1921
11 books
- You'll wince through this one in the best way: Alice picking her own violets and inventing a glamorous life for a boy she likes, while her family quietly falls apart around her. It's sad and small-town specific, and that awful hot dinner party scene stays with you.
- She writes about being lured from her mother's Dakota home to a missionary boarding school, and the scene where she hides under a bed while they come to cut her hair will stay with you. Quiet, angry, tender pieces, short enough to read in an evening.
- You spend a languid weekend at Crome with Denis Stone, who is forever composing himself while sharper, stranger people, especially Mr Scogan, talk circles around him. It’s a dry, episodic country-house comedy, more interested in clever conversation and social absurdity than plot.
- You follow Manuel, a practical fellow who keeps meeting gods, monsters, and beautiful impossibilities while trying to make a life that feels like his own. Cabell’s mock-medieval prose is sly, ornate, and occasionally prickly, so it rewards a taste for fables that keep winking at you.
- Williams pares American speech to the bone: the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain, weeds by the contagious hospital, poems the size of a glance. If poetry has felt overstuffed to you, these small exact things can retrain your eye.
- You watch Rilla Blythe grow from a frivolous sixteen-year-old into someone steadied by wartime loss, while Susan’s care of the abandoned baby Jims brings warmth and grit. It’s more somber than the earlier Anne books, but its letters, small acts of courage, and unsentimental tenderness stay with you.
- André-Louis is a cynical young lawyer who hides from his enemies by joining a traveling theater troupe, then picks up a sword out of pure spite. It's revenge and revolution with a wink, and the fencing scenes are better than they have any right to be.
- You get a wonderfully unsettling theatre rehearsal where six unfinished characters interrupt the actors and insist their suffering is more real than performance. It’s funny, argumentative, and deliberately slippery, especially if you enjoy questions about identity and art more than tidy emotional resolution.
- You get Tarzan dropped into Pal-ul-don, a hidden country of rival human peoples, dinosaurs, and wonderfully strange customs, with the loyal Om-at beside him. It’s pulpy and episodic rather than psychologically deep, but the lost-world invention keeps carrying you forward.
- Heyer wrote this at nineteen and it shows in the best way: a disgraced earl playing highwayman to shield his brother, a genuinely silky villain in the Duke of Andover, swordfights, abductions, the lot. Sillier than her later books, but cheerfully so.
- Billy Byrne starts out as a genuinely unpleasant Chicago thug, no charm, no heart of gold, and watching Burroughs slowly earn his change aboard ship and on a very strange island is the whole fun. Pure pulp, fast and dated in spots, but oddly sincere.