First off: great jokes. I had heard a few of them before, but all of them are great.

Next: The philosophy. You don’t learn a huge amount of philosophy from this book. If you’ve taken an intro course in college recently, you probably know it all already. If you took it 20 years ago, you probably forgot a lot, so this will be a refresher. If you took it 40 years ago, you probably forgot even more, and they probably didn’t get to some of the language, postmodern, and feminist philosophers anyway.

Jokes and philosophy together: They go surprisingly well, actually. So many jokes (and joke types) actually illustrate philosophical principles nicely.

I am reading the weekly Torah portions in this translation.

It doesn’t answer every question or solve every mystery, but I found the end of “The End” to be a very satisfying ending to a wonderfully entertaining series, which I have been reading for much of the past two months.

(I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but like all the best children’s literature, this series has some great jokes that only adults will get. In fact, some of the jokes require a knowledge of pop culture, classic literature, and Jewish culture. Nevertheless, you don’t have to get all the jokes to enjoy the series.)

In the end, the series is a wonderful meditation on good and evil, the nature of civilization, and the process of growing up. It’s very clear-eyed on all of these, without sugar-coating anything. Perfect for thoughtful children from ages 8 or 9 and up.

Wow. It took me a while to read this, but it was worth it. It’s like a symphony. Ever element in it, from the big themes to individual words and sentences, has a place that works with and against every other element. The different plot strands and characters weave together (sometimes in unpredictable—at least to me—ways). None of the characters is all-good or all-bad. Every chapter has at least one stunningly phrased revelation about how people really act and think and feel.

“A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” is the book Thoreau was working on while he lived at Walden Pond. It’s the story of a boat trip he took with his brother into New Hampshire. Since it’s Thoreau, though, there are lots of digressions, some of them on themes that would make their way into “Walden.” I didn’t like this one as much as I like “Walden”—which is one of my all-time favorite books—but if you think you might be a Thoreau fan, you should read this one, too.

The title story makes up more than half of the book. It’s an allegory about beggars with various powers, heavily annotated with explanations of its Kabbalistic symbolism.

The rest of the book consists of much shorter fables (some less than a page).

If you’re interested in mysticism in general and Jewish mysticism in particular, give this book a try.

An orphan from the north of England gets caught up in Shakespeare’s company of actors in London. Is this a promising plot, or what? Lots of skullduggery about acting companies stealing each other’s plays. Our hero Widge learns some good life lessons, along with his fellow kids in the company. We look forward to reading the sequel, Shakespeare’s Scribe.

Dromgoole, who recently became artistic director of the Globe Theatre, writes about how Shakespeare influenced his life and thought at every stage (and on every stage, too). The last part is his account of a week-long walk retracing Shakespeare’s steps from Stratford to London.

Rosenbaum nicely summarizes the major issues in the world of Shakespeare—editing his texts, reading his lines, even trying to decide what’s truly “Shakespearean.”

Minor quibbles: At times, he’s repetitive, and the sentence fragments get irritating.

I really loved this book! A group of four kids respond to a newspaper ad and, after a series of tests, they are chosen by Mr. Benedict to undertake an important mission that may have something to do with “the Emergency” everyone worries about. The two boys and two girls all get to use their special talents and learn to be brave.

May be a little scary for younger kids, but I think smart kids 8+ would get a lot out of this book.