1912
16 books
- A Personal Record non-fictionYou get Conrad the self-mythologizer here, looking back on his Polish childhood, his years at sea, and the awkward birth of his writing life. It’s episodic and sometimes ceremonious, but the glimpses of exile, duty, and a sailor trying to become an English novelist make the slow passages worthwhile.
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: John Carter wakes on Mars leaping thirty feet in the low gravity, befriends a four-armed green warrior, and everything moves at a sprint. If you want depth, look elsewhere; if you want swords and airships, you're set.
- Late Tolstoy, stripped of sermons: a short, hard novella about a Chechen war chief caught between Shamil and the Tsar, with a devastating little portrait of Nicholas I along the way. It opens with a crushed thistle by the road, and that image does a lot of quiet work.
- A man named Innocent Smith blows into a dreary boarding house, gets charged with burglary and bigamy, and both crimes turn out to be arguments for being alive. It's Chesterton at his silliest and most sincere, so skip it if whimsy with a sermon inside annoys you.
- You’ll like the stark Utah setting and the way Jane Withersteen’s decency collides with a whole community’s religious power. Lassiter brings a dangerous, almost mythic edge, while Venters and Bess give the story its tenderness.
- Dink Stover shows up as a football hero with his path to the senior societies mapped out, then starts wondering if the whole game is rigged. Slow in the sports parts, but the tap day scene and Brockhurst's late-night arguments about conformity still land surprisingly hard.
- Leacock pokes fun at the small-town Mariposans so gently you end up loving them, and the chapter where the steamer Mariposa Belle sinks in about six feet of water is genuinely funny. Fair warning, nothing much happens here, which is exactly the point.
- You get a wonderfully strange coming-of-age story in which Tarzan learns the jungle’s rules from Kala and Kerchak, then finds himself pulled between ape life and human society. The prose is pulpy and the colonial assumptions are dated, but Tarzan’s fierce intelligence and loneliness keep the book surprisingly alive.
- Strange little tales, most only a few pages, where jewel thieves creep toward the Gibbelins' hoard and rival idols sulk in the same temple, and the endings turn on you with a dry, wicked smile. If you like your fantasy dreamlike and slightly cruel, this is a treat.
- You get leprechauns, the god Pan, and a Philosopher who lectures his wife on everything from washing to wisdom, all told in prose that keeps wandering off into odd little sermons. If you like your whimsy with actual ideas underneath, this Irish oddity is lovely company.
- You’ll enjoy dipping into this rather than reading it straight through: Bierce turns words like “love,” “war,” and “politics” into tiny, beautifully sharpened traps. It’s funny, mean, and often startlingly modern, though some entries are dated or cruel enough to make you wince.
- Frank Cowperwood watching a lobster slowly devour a squid as a boy tells you everything about how he'll run Philadelphia's money later. Dreiser writes flat and detailed, almost like a ledger, but if cold ambition fascinates you more than likable heroes, this gets under your skin.
- Professor Challenger alone is worth it, a bearded egomaniac who throws a journalist down the stairs before agreeing to take him to a South American plateau where dinosaurs still roam. Pure boys'-own adventure, cheerfully implausible and very funny, if you're happy to switch your brain to holiday mode.
- The prose is a genuine slog, faux-archaic and repetitive, so fair warning. But if you push through, you get a dead sun, a last pyramid of humanity, and things like the Watchers sitting motionless in the dark for centuries, images no other book will give you.
- The Problems of Philosophy non-fictionRussell spends the first chapter wondering whether the table in front of him actually exists, and somehow makes that feel urgent rather than silly. It's short, clear, and slightly bracing, best read slowly, and the final chapter on why philosophy matters at all really lands.
- Mary Lennox starts out genuinely unpleasant, sour and rude, and watching her thaw as she digs in the dirt with Dickon and his tame animals is what makes it work. Slow and gentle, more about weather and growing things than plot, and lovely for exactly that reason.