls dream about becoming princesses. This is the boys' equivalent, in which a pair of British ne'er-do-wells knocking about the Raj decide to make for the frontier of Afghanistan with a plan to set up as rulers over the unsophisticated natives. They get what they deserve. To me, the narrator, a journalist, is the most interesting character, though he's very much in the background.

One of a series of humorous first-person novels purportedly by "Josiah Allen's Wife," Samantha, this one covers the Upstate New York couple's visit to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It takes a while to get into Samantha's country dialect — and I'm not entirely certain I did figure out all of it — and she's pretty preachy, especially on the subjects of temperance and wimmen's, er, women's issues, and inclined to ramble. In fact, she doesn't even get to the fair till Chapter 10. The story is even lighter on plot than "The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair," and, despite funny bits here and there, less amusing overall. Although Holley includes lots of description of the fair itself, much of it reads as if she took it from "The Best Things to Be Seen at the World's Fair" or some other guidebook. Chicago history buffs with an interest in the fair will likely want to read this for completism's sake, but there's not much here for anybody else. "Josiah Allen's Wife" published a slew of books and was apparently very popular in her day; perhaps her other volumes are more entertaining.

Four friends come up with a pie-in-the-sky scheme to start a newspaper that's going to net them millions ... but getting it going proves tougher than they predict. The reader can likely predict what will happen just from the title, but it's a nice read anyhow, with a touch of romance.

Very sweet and funny story of a soft-hearted, middle-aged ex-sailor, now with a country candy route, who becomes smitten with the housekeeping cousin of old friends.