To kick off the Winter of Dave Read-a-thon, I just finished the latest Pirates! adventure and a Philip Roth short story. Your after action reports:

Pirates! in Adventures with Communists by Gideon Defoe

In the third volume of the Pirates! series, the Pirate Captain is confused with Karl Marx, the hairy philosopher behind the growing communist party in Europe. The Adventure seeking pirates end up tasked with ferrying the wanted Marx to France, where he continues to be threatened by large blonde women intent on framing the communists for crimes they didn’t commit. Naturally, chases, battles, and the Pirates brilliant wit and wisdom all come out. While I was disappointed to see the libertarian Pirates! helping the Communists, rather than fighting them, I did like the way the Pirate Captain handled growing proletariat dissent among his crew - play stick swords in the agitator. I rate this the best Pirates! adventure since Pirates! in Adventures with Scientists, certainly better than their Adventure with Ahab, and a definite must read.

Special thanks to my dad, who bought the book for me as a Chanukkah present before I even knew it existed.

The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth

While sitting around my apartment, I picked up my roommate’s copy of Goodbye Columbus and began reading one of the short stories. “The Conversion of the Jews” follows Ozzie Freedman, a Jewish pre-teen who asks too many questions in Hebrew School. Ozzie resists hypocrisy and inconsistencies in the Rabbi’s answers to his questions, ultimately leading to an altercation where he escapes to the roof and forces the conversion of all those around him to Christianity. A quick read, and still insightful nearly a half-century after it was originally published. The Jewish Community is still grappling with the same issues Roth attacked, now as Roth’s generation struggles to pass its ties to Jewish tradition onto the next. You can find the story in Goodbye Columbus or in a number of short fiction collections.

Categories: Books, Winter of Dave