1894
7 books
- Half of it reads like an astronomer thinking out loud about how the world might actually end, comet panic in a future Paris and all, then it leaps millions of years to the last two humans on a freezing Earth. Strange, lecture-y in spots, weirdly moving if you let it be.
- Darker Twain than you might expect: a mother switches two babies in the cradle and the whole cruel logic of slavery gets turned inside out. Come for the courtroom fireworks, stay for Wilson's calendar epigraphs, which are some of the meanest, funniest lines Twain ever wrote.
- Forget the singing bear; the real Baloo teaches Law, and the jungle here has actual menace, with Shere Khan circling Mowgli's village like a debt coming due. Between the Mowgli chapters you also get Rikki-tikki fighting cobras, which is somehow tenser than most thrillers.
- You get Holmes at his most inventive here, from the vanished racehorse in “Silver Blaze” to the eerie family history of “The Musgrave Ritual,” with Watson’s steady affection keeping the eccentricity human. A few stories feel more like clever puzzles than emotional dramas, but the collection is wonderfully varied and easy to dip into.
- You get a brisk, old-fashioned adventure where Rudolf Rassendyll impersonates the absent King of Ruritania, while the real king is held in Zenda Castle. The swordplay and disguises are fun, but the real pull is Rassendyll’s uneasy choice between duty and the woman he cannot openly have.
- You follow Henry Fleming through battle as fear, shame, vanity, and sudden courage jostle inside him, with the fighting rendered in sharp, almost dreamlike flashes. It’s brief, unsentimental, and more interested in what war does to the mind than in making a hero of anyone.
- If you can settle into Morris's deliberately old-fashioned prose (it reads like a medieval romance on purpose), this is a strange, dreamy thing: Walter fleeing a bad marriage, haunted by visions of a Lady and a Maid before he ever meets them. Slow, but it casts a real spell.