Twenty-eight books that go somewhere

28 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. The Aran Islands — John Millington Synge, 1907. A travel memoir that doubles as a writer's notebook, and the source of Synge's stage language.
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2. A Little Tour in France — Henry James, 1884. The best kind of literary travel writing: opinionated, unhurried and full of buildings.
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3. The Innocents Abroad — Mark Twain, 1869. The funniest travel book of the nineteenth century, and a useful antidote to reverence.
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4. The Alhambra — Washington Irving, 1832. A romantic sketchbook that created the Alhambra as an image in the English-speaking world.
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5. The Bible in Spain — George Borrow, 1843. A swaggering, unreliable travel classic about selling books in a country that did not want them.
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6. A Thousand Miles up the Nile — Amelia Edwards, 1877. The best Victorian account of the Nile, written by a woman who turned tourism into scholarship.
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7. Letters from Egypt — Lucie Duff Gordon, 1865. Letters that turn a health trip into one of the most sympathetic travel books of the century.
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8. The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places — Rudyard Kipling, 1891. Early Kipling on the machinery of a colonial city, sharper and less sentimental than his later work.
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9. Life on the Mississippi — Mark Twain, 1883. The best book about learning a craft, and the source of Twain's voice.
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10. The Voyage of the Beagle — Charles Darwin, 1839. The best travel book ever written by a scientist, and the raw material of the Origin.
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11. A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens, 1859. Dickens writing at speed and with unusual restraint, about a city learning how quickly a revolution can eat its own.
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12. The Ambassadors — Henry James, 1903. James's masterpiece of late style, where the drama is entirely in what people avoid saying.
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13. The Marble Faun — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860. Hawthorne's Italian novel: slow, odd, and more interested in guilt than in plot.
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14. Roderick Hudson — Henry James, 1875. An early James novel that already knows how to make failure interesting.
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15. Daisy Miller — Henry James, 1878. Short, sharp and still capable of starting an argument about who was actually at fault.
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16. A Room with a View — E. M. Forster, 1908. Forster's most generous comedy, and the best novel ever written about a pension in Florence.
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17. Romola — George Eliot, 1863. Eliot's historical novel: demanding, carefully researched and unlike anything else she wrote.
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18. The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James, 1881. The great novel about a woman's freedom being granted and then quietly withdrawn.
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19. The Wings of the Dove — Henry James, 1902. James at his most morally intricate, with Venice doing half the work.
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20. South Wind — Norman Douglas, 1917. The most enjoyable argumentative novel in English, set on an island you will want to visit.
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21. The Story of an African Farm — Olive Schreiner, 1883. The first great South African novel, and still the most quoted one.
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22. My Brilliant Career — Miles Franklin, 1901. The first great Australian novel about a woman who wants work more than marriage.
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23. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town — Stephen Leacock, 1912. Gentle, perfectly timed comedy about a town that thinks it is the centre of the world.
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24. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab — Fergus Hume, 1886. One of the first international detective bestsellers, and a snapshot of colonial Melbourne.
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25. Kim — Rudyard Kipling, 1901. Kipling's best novel, and the most vivid picture of British India in fiction.
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26. Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894. The Australian children's classic that refuses to be charming about children.
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27. Bliss and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield, 1920. The best short stories written in English in the early twentieth century.
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28. The Garden Party and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield, 1922. Mansfield's most famous collection, and the best place to start with her.
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