Under Kilimanjaro – Ernest Hemingway, 2005 ★★★★

Iceberg Turned Upside-down

Like for many others, my Ernest Hemingway studies began with a teacher in front of a blackboard with an iceberg drawn on it.

“Notice with the water level we only see the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “That’s what Hemingway did with his writing. There is so much underneath he doesn’t explain, but you know it’s there. All you get is the basic plot and some character dialogue. The reader does the work.”

With Under Kilimanjaro, that concept is literally turned upside down. In its 445 pages, what you get is pretty much everything Hemingway experienced on his second safari in Africa except a plot. There are multiple story arcs, but no clear single throughline. It’s kind of a mess, yet more fun than several of Papa’s more disciplined works.

When The Women Come Out To Dance – Elmore Leonard, 2002 ★★★½

Keeping it Tight

This short-story collection by Elmore Leonard can get overlooked in his total output yet includes one of his most influential stories. It also displays how he owned the genre of crime fiction enough to deliver engaging, wry tales of life regardless of any degree of law-breaking.

The story of note, “Fire in the Hole,” would be better known to television audiences a few years later as the basis for the pilot of a long-running series, “Justified.”

While that is the most representative (and satisfying) example of Leonard’s tough-guy fiction in the collection, it’s far from the only thing worth reading.

Stirling’s Desert Raiders – Virginia Cowles, 1958 ★½

A Puzzling Legend

Can a single individual change the outcome of something as epic as World War II? This account of a pioneering British commando taking on the Afrika Korps in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt would have you believe it not only possible, but true. If only it were more convincing.

David Stirling was the son of a Scottish laird who found himself early in the conflict looking for something more stimulating than regular military duty. The result: inventing the Special Air Service, a commando unit still active today, known for their elite professionalism.

In Stirling’s case, however, it reads more like adventurism. As described in Stirling’s Desert Raiders, there was no risk too great, no chance not worth taking. A raid was something he looked upon as “pure relaxation.” While men under his command died following orders that were highly reckless, he kept on his path.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 ★★★★½

Life with America's Most Wanted

The Great American Novel, it turns out, is a crime story. The Great Gatsby may be known now as refined literature or even worse, high art, but what makes it so immediate and enjoyable is the milieu it sprang from, of gangsters, flappers, body counts and bootleg gin.

That and the fact it is so much fun to read should divest it of any perceived responsibility for uplifting the mind. It has a message, deep if not especially brilliant, but the novel’s main takeaway is the setting and its people, aristocrats basking in the high life along Long Island Sound.

Nick Carraway is a striving bond salesman and Yale graduate who becomes enmeshed when his married second cousin Daisy takes up an affair with Nick’s rich neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is an enigma; no one seems to know how he got his money, only that he has a lot of it.

George Washington Slept Here – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1940 ½★

When the Well Runs Dry

Country life was a popular subject for American entertainment in the 1940s, with movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, comic strips like “Li’l Abner,” even paintings like Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World.” Why not screwball comedy, too?

The writing team of Kaufman & Hart, enjoying enough success from their collaborative playwriting to afford new homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided to make their next play about the experience of country living. George Washington Slept Here was the result.

While a good idea, the play suffers from all the triteness and contrivances of the pair’s earlier work with fewer sparks of originality. Perhaps because country comedies were not so popular in the beginning of the 1940s as they became in the end, there is a potted, been-there done-that feeling about the thing which maybe it doesn’t quite deserve.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams, 1987 ★★★½

 And Now for Something Slightly Different

Is it a mystery? A fantasy? A comedy? A spiritual satire? A free-range, deep-dish metaphysical contemplation of time itself?

The most fun readers may have with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is making guesses after every chapter as to what it is they are reading, then revising them after a few more pages.

Probably the happiest takeaway from reading this novel is the sneaking sense its author was having fun writing again. Douglas Adams leaves the increasingly dour Galaxy of his recent past behind to bring forth a distinctly different yet still engagingly silly Universe involving a fictitious British university and the ghost of a computer billionaire.

Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson – Evelyn Waugh, 1939 ★★

Taking Oil, Dumping God

Marxism is one of the most profound political movements in the history of mankind. Love it or hate it, the rise of the “workers’ revolution” has left few neutral observers in its wake.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the haters. He condemned Marxism for its negative impact on national economies, its removal of public liberties to serve a nebulous public good, and most especially its avowed atheism. In Mexico in the late 1930s, he called out this “object-lesson” for what he describes as its ruinous effects.

Waugh writes: “Just as the United States earned the gratitude of the world by ‘trying out’ prohibition, so the Mexicans may be said to be trying out Marxism.”