1916
8 books
- Democracy and Education non-fictionDewey's prose is dry, no way around it, but his central idea (that education is growth itself, not preparation for some later life) will quietly rearrange how you think about school, work, even conversation. Read it slowly, arguing with him in the margins; that's the point.
- If you liked following Richard Hannay before, this one sends him across wartime Germany toward Constantinople chasing a rumor of a prophet, with the dyspeptic American Blenkiron stealing half the scenes. Pure boyish adventure, cheerfully implausible in places, and showing its 1916 attitudes now and then.
- You get a strange, theatrical sadness in He, a disgraced man who turns humiliation into a circus act, and in Consuelo, whose warmth never quite escapes the play’s shadows. It’s melodramatic and deliberately artificial, but if you like tragic stories with masks, applause, and bruised dignity, it lingers.
- Not the Wells of Martians, this is him watching the war arrive at an English country house in real time, and it shows, half comic house-party chatter, half raw grief. When Mr. Britling sits down to write to his son's German tutor, it wrecks you quietly.
- You get Tarzan at his most feral and resourceful, moving through Opar’s ruins with Jad-bal-ja beside him while greedy men blunder after its treasure. It’s pulpy, violent, and gloriously improbable, with a dreamlike jungle atmosphere that makes the clunky bits worth tolerating.
- A quick one, an evening's read, and the best scene is just two men talking over dinner, where Lumley calmly explains how thin the crust of civilization really is and Leithen's blood runs cold. The danger stays in ordinary London streets, which somehow makes it worse.
- You’ll like how Elizabeth Ann’s move from her anxious aunts to the Putney family turns ordinary things, cooking, school, getting lost, into small tests of courage and competence. It’s warm and funny, with a quietly radical faith in children’s judgment, though its old-fashioned manners and moralizing take a little patience.
- You’ll like the early Wodehouse looseness here: penniless Lord Dawlish drifts into an American millionaire’s household, where English dignity keeps colliding with money and common sense. It’s frothy and slightly less polished than the later novels, but the social absurdity and dry one-liners are already doing their work.