1890
8 books
- Half the fun is watching Basil and Isabel March bicker their way through New York apartment hunting before the book quietly turns serious, with a streetcar strike and old Dryfoos's money pulling everyone apart. It's slow and talky in the best way, if you like your realism gentle but pointed.
- Hedda is bored in a way that turns dangerous, playing with her father's pistols while her dull new husband fusses over his research, and you watch her wreck things almost for sport. It's a short, cold, fascinating play, better if you like your protagonists unlikable.
- How the Other Half Lives non-fictionYou get a vivid, uneasy tour through New York’s tenements, from overcrowded rooms to Mulberry Bend, where Riis’s firsthand reporting makes poverty feel brutally concrete. Read it as reform-minded history, but expect harsh racial stereotypes and a voice that often confuses indignation with understanding.
- You get a feverish, claustrophobic look inside a penniless writer wandering Kristiania, where hunger twists every small encounter and his pride keeps sabotaging him. It’s strange, funny in a jagged way, and deliberately uncomfortable, rewarding you if you can stay with a narrator who is both painfully lucid and maddeningly unreliable.
- A man wakes up in a future England where work feels like pleasure and the Thames runs clean, then spends the book rowing upriver and asking questions. Short on plot, generous with conversation, and oddly restful; read it when you want to argue gently with a dream.
- You get a huge, eccentric tour of rituals, taboos, and stories, beginning with the priest of Diana at Nemi and wandering through dying gods, sacred kings, and harvest customs. Frazer’s theories are dated and the catalogues can drag, but his strange connections make familiar myths feel newly charged.
- Wilde gives every character his best one-liners, so you'll laugh even as the whole thing curdles into something genuinely creepy. Lord Henry's lazy, poisonous charm is the real draw; you'll catch yourself agreeing with him and then feeling slightly guilty about it.
- Holmes at his moodiest here, bored and reaching for the cocaine until a treasure map and a missing father give him something worth chasing. You get a proper Thames boat chase, and Watson quietly falling in love while pretending to take notes.