A store sign at a bar in Edinburgh, Scotland

The 8th book I read this year was ‘The Iceman Cometh’ by Eugene O'Neill. While often considered one of the great American plays, I found it difficult to read and didn’t enjoy it much.

The opening conversations between drunks in a bar seem to take way too long and by the time we get to the crux of the story, I had mostly lost interest. I can get behind the powerful theme of both the necessity and pitfall of illusions to contend with life, that is often less than what most of us had envisioned it was going to be. However, the relatively dull precision of the point, did not age well. Contrast this to the incredibly powerful ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’, a drama that haunts me years after I read it.