The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe – Douglas Adams, 1980 ★★★★½

Intergalactic Dining at its Finest

Transforming a successful novel into an enduring media franchise requires more than just skill or luck. It requires a magnificent first sequel. Every subsequent entry in the series can run the gamut from brilliant to horrible, but that second book must sing.

The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe does just that, beginning with a clever title whose double meaning becomes a fascinating storyline in its own right. But it is just a small part of the rich pageant on offer. Douglas Adams delivers a book even more conceptual, expansive and hilarious than what came before.

This is the book that turned Adams’s brainchild into a cultural touchstone; it’s also a terrific read.

You Can’t Take It With You – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1936 ★½

Taking it Easy...Too Easy

Screwball comedies of the 1930s are hard to judge. They live within their own unique construct where people spout earnest nonsense all at once. Roles are overturned, conventions twisted, love springs from the oddest of places. Lessons are not learned; rather they are flouted.

A first-rate screwball comedy freezes time as brilliantly as a Grecian urn. Check out Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey, and The Lady Eve, all of which spoof familiar romantic tropes, spit dialogue like rappers on Ritalin, and retain the power of laughter nearly a century on.

Then there is You Can’t Take It With You, a rare comedy that won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Even before that happened, it was a Broadway comeback hit for playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Here is a screwball comedy where time has not been so kind.

Jaws – Peter Benchley, 1974 ★★★

Divine Judgement on Long Island Sound

When the people of a Long Island resort town abandon themselves to lives of carnal frolic, suburban complacency, and underworld corruption, only a 20-foot Great White shark can set them on the path to righteousness. So goes one reasonable takeaway from this bestseller.

Another would be that this is nothing like the classic movie it would spawn the following summer, though that isn’t so a bad thing. Jaws the novel is just a different kind of fish.

Martin Brody, sheriff of the economically struggling shoreline town of Amity, has two problems. One is a shark that has begun feeding off its population. The other is his community wants the beaches kept open for the tourist money it brings.

Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh, 1930 ★★★½

Aiming for the Gut

So much of what made Evelyn Waugh great, including the decade he blossomed in and the smart set he dished so ruthlessly about, is on display in this, his second novel, a triumph of form over substance.

No doubt Waugh intended it just so.

In many important ways, Vile Bodies marks a turning point in the author’s career. He already had his signature voice worked out. Here he aims for scope and bite, casting a wide net on the social antics of the jaded aristocratic scions dubbed the “Bright Young Things.” These were people he knew and loved best. And they loved him back, even more after he pilloried them in print with this mordant, often acid book.

The Divine Wind – Rikihei Inoguchi & Tadashi Nakajima with Roger Pineau, 1958 ★★

Survival Was Not an Option

Call it bushido, call it warrior spirit, call it wanton military terrorism, there is something about the idea of young men willingly flying their planes into enemy ships that is hard to process, even more than 80 years after it was part of daily life in World War II.

To read the story the way it is told by two principal architects of Imperial Japan’s kamikaze program, the problem wasn’t finding volunteers for these suicide missions. The problem was saying no to those who had to wait for another opportunity.

Believable? Not entirely, to be sure. But two things about Japan in 1944 helped make the kamikaze idea reality. One: Their people were steeped in a tradition of honor centered around self-sacrifice. Two: They had already all but lost the war by any conventional metric.

Calypso – Ed McBain, 1979 ★½

Who Feels Like Dancing?

Has this ever happened to you? You re-read a book you remember really disliking, only this time you can’t recall what it was that put you off. What you are reading flows really well and keeps you engaged. Was it you? A bad mood, say, or an uncomfortable chair?

This happened to me with Calypso, a novel I remember being a nadir of my previous jaunt through the 87^th Precinct. But blow me down; what a strong start! It has what you look for in a police procedural: a compelling murder victim, a sense of authentic urgency and sundry aspects of police process brought in with smooth clarity.

Then with no warning it takes a hard left into Silence Of The Lambs territory, with a crazy subplot that more or less renders all prior conventional police work meaningless. This isn’t the worst 87^th Precinct novel; it does pull one in. But it may just be the most disjointed.

Suspiria de Profundis – Thomas De Quincey, 1845 ★

A Second Helping of Opium

Over a century before Timothy Leary told a generation of young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” a conservative Anglican beat him to the punch, sparking a tide of self-idealization, impiety and riotous psychedelic expression that became known as “addiction literature.”

Would Thomas De Quincey have recognized himself as its instigator?

The book that made it happen was his 1821 Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, which made De Quincey an overnight sensation. But as if sensing his title as literature’s reigning hophead might be in jeopardy, he later produced a sequel nearly as famous: Suspiria de Profundis.