1927
26 books
- “We” non-fictionYou get the Atlantic crossing from inside the cockpit, with Lindbergh weighing fuel, weather, exhaustion, and the awful uncertainty of flying alone toward Paris. The writing is plain and technical rather than polished, but that restraint makes the danger feel startlingly immediate.
- Aspects of the Novel non-fictionForster basically chats you through how novels work, coining flat versus round characters and grumbling that story ("and then, and then") is the novel's most primitive part. If you like fiction but want to see the machinery, his lecture-hall wit makes criticism feel like gossip.
- You settle into the slow, clear beauty of Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant crossing the New Mexico wilderness, where friendship, faith, and the harsh landscape matter more than plot. It’s quiet and episodic, but the cathedral rising in Santa Fe gives the book a steady, human center.
- You get a funny, often ugly look at American revivalism through Elmer Gantry, a talented salesman who treats religion as another route to power. The satire is broad and the sermons can run long, but his shameless self-invention remains horribly recognizable.
- Every story starts with a stranger in the Angler's Rest making the mistake of mentioning something, and Mulliner having a nephew whose life proves a point about it. If you like watching a shy curate or a timid photographer spiral into glorious absurdity, this is happy nonsense done properly.
- Two brothers killed with poisoned darts in a hedge maze, and Sir Clinton Driffield working it out while telling poor Wendover almost nothing. If you like your Golden Age puzzles clever and a bit cold-blooded, the detective included, this scratches that exact itch.
- The Continental Op rolls into a mining town so crooked he starts setting the gangs on each other just to clean it out, and halfway through he admits the killing is getting under his skin. Fast, brutal, funny in a dry way, zero comfort anywhere.
- You get the pleasure of watching Percy Blakeney turn his ridiculous foppish mask into a weapon, while Marguerite remains far sharper than the people around her realise. It’s a brisk, episodic later adventure, best enjoyed for the disguises, narrow escapes, and Percy’s dry theatricality rather than emotional depth.
- You follow Harry Haller, a lonely, self-dramatizing intellectual who despises the bourgeois world while secretly needing its warmth. The novel gets increasingly strange, especially in the Treatise and the Magic Theater, and its messy argument with despair feels more honest than comforting.
- This is the one where Tarzan stumbles on a lost valley of crusaders' descendants still jousting in full armor, and an American named Blake gets swept into their knighthood. Pure pulp adventure, cheerfully absurd, and Burroughs knows it.
- You get Poirot and Hastings in a brisk, pulpy international chase involving four shadowy masterminds, secret messages, disguises, and an almost comic number of narrow escapes. It’s less a carefully plotted whodunit than a string of extravagant episodes, but the shameless melodrama can be great fun.
- It's short and quiet and it will wreck you a little: five strangers die when a rope bridge falls in Peru, and a monk tries to prove God meant it. The Marquesa's letters to her daughter alone are worth the afternoon it takes.
- Philo Vance solves this one partly by watching suspects play poker, which tells you the fun here is pure deduction, not thrills. He's insufferable, all art lectures and dropped g's, but if you enjoy a smug detective circling a strangled showgirl's locked apartment, it clicks nicely.
- Late, strange Holmes, stories where Doyle gets darker and odder (a supposed vampire in Sussex, Holmes retired among his bees narrating one himself). Uneven if it's your first Holmes, but if you already love Watson's voice, the moment he's wounded in the Garridebs case lands hard.
- Honestly, this is comfort food: two brothers on motorcycles poking around a supposedly haunted house on a cliff, and their detective father goes quiet at exactly the wrong moment. If you want secret passages and smugglers over deep characters, an afternoon with this is well spent.
- You’ll love Eepersip’s fierce, almost wordless refusal of parlors, lessons, and adult expectations, followed into woods and fields with prose that feels bright and slightly wild. It’s dreamy and idealistic, sometimes stubbornly so, but perfect when you want a child’s freedom taken completely seriously.
- You get a wonderfully odd blend of deep-sea adventure and speculative science, with Professor Maracot, Cyrus Headley, and Bill Scanlan trapped far below the Atlantic among the remnants of a lost civilization. It’s brisk, earnest, and occasionally very Victorian in its ideas, but the strange underwater setting gives it a charm that lingers.
- You get the strangest Barsoom adventure here: Ulysses Paxton lands among brain surgeons, body-swapping experiments, and a civilization held together by ingenious brutality. It’s pulpy and episodic, but the bizarre medical imagination and Paxton’s steady decency make the book surprisingly easy to keep reading.
- Burroughs leaves the jungle for the thirteenth century: a stolen prince, raised to hate his own royal blood, becomes England's most feared outlaw. Sword fights arrive on schedule and you'll guess the secret early, which somehow doesn't spoil it.
- The Public and Its Problems non-fictionYou find a bracing, sometimes dense account of how a public disappears when people cannot see the consequences of institutional decisions, and why communication is the heart of democracy. Dewey’s argument with Walter Lippmann remains useful, though the philosophical passages make you slow down.
- You get a brisk, old-fashioned mystery where Frank and Joe Hardy follow counterfeit-money clues around an abandoned mill while trying to outwit genuinely nasty criminals. The plotting is simple and the dialogue dated, but the brothers’ teamwork and scrappy investigating make it easy to settle into.
- Wodehouse off his usual English turf, loose in Jazz Age New York, and it suits him: a shy painter mooning over a girl, a policeman who'd rather write poetry, and an efficiency expert whose theories collapse the moment he falls in love. Pure silliness, expertly plotted, zero stakes.
- If you like watching a detective actually work, French tracing one supposedly burnt banknote back through banks and shops until a whole fraud unravels, this is very satisfying. It's patient, methodical stuff, so skip it if you want thrills over careful, honest legwork.
- The Story of My Experiments with Truth non-fictionYou get an unusually candid Gandhi here, testing his beliefs through diet, vows, celibacy, law, and political struggle rather than presenting them as finished wisdom. The plain, sometimes repetitive prose suits his habit of examining every choice, though readers wanting a polished autobiography may find the moral bookkeeping demanding.
- You get a brisk, old-fashioned mystery with Frank and Joe Hardy poking around Tower Mansion, chasing clues through secret passages and suspicious adults. The writing is uncomplicated and the world is dated, but its tidy puzzles, constant movement, and brotherly teamwork make it easy to read in an afternoon.
- You settle into the Ramsays’ house and find whole emotional lives unfolding inside a glance, a dinner, or Lily Briscoe’s struggle with her painting. It’s quiet, formally strange, and sometimes slow, but the way it makes time and absence feel physical stays with you.