![]() ![]() With a quite good miniseries adaptation, the saga of North and South may be familiar to you already. And this petite story has everything you’d want from the genre: an ancient inn, suspicion, intrigue, eerie atmosphere, and, of course, murder. The Forsaken Inn by Anna Katharine Greenĭubbed “the mother of the detective novel,” Green helped popularize detective stories in America-and shaped the direction of the whodunit format before Arthur Conan Doyle set Sherlock Holmes to paper. Aubert, a heroine trapped in a medieval castle and dogged by terrors of the natural and supernatural varieties. Among Guillermo del Toro’s favorite works, Radcliffe’s genre-defining book centers on Emily St. This early gothic romance is the prototype of the form, imitated or parodied (as in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey) ever since. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe It’s also among the earliest forerunners to modern science fiction ( and the submarine!), with a plot that sends a young woman into a strange new utopian world. Not only was it written by the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, it was published under her name in 1666. The Blazing World by Margaret CavendishĪmong our picks for the best feminist books, The Blazing World is remarkable in many ways. It also happens to be a funny, fast-moving read. Second, its titular protagonist is a troublemaker at his conservative boys’ school. First, this book is widely familiar to Japanese schoolchildren. This coming-of-age tale has been compared to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye for a couple of reasons. Botchan by Natsume Sōseki, translated by Yasotaro Morri The chronicler is Thady Quirk, the family’s longtime servant and an unreliable narrator along the lines of Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Published in 1800, Castle Rackrent is an historical novel, chronicling three generations of a landed family in an Ireland still legislatively bound by England. ![]() Castle Rackrent by Maria EdgeworthĮdgeworth is an underappreciated name today, but she was a star of her own time. Adultery and murder dot a claustrophobic story set along the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris. Throes of passion are studied dispassionately in this, Zola’s first major novel. This is decidedly not a book to read aloud to children, but it is a short, relatively digestible work of Naturalist fiction if you’re not in the mood to grind away at something. Both hopeful and sad, the book offers life lessons aplenty for readers young and old. Black Beauty describes the warm and loving home of his youth, followed by many human-centered hardships. The book is narrated by Black Beauty, in a sort of horse bildungsroman. If you missed this short classic in childhood-or want to revisit it for a good cry-here’s your chance. (Don’t take my word for it: Philip Pullman wrote the introduction to the book’s 2004 reissue and has listed it among his favorite children’s books.) Simplifying the plot, a koala, a sailor, and a penguin protect a magic, unending bowl of pudding from dastardly thieves. Several friends and I ran across this Australian children’s book years ago, and it has been a favorite ever since. ![]()
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