1910
10 books
- Early Wodehouse, before Jeeves, so the jokes are a bit less dense, but watching Jimmy Pitt bet he can burgle a house and then acquire an actual burglar as a devoted sidekick is good fun. Light, silly, fine company for a lazy weekend afternoon.
- You’d enjoy this for Inspector Hanaud, a sharp, theatrical French detective who questions everyone at the Villa Rose in Aix-les-Bains. The pace is deliberate and the manners are very 1910, but the careful deductions and faintly sinister atmosphere reward you if you like your mysteries patient rather than breathless.
- Margaret Schlegel is one of the few people in fiction who tries to be genuinely good without being insufferable about it, and watching her navigate the blunt, moneyed Wilcoxes is quietly absorbing. It moves gently, more conversation than event, but Forster's warmth sneaks up on you.
- Seven cold, grim little stories, and worth it just for To Build a Fire, where a man's whole fate hangs on wet matches and a dog who knows better than he does. Read it in winter with something hot; the title story's ending is wickedly clever.
- Memoirs of a Revolutionist non-fictionYou get a vivid life moving from pageantry at the tsar’s court to Siberian prisons, scientific expeditions, and revolutionary circles, with Kropotkin’s curiosity often as strong as his politics. It can feel episodic and argumentative, but his attention to landscapes, prisoners, and ordinary mutual aid makes the memoir feel genuinely lived-in.
- If you've ever hated an office job, watching Psmith serenely dismantle bank life (calling everyone Comrade, politely stalking his pompous manager Bickersdyke to his own club) is deeply satisfying. Early Wodehouse, so gentler than Jeeves, with a surprising amount of cricket, but the same silliness.
- Laura Rambotham is one of those heroines you wince for: too clever, too poor, too eager to impress, lying her way into and out of trouble at her Melbourne boarding school. If you like your school stories sharp and unsentimental rather than cosy, this one's honest company.
- You spend time with Alfred Polly, a muddled, dissatisfied shopkeeper whose elaborate suicide plan goes badly and opens into a stranger, freer life. Wells is funny about bad spelling, suburban respectability, and Polly’s dramatic moods, but the sadness underneath gives the comedy real weight.
- You’ll like the way Philip’s furniture-built city feels both gloriously inventive and faintly unsettling, as if a lonely child’s imagination has acquired its own laws. The book takes odd turns and wears its Edwardian assumptions openly, but its tenderness toward neglected, serious-minded children still feels wonderfully real.
- You get a wonderfully melodramatic Gothic mystery, with hidden passages beneath the Paris Opera, a masked Erik, and Christine caught between fear, pity, and fascination. The narration can be delightfully over-the-top, but the underground atmosphere and Erik’s wounded loneliness linger after the thrills fade.