21st century
17 books
- A Daughter of the Samurai non-fictionYou get a quietly vivid view of a samurai household being pressed into the modern world, filtered through Sugimoto’s restrained, observant voice. Her account of leaving Japan for an arranged marriage in America can feel formal and slow, but the details of duty, clothing, meals, and family honor stay with you.
- Seneca writes like he's grabbing your shoulder about things you keep putting off, especially in On the Shortness of Life, where he argues you have plenty of time and just waste it. Best read slowly, a few pages at a time, when something's actually bothering you.
- A mild village vicar on Romney Marsh, sermons by day, and something much darker riding out under the moon; the fun is watching Thorndike keep both faces spinning. Pulpy and gleefully grim in places, so come for atmosphere and menace, not tidy comfort.
- Essays non-fictionThoreau in essay form is crankier and funnier than his reputation suggests: he'll defend John Brown, refuse his poll tax, then spend twenty pages on wild apples like nothing else matters. Read him slowly, argue with him a little, he holds up.
- Fair warning, the sentences wander for pages and almost nothing happens fast, but if you let it slow you down, that famous madeleine scene really does change how you notice your own memories. Read it in small pieces over months, not weeks.
- Rihani chants between Lebanon and New York in long unmetered lines, Whitman crossed with the Sufi poets. Prophetic mysticism is an acquired taste, but no one else in English was writing anything like it in 1920.
- You'll want a quiet evening for these, they're steeped in grief for serfs and vanished Cossack freedom, but Shevchenko sings it, all Dnipro riverbanks and stolen daughters like poor Kateryna. Slow, mournful, and somehow steadying, especially the Testament.
- Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69 non-fictionWhymper spends years failing at the Matterhorn, dusting himself off after literal cliff falls, and his dry Victorian understatement makes it oddly funny until, on the descent from the summit at last, it turns terribly serious. If you like your adventure honest about its costs, this rewards you.
- Tolstoy at story length is Tolstoy at his most direct: a peasant bargaining for land he'll never keep, a merchant snowbound with his servant, Ivan Ilyich staring at the ceiling. Fair warning, most of these end with death, but you come away oddly steadied rather than gloomy.
- Nick Adams making camp in Big Two-Hearted River, saying nothing about the war, is the whole trick: what's left out does the work. If you like clean sentences and grief kept just offstage, these stories reward slow reading, though the terseness can feel cold at first.
- Norwegian sea stories where the folklore is load-bearing: the draug rides the waves in half a boat, and drowned men keep their appointments. Lie writes the coast's weather and dread from the inside; best read in winter.
- Lardner writes idiots who tell on themselves without knowing it, like the barber in Haircut cheerfully recounting a story that gets darker with every sentence. If you like humor with a mean streak and pitch-perfect American slang, you'll grin and wince in equal measure.
- A slim handful of stories, sharper and stranger than you'd expect, each one built around a quiet betrayal that lands in the last paragraph. Sanctuary alone, where a mother hides a fugitive without knowing what he's done, will sit with you.
- You get a clear-eyed, often surprisingly modern argument that character matters more than stuffing a child’s head with lessons. Locke’s advice on cold baths, exercise, reading, and self-command can feel rigid, but his close attention to habit and the child’s mind makes this thoughtful, practical reading.
- If you liked Uncle Silas but want something slower and stranger, this delivers: Alice hidden away at damp, lonely Carwell Grange, and a blind Dutchwoman whose scenes are genuinely frightening. It rambles a bit in the middle, but the dread when it lands is real.
- You’re glad you read it for the strange intimacy of spending a day inside Leopold Bloom’s mind, where errands, advertisements, hunger, and memory keep turning unexpectedly funny and tender. It’s demanding and occasionally maddening, but the jokes, wordplay, and Molly Bloom’s closing monologue reward patience.
- You get a fierce, unruly argument that keeps asking who benefits when land, labor, and law become private property. Proudhon’s famous “property is theft” is only the doorway; the book is dense and repetitive, but rewarding if you enjoy watching a mind worry an idea from every direction.