1889
10 books
- Twain lets a smug factory foreman loose in Camelot, and watching Hank predict an eclipse to save his own neck is as funny as you'd hope. Just know the satire curdles into something genuinely dark by the end, which is honestly why it sticks with you.
- You spend time in a German garden with Elizabeth, whose pleasure in flowers and solitude is sharpened by her dry observations of the “Man of Wrath” and the demands of family life. It’s gently funny and quietly rebellious, though its leisurely pace suits you best if you enjoy reflection more than plot.
- Martha starts as an Austrian countess who thinks war is glorious, then it takes her first husband at Solferino and keeps coming for everyone she loves. It's earnest and sometimes preachy, but her fury feels earned, and knowing Suttner wrote it decades before 1914 gives it a chill.
- Stranger and more uneven than Alice, this one drifts between a Victorian love story and fairyland mid-sentence, the way dreams actually work. Bruno's baby-talk grates on some people, but the Gardener's nonsense songs are Carroll at his oddest.
- If you liked Treasure Island's pace, this gives you the same headlong energy in the Wars of the Roses: outlaw arrows in the greenwood, a treacherous guardian, and a girl in disguise young Dick is slow to figure out. The mock-medieval dialogue takes some warming to.
- Fair warning, Morris writes in deliberately old-fashioned prose that keeps breaking into verse, so it asks patience. But Thiodolf's choice, between a charmed hauberk that saves his life and the good of his folk, has real weight, and you can feel Tolkien taking notes.
- You get a dark, beautifully skewed adventure where the charming James Durrie keeps slipping beyond everyone’s grasp, while his moral, tormented brother Henry tries to live with the wreckage. The shifting narrators and haunted atmosphere make it stranger and more psychologically sharp than a straightforward swashbuckler.
- You settle into its deliberately archaic, saga-like rhythm and find real warmth in Burgdale’s feasts, work, loyalties, and quarrels. Face-of-god and Hall-Sun make a tender center, though Morris lingers over landscape and custom, so it suits you when you want an old tale told slowly.
- You'll be laughing at three useless Victorians failing to open a tin of pineapple on the Thames, and it still lands. The plot barely exists, it's really just J. going off on tangents, but the tangents (Uncle Podger hanging a picture) are the whole point.
- Verne in a mischievous mood: the same gun club from the moon adventure buys the North Pole and plans to tilt the Earth's axis with one colossal cannon shot, and nobody stops to ask if they should. Short, dry, and funnier than his reputation suggests, though heavy on arithmetic.