On Liberty – John Stuart Mill, 1859 ★★★½

Pocket Revolution 

Free-thinking used to be a crime but is critical to any healthy civilization. This is one point explicated by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which also addresses the need for intellectual progress and where our right to do as we please begins and ends.

In five sprawling essays tied together by the theme of liberty but also the objectives and needful limitations of society, Mill lays out one of his most famous cases, for why people should be able to do pretty much whatever they want so long as they hurt no one doing it.

He also has at orthodoxy in many forms, which no doubt disquieted religious readers but clearly impressed a large part of England’s educated classes. On Liberty was a milestone in the development of civil liberties and democratic institutions around the world.

The High Window – Raymond Chandler, 1942 ★★★★

Blood and Tax Brackets 

Class isn’t as big a theme in American literature as one might expect, but it crops up often enough. In Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, it comes into play two ways, as income and moral refinement.

Protagonist Philip Marlowe is a very classy guy who relates to what it is to be down-and-out. When he pays a visit to the palatial Pasadena home of Mrs. Murdock, a wealthy widow who marinates in her port-soaked seclusion, he takes it in with the air of a jaded Bolshevik:

“The sidewalk and the parkway were both very wide and in the parkway were three white acacias that were worth seeing. There was a heavy scent of summer on the morning and everything that grew was perfectly still in the breathless air they get over there on what they call a nice cool day.”

John Adams – David McCullough, 2001 ★★★

Looking Out for Number Two

Popular historians need more than get their facts straight; they must entertain while they edify. Few did this better than David McCullough, whose biography on John Adams won him his second Pulitzer Prize. 

Often overlooked for his contributions to the American Revolution and its aftermath, or else depicted as duller or plainer than his fellow Patriots, Adams was due for a reappraisal. But in rebalancing Adams’s legacy as a selfless prime mover of his nation’s birth, did McCullough push too hard in the other direction?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: You don’t mind it so much when the case presented – however dubious in several particulars – is this engaging, humorous, and enjoyable to read. Adams at times seems to breathe through these pages.

Asterix And The Big Fight – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1966 ★★★★

It Takes a Village

Enemy occupation involves more than one type of opponent for those engaged in active resistance. There are the occupiers themselves, and then there are collaborationists, people who accept their new overlords and expect others around them to do the same.

In the case of the unnamed Gaul village which Asterix calls home, the collaborationists are often more trouble than the Romans, never mind history. Back in the day, independent-minded Gauls didn’t have recourse to a magic potion that made them indomitable.

For a long stretch of Asterix And The Big Fight, neither does Asterix. That departure from formula is one big reason this seventh entry in the classic comic series is so much fun.

King Lear – William Shakespeare, 1605-1606 ★★★★½

Grimmest of the Grim

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear hits the hardest. It offers the grimmest scenes, the coldest ending, and the bleakest worldview, turning the classic elements of tragedy on its head. Instead of offering catharsis, it presents despair.

But is it bottomless despair? That depends on the audience. In its early stagings, what the audience saw was quite different than what appears today. Theatrical managers as late as the 1800s famously pulled back on the carnage and even gave their audiences a revised happy ending.

Reading the play today is to understand the impulse. MacBeth wipes out an entire family, but no one in that play is as reduced by the human toll as we see Lear and Gloucester become. Hamlet may touch on existential themes, but the lack of any overarching morality is bracing here:

The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul – Douglas Adams, 1988 ★½

The Gods Must be Crazy

Can a hit record prove the key to solving a mysterious beheading? Will a horoscope’s dire prediction prove for once to be correct? Will a refrigerator’s possibly sinister secret force Dirk Gently to make an overdue renovation in his ultra-messy apartment?

After some 240 pages, I’m not sure I can answer any of those question, nor care very much either way. The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul manages to be rather long, very dark, and wholly frustrating finale to the Dirk Gently mysteries.

I don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with the gods.

Put Out More Flags – Evelyn Waugh, 1942 ★★

Mind You There's a War on

In September 1939 a 21-year British holiday from history came to a sharp end. War was declared and Poland carved up by Germany and Russia as the rest of the world looked on. It was time to strike back.

Only it wasn’t, not right away. First came something called the “Phoney War,” eight months of waiting and hoping. Just two years later, Evelyn Waugh set about mocking that time of simmering conflict and self-rationalization was as experienced by London’s smart set.

Put Out More Flags is a satire written in the anything-goes spirit of Waugh’s earlier, peacetime works. Government ministries set about planning ridiculous strategies, seeing the enemy everywhere but where they actually are, getting men killed by sheer lack of imagination.