It’s a big year for Beckett fans, and critic Ian Brown was looking forward to celebrating the author’s centenary by rereading all the master’s plays, and then writing about the experience. The problem, of course, is that reading Beckett is frequently as difficult and mind-numbing as the writing process apparently was for Beckett himself. By the time he reached literary maturity, “Beckett [was] content to simply slam your head repeatedly into the thick planks of linguistic hopelessness, proving again and again how meaningless meaning can be.”