In the 1880s, leisure boating took hold in Great Britain, and thus Jerome K. Jerome planned a trip to write a Thames boating travelogue. He ended up, after traveling with two friends up the river from Kingston to Oxford, with a witty, whimsical, and thoroughly charming little book. Refreshing and unrushed, an absolute charmer.
Jurgen by James Branch Cabell
He counted among his admirers H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, and Sinclair Lewis, and wrote dozens of novels set in an arch and very adult fantasy world. Jurgen won Cabell notoriety for its supposed salaciousness – our hero is a serial seducer which did not go over well in 1919 America, but sex is not the point – satire and deft writing is as Jurgen goes all the way to Hell on his travels.
The Complete Stories of Saki by H. H. Munro
A vengeful ferret deity, a talking cat, a woman reincarnated as an otter, and the foibles of countless upper-class twits – Saki merged the strange, the silly, and the laughable in dozens of compact and memorable stories set among the toffs in Great Britain pre-WWI. Clever young boys and devious young men are his favorite heroes, but there’s a bite of nasty delight in all his work.
Scully, an Australian ex-pat has just purchased a ramshackle cottage that sits on a “bare scalp of hill” along the Slieve Bloom mountains of central Ireland. Intending to renovate the dwelling for his wife and young daughter, Scully tirelessly untangles the place from the creeping vegetation only to discover that his wife has disappeared without a trace. Left alone with his child and the gaping wound in his heart, Scully attempts to unravel the mystery that looms over the novel like the shadow of a moldering castle. Dark, damp, and mournful, The Riders reads like a haunting Irish lament.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Hundreds Hall, the sprawling Georgian house owned by the Ayers family, has been lodging ghostly secrets for centuries. Though it has seen better days, by the end of the second world war, as England’s landed estates begin to be dismantled, Hundreds’ secrets are still potent enough to send maids running scared into the night, requiring the ministrations of the local Dr. Faraday to set the house and its inhabitants to rights. Faraday soon learns that there is one member of the Ayers family who will not follow his recommendations. Waters employs the ghost-story trope brilliantly here as she examines the final demise of England’s landed gentry and the tenuous fate of an independent woman.
Sisters by Daisy Johnson
Daisy Johnson has a penchant for personifying houses in a most disturbing way. The Settle House, the salt-scrubbed and splintered setting of her latest, Sisters, serves as a character in itself, with its sinking floors and throbbing walls. Beneath its sloped roof, reside Sheela and her two daughters, named September and July. The sisters, in their mid-teens, are only ten months apart in age, making them what is known as “Irish twins.” It quickly becomes clear, however, that the sisters are less two than they are one; July seems to dwell not only in the Settle House but also in the very body of her sister as if she is some sort of living and breathing fetus in fetu. Johnson’s sharp and vivid prose makes for an unsettling and delicious portrait of two girls who suffer from warped identities and unreliable memories.
Deadly serious and heart-breaking, Stapledon’s work about a dog imbued with human-level intelligence while retaining his canine attributes and his deep bond with his human creator’s daughter is a landmark in science fiction’s reach to explain humanity through the possibilities of the future and its own persistent prejudices and fear.
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
On the other hand, turning a dog into a human is a perfect vehicle for satire, and Bulgakov’s skill at critiquing the burgeoning Soviet state, its fascination with human improvement, total control, and junk science through our hero dog’s evolution is a laugh aloud pleasure.
Nop’s Trialby Donald McCaig
Real dogs with remarkable skills are not unusual, and border collie Nop, a working sheepdog, is among the best. But once stolen and abused, Nop reveals an inner strength and loyalty beyond his previous experience that pulls him through these trials, endurable only through the bond between him and his owner.
Victor Hanson recreates nine battles fought by armies from the West against other cultures, from Salamis and Cannae to Midway and Tet, and ties them to a cultural superiority defined by freedom, citizen armies, group discipline combined with individual initiative, Capitalism, technology and ruthlessness. Lucid, controversial, unflinching in the telling of the true costs of war, a powerful argument that victory often stemmed from greater freedoms.
The Face of Battle by John Keegan
John Keegan’s landmark The Face of Battle brought warfare down from grand and sweeping portraits to the ground where the men, weapons, tactics and strategies determined the outcomes at Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme , challenging assumptions, myths and stereotypes along the way in exacting and lively battlefield analyses.
The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman
Opinionated, sometimes maddening but always as entertaining as a conversation with a brilliant and much-missed friend, Barbara Tuchman tries here to understand why the Trojans, Renaissance Popes, King George III and American presidents from Kennedy to Nixon and their wisemen committed to wars that were, as the title claims, follies.
Byatt’s Possession is so gorgeous and finely-wrought, it glimmers like a polished disc of jet. The novel toggles between two narratives, one set in modern times, the other in the Victorian era. Dual romances play out across the centuries as the male and female protagonists in each time period (the Victorians are poets, the modern characters are literary scholars who specialize in those same Victorian poets) explore poetry, sexuality, the occult, and each other. Byatt’s prose is poetic in nature, packed with symbolism, allusion, and metaphor.
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Oh, Hopscotch! If you like mazes, “choose your own adventures”, skipping chapters, skidding back and forth between pages, and brilliant, wandering bohemians, Cortázar’s masterful puzzle of a novel is for you. The main character, Horatio Oliveria, is a poet and writer who falls into innumerable kerfuffles and hardships as he wanders both Paris and Buenos Aires with his artistic cohort.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
The “Visceral Realists” are a boisterous band of poets who embark on a quest to locate the “original Visceral Realist,” Cesárea Tinajero. The novel sprawls out across the globe, as the narrative voice shifts between a variety of characters who lament elitist poetry of privilege and amplify the power of the real– the raw, transcendent language of the people.
When I first heard about Martha Ackerman’s new Dickinson biography, These Fevered Days, I was immediately intrigued by her specific view of how the poet’s life was shaped. Unlike other recent biographies of Dickinson that cover her entire life in relatively broad strokes, Ackerman focuses her lens on what she believes are the ten key moments that defined Dickinson as a poet. She makes convincing arguments for each of these ten life events and finds evidence in the poems to support her ideas. I will not outline each of the ten moments here, but I will say that even if you have read all of the Dickinson biographies you could get your hands on, I feel confident that you will come away from These Fevered Days with a deeper understanding of Emily’s craft and her world. Ackerman writes in a style that is equal measure academic and poetic, which, as a scholar of English Literature, I admire, and wish was more commonly found in biographies.
David Bowie, A Life by Dylan Jones
Dylan Jones (no relation to David) crafted his biography of David Bowie from the almost two hundred interviews he conducted with colleagues, friends, lovers, and artists who were intimately associated with the Thin White Duke. This oral history takes us from the childhood Bowie spent in the London suburb of Bromely all the way through to the final years of his life. The accounts shared by those interviewed are funny, tawdry, heartbreaking, and, at times, artistically inspiring. I found the sections on the making of Young Americans and Station to Station particularly fascinating regarding Bowie’s studio work ethic and collaborative spirit. In short, David Bowie, A Life paints a vivid portrait of a singular artist who lit up the world with some of rock and roll’s most breathtaking and transformative moments.
Please Kill Me, Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
How does one corral a movement as unwieldy and nonconformist as punk into a definitive narrative? Well, one (or two, in this case) conducts a variety of candid interviews with nearly all the major players of the era and compiles them into an oral history so vibrant and raw, you can almost smell the smoke, sweat, and leather drifting off the pages. McNeil and McCain don’t hesitate to include all the gory details as interviewees describe Iggy Pop’s frequent mid-gig vomiting, Lou Reed’s colossal ego, and how Patti Smith convinced Bebe Buell to pose for Playboy. The narrative winds its way through the dregs of lower Manhattan to the clubs of Manchester and London to the basements of Ann Arbor, charting the course of punk’s wave as the ’70s seeped into the ’80s. The twentieth-anniversary edition contains a clever afterword by McNeil and McCain that outlines their definition of oral history. Please Kill Me, is at once an irresistibly filthy gossip rag and an important cultural document that makes for an exhilarating read.
The Literary Voyeur 