Surely this is just painfully obvious?

I will cop to the fact that I hate reading plays.  And screenplays.  They just don't read right to me.  Shakespeare is better than most but I have very little interest in delving in to them again.  

Nope. Great playwright. Probably the greatest. I’m super happy to watch those plays. I just don’t want to read them.

Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr

The penultimate Bernie Gunther novel finds Bernie living under another assumed name in Munich and working in a hospital morgue.  Bernie is recognized by a corrupt cop and through a series of misadventures ends up working as an insurance claims investigator for a major insurance company in Munich.  Which is, of course, right up Bernie's alley.  Well, except for his penchant for wanting to move beyond his own work and in to realms better left to the actual police.  This is the time of the "New Europe" with the EEC being formed and an amnesia sweeping Germany and many other countries about the atrocities of just over a decade before.  This is something that Bernie is not comfortable with even given the miraculous German economy under the Adenauer Government. 

In the course of his duties Bernie is assigned to investigate an insurance claim on lost ship in Greece.  And, of course, this throws Bernie right in to the middle of the "Merten Affair," the fallout from the Axis occupation of Greece and the Holocaust in Greece, particularly in Thessaloniki.  There's a lot happening in this one and a whole lot more bubbling under the surface.  And Bernie...well he's still mostly the Bernie of old, though maybe a little less flippant.  

I liked this one a lot.  Probably my favorite book in the series since the initial trilogy.  I think it helps that I didn't know a lot about Greece during or after WWII, so it sent me down a lot of rabbit holes of extraneous research.  It also helped that the story was, by and large, in a single time setting.  While Kerr does a good job integrating flashbacks, it was nice to just hang out in 1957 and not also in the war.  

This was the last book published before Kerr's untimely death.  And I do look forward to Metropolis and a much younger Bernie Gunther.  But I'm really going to miss that world-weary worn knight.  And it appeared that Kerr was setting up some interesting things at the end of this novel that will never come to fruition.  

Earth’s Other Shadow
Robert Silverberg, 1973

This is a collection of nine of Silverberg’s short SF stories (including one almost novella) that were mostly written/published from the early 1960s through 1971, except for one from 1957 (“Hidden Talent”). Silverberg is always a dependably solid writer who produces at the very least readable but quite often outstanding prose, and he has no problem handling a variety of SF concepts. My favorite here is the excellent novella “How It Was When the Past Went Away”, which describes the immediate aftermath of the deliberate contamination of San Francisco’s water supply in 2003 with a drug that causes severe forms of memory loss – everybody loses memories of their last few months, most lose memories of big swaths of their lives, and some lose specific memories of vital information; some people recover most of their memories, mostly children and women under 30, but most don’t. Another notable one I found notable is “To See the Invisible Man,” which is set in the early 22nd century, at a time when people deemed too emotionally callous are sentenced to punishment by being turned ‘invisible’, i.e., they get a mark on their forehead which means everyone else cannot even acknowledge their existence. It’s an intriguing concept – and some may recall that it was adapted into a segment for the revived Twilight Zone in the 1980s.
To sum up, this is a great sampling of Silverberg’s work – warmly recommended.