Our Man in Havana
By Graham Greene

I'm beginning to see a pattern here that I didn't notice before: A lot of these books, including this one, center on neurotic, detached people who are forced in one way or another to deal with the world. This novel is about Jim Wormold, a quiet vacuum cleaner salesman who reluctantly becomes involved in the Cold War espionage game in pre-revolutionary Cuba. I've read it a few times—not only because it made me laugh out loud but because, even in its most satiric moments, it shows how fragile government is; how haywire, accidental, and ludicrous international policy can be; and how decisions that change millions of people's lives are often the result of terrible accidents.