IS THIS ANYTHING? by Jerry Seinfeld (Simon & Schuster). Don't look this book over in a shop; but do by all means take it home. The first few minutes of browsing—well, once past the welcoming and charming mini-memoir of an introduction—for a very few minutes (just long enough to get you to put it back on the bestsellers table) reading these spare, all but austere, short typeset lines can seem, well, okay, technically admirable, of course, but . . . but then, that soon, you shock your own self by laughing out loud, all by yourself (or perhaps alarming another in an otherwise quiet room). This is a big book; Jerry dares to claim that it's every “bit” that he's ever delivered in performance—a billion or so, I think—averaging twenty or so lines, some longer, some even shorter. Each evokes irresistibly that calm, observant, Seinfeld voice that's already in your brain, rising, never quite predictably, into vividly felt desperation or outrage. So a lot of enormously enjoyable reading sessions, each maybe the length of a comedy club turn.

THE SEARCHER by Tana French (Viking). Unmistakably Tana French, a stand-alone, big thriller: deeply characterized—people who become very real under your close attention—recognizably ingenious; but a western? It's the west of Ireland, but there's no joke here; in structure, at least, that's what it is, and a classic. A lone investigator comes to a remote small town that's suspicious of outsiders . . . and the author has owned up to having come to love classic American western fiction like that of Larry McMurtry and others, so. . . .

EARTHLINGS by Sayaka Murata (Grove). Surprisingly beautiful, even though fierce, satirical novel of contemporary Japan. It opens with charming, oddball children, whom we'll follow. So it's warming at first, but then becomes ever more desperately fearful and then angrily violent, expressing, clearly, its author's feelings about the rigidly conformist culture of bourgeois, mercantile Japan. This is not, somehow, at all exotic. Think, maybe, of a harder, more nearly science-fiction version of the American classic BABBITT. Plus, yeah, sort of dreamily beautiful.

WAR: HOW CONFLICT SHAPED US by Margaret MacMillan (Random House). Engrossing world history—another thoughtful history of everything, from a particular point of view that illuminates just about everything else (there are “what if this had ended just a bit differently?” examples that are breathtaking to consider). Lovers of military history should consider it carefully—it's at least adjacent to their core interests. But for lovers of understanding how all of us got where we are today, it's startlingly illuminating. Astonishing, how intimately and decisively war, systematic international violence, can affect all that follows.