1909
8 books
- Anne's sixteen here and teaching school, which mostly means learning how little she knows, and the mischief of little Davy Keith will make you laugh out loud. Gentler and more episodic than the first book, so read it when you want comfort, not momentum.
- You watch Martin teach himself grammar, literature, and the manners of the people he wants to join, while his love for Ruth keeps tangling ambition with humiliation. It’s rough-edged and sometimes argumentative, but its account of writing against poverty and respectability feels startlingly honest.
- The Great Illusion non-fictionA patient, methodical argument from 1910 that conquest can't actually make a modern nation richer, written by a man watching Europe arm itself anyway. Read it if you like watching clear logic collide with history; knowing what came four years later gives every calm page a strange weight.
- You watch the sharp young Isidore Beautrelet chase Lupin through French history, clues, and the cliffs of Étretat. It’s an old-fashioned, melodramatic puzzle, but the pleasure is real: Lupin’s charm keeps colliding with Beautrelet’s stubborn intelligence, and every answer opens another door.
- Fair warning, there's barely a plot: Dorothy and the Shaggy Man just wander strange roads picking up strays like Polychrome, the rainbow's daughter, until everyone lands at Ozma's birthday party. If you want stakes, skip it; if you want gentle, dreamy company, it's lovely.
- You settle into Stein’s deliberately repetitive prose and start hearing how each sentence shifts, especially in Melanctha’s restless conversations and Anna’s blunt, practical judgments. It’s strange, patient reading, sometimes frustrating, but rewarding if you like language turning ordinary lives into something formally new.
- Forget the Martians, this is Wells writing about his own world: George watching his uncle puff a worthless tonic into a fortune, and the whole rickety empire of advertising and borrowed money wobbling underneath. Funny and sad at once, and weirdly current about how hype works.
- Fair warning, this is grim: life inside a brothel, told without melodrama or rescue fantasies. When the student Likhonin tries to save Liubka and discovers good intentions aren't enough, Kuprin is quietly devastating.