1896
9 books
- Fair warning, this one moves slowly, all humid river air and moral rot, but watching Willems talk himself into each new betrayal (of Lingard, who saved him, of everyone) is queasily fascinating. Read it when you want to sit with a weak man's self-deception, not root for anyone.
- Lesser-known Verne, but fun: a half-mad inventor with a doomsday weapon gets kidnapped to a pirate's hideout inside a hollow island, and you watch it all through his keeper's secret diary. Pulpy and a bit stiff in places, though the villain's lair alone earns its keep.
- You get a surprisingly earnest Twain here, filtering Joan’s life through the fond, slightly old-fashioned recollections of Sieur Louis de Conte. The battles and trial have real weight, but the book moves patiently and leaves most of Twain’s comedy aside, so it suits you when you want historical fiction with moral seriousness.
- Nero's Rome, but the reason to stay is Petronius, the exhausted aesthete who mocks everyone (including himself) right up to the edge of disaster. It's a big, old-fashioned love story with real dread underneath, and yes, the burning city scenes still land.
- Almost nothing happens in it, and that's the whole gift: you board with Mrs. Todd, the herb-gathering landlady in a small Maine harbor town, and just visit people, her mother on Green Island, an old captain with strange stories. If you're patient, it feels like actual rest.
- You watch a small-town Methodist minister meet a worldly priest and a Chopin-playing redhead, decide he's finally becoming enlightened, and slowly make a fool of himself instead. It's sharp and a little cruel, and Sister Soulsby, the pragmatic revival fundraiser, nearly steals the whole thing.
- You watch Konstantin’s wounded ambition, Nina’s hunger for the stage, and Arkadina’s brittle charm collide around a disastrous play and a country estate. It’s funny in the way awkward people can be funny, then quietly painful, especially if you like drama that lets everyone misunderstand one another in painfully recognizable ways.
- Ralph of Upmeads just rides out of his father's tiny kingdom because he's restless, and the road unspools forever from there. If you can settle into Morris's deliberately old-fashioned prose (it takes a chapter or two), it becomes hypnotic, like fantasy before the genre existed.
- You’ll like Beerbohm’s cool, mischievous eye for vanity, especially in pieces like “A Defence of Cosmetics,” where a comic argument becomes a miniature portrait of social posing. The prose is polished and lightly wicked, though the book feels more like a cabinet of curiosities than a continuous read.