1913
14 books
- Marlow tells this one at several removes, so Flora de Barral's story reaches you the way gossip does, in pieces, and half the pleasure is assembling her. If you like Conrad's slow, indirect way of circling a lonely person, this rewards patience; if not, it'll test you.
- Cabell takes courtly love dead seriously and winks at it in the same breath, so you get Perion spending decades trying to ransom Melicent while she wastes her youth in Demetrios's household. The ornate, mock-medieval prose is an acquired taste, but the irony underneath is sharp.
- You get the Scarlet Pimpernel in Revolutionary Paris, working through danger with that wonderfully ridiculous public mask of Sir Percy Blakeney and much sharper courage underneath. It’s melodramatic and politically shadowed rather than subtle, but the disguises, narrow escapes, and doomed atmosphere make it satisfying if you like your adventure theatrical.
- You settle into its quiet world of snow, woodcutting, church bells, and hard farm labor, where Maria’s choice between François Paradis’s wild freedom and a settled life feels painfully real. It’s spare and melancholy, with the landscape pressing on every page, but its emotional honesty lingers.
- You settle into Alexandra Bergson’s hard, hopeful work of making a life from Nebraska prairie, and the land gradually feels as present as any person. Cather keeps the prose plain and spacious, but loneliness, desire, and the costs of belonging give it a quiet ache.
- You’ll probably enjoy Pollyanna if you can tolerate unabashed sweetness: Polly’s “glad game” slowly unsettles stern Aunt Polly and an entire town, while the story keeps asking what kindness can do without pretending hardship is imaginary. It’s sentimental, sometimes creaky, but genuinely warm-hearted.
- You get sharp, funny dialogue and a surprisingly prickly look at class, language, and who gets to remake whom. Eliza Doolittle is far more than Higgins’s experiment, and the play’s ending leaves you thinking about her independence rather than settling comfortably into a romance.
- You'll recognize things you've never said out loud, especially in Paul Morel's tangled love for his mother, which warps every romance he tries to have. It's intense and sometimes claustrophobic, set among Nottinghamshire coal pits, and if messy family feeling exhausts you, maybe skip it.
- You’ll enjoy watching Lupin turn confession into another performance: charming, vain, generous, and never quite as trustworthy as he sounds. The stories feel like polished little puzzles, with disguises, stolen jewels, and sudden shifts in what you thought you understood, though the episodic structure can feel slightly uneven.
- If you can stomach the ugly period racism baked into its very premise, this is pure breathless pulp: Nayland Smith and Petrie stumbling through fog, trapdoors, and poisonous centipedes, always three steps behind. Fun in short bursts, though the plot is basically one chase repeated.
- If you liked the Scarlet Pimpernel, this is Orczy imagining his ancestor: Diogenes, a broke soldier of fortune in frozen 1620s Holland who takes a shady job abducting a girl and can't stop grinning about it. Pure swagger and snow, happily unserious, slow in patches.
- You get the creeping unease of Mrs Bunting, who suspects her respectable new lodger may be hiding something terrible, while ordinary domestic manners carry on around her. It’s quiet, psychologically sharp suspense, more interested in dread and complicity than shocks, and its slow tightening feels remarkably nasty.
- You get a wonderfully odd Oz adventure here, with Ojo’s anxious earnestness balanced by Scraps, a patchwork girl who treats every danger as an excuse for mischief. The journey wanders through Baum’s usual bright strangeness, though its episodic shape suits you better if you enjoy fairy-tale detours over a tightly driven plot.
- Trent is a detective who does everything right, builds a beautiful watertight theory about the dead financier Manderson, and then, well, you'll see. Bentley wrote it partly to tease the infallible-sleuth genre, so it's witty and humane, and the ending still lands after a century.