Plays come and go, but this one, first produced at London's Royal Court in 1995, has all the hallmarks of a timeless treasure. It's drama, and poetry, full of unbelievably rich characterizations and history of Ireland's Time of Troubles.

Thomas Dunne, the seventy-something Da, anchors the play firmly, though not exactly in the play's here and now, about 1932.

Three of Da's four children have relegated him to an Irish county home, not for lack of love. No, Da's gone mad, as his effervescent lapses into the past make altogether real.

He is not so mad, though, not to know the truth of things, and there is the beauty in this Lear-like drama.

Play-lovers will melt on reading or hearing the final 15-minute soliloquy of this masterpiece. Da tells about a dog he had as a child, a dog his father did not want him to have, one that he brought home anyway.

"And I knew that dog and me were for slaughter. My feet carried me on to where he stood, immortal you would say in the door. And he put his right hand on the back of my head, and pulled me to him so that my cheek rested against the buckle of his belt....

"And I would call that the mercy of fathers, when the love that lies in them deeply like the glittering face of a well is betrayed by an emergency, and the child sees at last that he is loved, loved and needed and not to be lived without, and greatly."

That hint of the powerful closing, though, is just the beginning. For the play proves equally rich throughout. Alyssa A. Lappen

The first step is to analyze cost management, and the book provides a three-step healthcheck to help you to get a handle on this aspect. Second, you are shown how to trace cost allocations in a manner that borrows heavily from activity-based cost management techniques. The next step in the book's approach is to develop a strategy and supporting tactics for achieving efficiency. Then chapter on key performance indicators and benchmarking shows you what you should be measuring and how to compare your cost management posture with industry norms for your industry segment. This chapter also gives caveats about benchmarking to which you should pay close attention if you are new to benchmarking or frameworks because it's easy to lose sight of the objectives (cost management) when you're exploring this aspect of management. The book concludes with chapter that goes deeper into strategic planning, and two invaluable appendices on accounting techniques and typical cost structures.

What I particularly like about this book is there is no theory, silver bullets or preaching. It gives an approach that is not only achievable, but is consistent with standard practices in cost management in and out of thr IT domain.

As I read through this book I began to gain a wider view of how to go about analyzing service delivery and support costs through a systematic analysis of cost allocations. The three IT expense health checks in chapter 2 were immediately useful because they addressed key performance indicators that show how well costs are managed, the impact standardization has on controlling costs, and the importance of gaining control over physical assets (this is directly related to my original reason for reading the book). Another gem I gleaned from this book is the fact that fixed costs are like a shell game - there is an apportionment of fixed costs, which are finite and driven by a budget, among functional areas. The trick is to make sure that the budget for fixed costs is apportioned in accordance with the importance of the areas to which they are targeted. Also interesting is the premise that budgets should be based on a mix of short- and long-term initiatives, which is different from common practice in that too often budgets are allocated to initiatives strictly based on priority or perceived importance.

This book deals with strategy as much as cost control, which is logical since both have some obvious relationships. Here too the book contained some excellent advice, the most sensible of which is that methodologies are not as important to a strategy as understanding the strategic issues and building an integrated team. This applies to both projects and operations, and should be carefully considered by anyone who rushes out to buy the latest tools (most of which lock you into a methodology) before thinking through the real goals and objectives. The two appendices were invaluable resources for reviewing accounting principles and giving a complete cost breakdown structure that is typical of most IT organizations.

Picture Vladimir Nabokov. In the hall of mirrors that is popular culture, he is the dirty man who wrote the dirty book "Lolita," about a 12-year-old "nymphet" -- he invented the term, by the way -- and her affair with an older man.

Angle the mirror another way, and he is one of the founders of the modernist novel, which to some people -- myself included -- that's a damning phrase. "Modernist" and "post-modernist" literature seems a) self-referencing to the point of egotism; b) dedicated to the advancement of decedent themes, and to score big points as a writer, pile it on, brother; and c) obsessed with the discovery that the "arts" -- whether books, pictures or movies -- are artificial, and that we use them to create, well, books, pictures and movies.

Unless you think I am making it up, here's an example drawn from real life: a few years back, a Charlotte museum mounted an exhibition of a painter's work, one of which was a canvas whose front side was turned toward the wall, exposing a paint-stained frame. A newspaper reviewer breathlessly informed the reading public that the artist did this "to inform the viewer that most paintings are recetangular."

Now, a reasonably intelligent person could probably reach that conclusion without much effort, but discoveries like these seem to drive those who tread into the "modern" era of art.

So Vlaidmir Nabokov's reputation is caught between two very opposing poles. He either panders to the worst tastes of man, or the worst tastes of art.

Fortunately, he is neither, and the Library of America agrees. The non-profit publisher throws its reputation behind Nabokov as a writer worth reading by publishing all of his English-language novels in three volumes. The first volume covers his work from 1941 to 1951: "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," "Bend Sinister," and his memoir, "Speak, Memory." The middle work contains the notorious "Lolita," "Pale Fire," "Pnin," and the "Lolita" screenplay Nabokov wrote for Stanley Kubrick. The concluding volume contains "Ada," "Transparent Things," and "Look at the Harlequins!"

But of these works, only "Lolita" stands alone. It is not a dirty book, and one should pity those American and British tourists who, in the mid-1950s, bought the pale olive-green two-volume paperbacks published in Paris by the notorious Olympia Press. Those expecting frankly pornographic stories like "The Story of O" and "How to Do It" would have been sorely disappointed in Humbert Humbert's self-confessed defense of his rape (not "seduction," which implies a willingness to be seduced) and exploitation of Delores Haze, "Lolita, light of my life,fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Even Olympia's publisher was taken in, telling a mutual friend that he though Nabokov was Humbert, and that he was attempting to popularize nymphet love.

What does become apparent after reading through the volumes (and aided by an excellent two-volume biography by Brian Boyd) is that there is much more to Nabokov than meets the eye. Delving deeper in his works reveals a funhouse hall of mirrors that can lead to a definitive end, and there's not much in modernist fiction that could substantiate that claim.

What sets Nabokov off from other writers is his use of the language. Raised in Tsarist Russia, Nabokov was a child prodigy who was taught Russian, French and English at an early age. His prose is elegent, his command of English astounding. It's close to the prose of Henry James, but except for the foreign phrases, which the Library editions provide translations and explanations, far more understandable.

Descriptions pulled at random from "Lolita" ring as if English was a newly minted language, capable of expressing humor ("The bed was a frightful mess with overtones of potato chips") and snobbish anger ("Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown").

Even, when Humbert meets his Lolita long after she escaped his clutches, when he believes that he still loves her, heart-rending: "In her washed-out grey eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood."

This is not casual reading, but neither is it reading-as-masochistic exercise, with furrowed brows and an exasperated flipping of once-read pages. There is a surface meaning that is easily accessible, but there are deeper meanings, in-jokes, ironies and moral questions worthy of consideration.

The best volume of the three is the second, which contains "Lolita," the screenplay he wrote for Stanley Kubrick (which was not used), the comic novel (for Nabokov at least) "Pnin" and "Pale Fire."

But good works can be found in the other volumes as well. "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," in the first volume, is the author's account of his biographical research on his half-brother, the brilliant writer Sebastian Knight, who had died recently of a heart condition after writing a half-dozen novels. It bears all the hallmarks of the post-modernist novel replete with a self-absorption with writers, spurious biography, an unreliable narrator and ironical references. "Speak, Memory," also in the first volume, is Nabokov's memoirs about growing up in Russia.

Indeed, the only disadvantage to reading Nabokov is that it may cause a nagging niggling in the back of your head, while reading novels in the future, that they just cannot compare to those composed by the American from Russia.