1872
6 books
- Phileas Fogg is so rigidly punctual he fires a servant over shaving water two degrees too cool, and watching that composure survive missed steamers, a rescue in India, and a detective tailing him is half the fun. Light, quick, good company on a trip.
- You'll come for the strange country where being sick is a crime and stealing gets you sympathy, and stay for the Book of the Machines, which reads like someone worrying about AI in 1872. Fair warning, it's more essay than adventure, but the ideas keep biting.
- You’re in the hands of an unreliable travel companion as Twain moves through stagecoach dust, Virginia City silver camps, Mormon stories, and a wildly embellished trip to Hawaii. It’s episodic and sometimes wanders, but his deadpan eye makes frontier boasting feel freshly ridiculous.
- You watch Lizzie Eustace bluff, scheme, and plead over a supposedly priceless diamond necklace, while Trollope patiently exposes the vanity and self-deception of polite society. It takes its time, but her nerve, self-pity, and sheer improvisational audacity keep the social comedy wonderfully alive.
- An old Welsh fisherman narrates, salty and self-serving, the story of a little girl washed ashore from a wreck and who she might be. Blackmore preferred this to Lorna Doone; it moves slower, but Davy's voice carries the whole book.
- A fairy tale that trusts children with real mystery: Irene follows her great-great-grandmother's invisible thread through the dark, and Curdie taunts goblins by stomping their soft feet. Gentle and strange in equal measure, best read slowly, ideally aloud, without demanding everything explain itself.