1891
11 books
- Read Noli Me Tangere first, then come to this angrier, darker sequel. Watching the jeweler Simoun quietly seed a revolution while everyone fawns over him is chilling, and Rizal's fury at colonial rot burns through every page.
- Essays non-fictionMalatesta writes like a patient friend arguing at a café table, not a theorist showing off, so pieces on organization, violence, and why anarchy takes will rather than waiting suit you if you like plain moral reasoning. Expect polemic and repetition, not lyricism.
- Bierce writes war stories with a cold eye and a knife twist, and Owl Creek Bridge alone will rearrange how you think an ending can work. Grim, short, precise, no comfort offered.
- A jinn takes human shape and marries a princess, only to find she doesn't love him, and his soul depends on changing that. Zehowah's cool, logical questions about what love even is are the best part.
- You follow Durtal through a grimy, feverish Paris as he investigates Gilles de Rais and the world of modern Satanism, while his own disgust and curiosity keep tangling together. It’s strange, talkative, and occasionally sluggish, but the black-mass atmosphere and Huysmans’s decadent, unnerved prose stay with you.
- Wilde in a wicked mood: a man told by a palm reader he'll commit murder decides to get it over with before his wedding, and treats it like a chore. If you like your comedy dry and slightly heartless, the Canterville Ghost story alone earns the afternoon.
- You get a painfully sharp look at literary ambition through Edwin Reardon’s scruples and poverty, set against Jasper Milvain’s cheerful careerism. It’s bleak, talk-heavy, and slow in places, but the clash between making art and making money still feels uncomfortably close to home.
- You spend the book feeling Tess’s intelligence, tenderness, and stubborn dignity pressed against a world determined to judge her. Hardy can be bleak and digressive, but the scenes with Angel and Tess linger because their hopes feel so human, and so painfully unequal.
- You spend most of it wanting to shake Laevsky, this lazy, self-excusing man rotting in a Black Sea town, while von Koren coldly argues he'd be better off dead. Then Chekhov quietly turns it, and you come out gentler about people, including yourself.
- You get Gösta, a defrocked drunken priest who keeps wrecking and redeeming himself, plus a whole manor of pensioned cavaliers running riot on Ekeby for a year. It reads like Värmland folklore told by firelight, episodic and feverish, so skip it if you need a tidy plot.
- Doyle loved this more than Sherlock Holmes, and you can feel it: Alleyne leaves his abbey and falls in with Aylward the archer and tiny, half-blind Sir Nigel, who politely begs strangers for a chance to fight them. It ambles, but the company's good all the way to Spain.