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.

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.