1900
7 books
- If you've ever done one cowardly thing and never quite forgiven yourself, Jim's leap off the Patna will sit in your chest for weeks. Marlow tells it slantwise and slow, so give it patience; the reward is watching a man try to outrun his own shame.
- You follow Pelle from a bleak Swedish farm, where he and his father Lasse endure hunger, humiliation, and hard labor, into a wider understanding of solidarity. It’s slow, compassionate, and sometimes grim, but its attention to working people feels sturdy and deeply earned.
- Sailing Alone Around the World non-fictionYou spend time aboard the Spray with Slocum as he repairs gear, outwits bad weather, and chats with people in far-off ports. The sailing details are wonderfully practical, while his dry humor keeps the long calms and occasional dangers from feeling heavy.
- Churchill's one novel, written in his twenties, and yes, the hero is basically Churchill with better hair, leading a revolution in a made-up Mediterranean republic. The politics are stagey, but the speeches crackle, and watching the young man rehearse his future self is oddly fascinating.
- Dreiser writes flat and unhurried, but watching Hurstwood come apart, from swanky Chicago bar manager to a man counting pennies in New York, gets under your skin like almost nothing else. Carrie's rise is quieter and stranger.
- Old-school Atlantis pulp, and it commits: Deucalion is a stern priest dragged home to court an empress who rides a mammoth through the streets and wants a god's throne. Stiff Victorian prose, sure, but the doomed grandeur lands.
- You probably think you know this from the movie, but the book is stranger and drier, with a Tin Woodman who's oddly tender and a wizard who's basically a nervous con man. It reads fast and light, good for a rainy afternoon or reading aloud.