And now for something completely different ( Read more... )

One of the best accounts of a Victorian childhood that I've ever read (and let me tell you, I have read hundreds). Gwen Raverat was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin and the daughter of a Cambridge don. She led a very typical upper-middle-class childhood in Cambridge ( Read more... )

Apologies for the hiatus in my promised series of ebook recs. Partly this has been due to the fullness of my schedule, but partly also due to my concern that I have a very well-read group of friends and therefore that I'm choosing books which everyone has heard of already. Do let me know if you think my recs ought to be more obscure. In the mean ( Read more... )

Most of my friends--the ones who enjoy messing about in boats on the Thames, at least--have probably read this already. But maybe not everyone in the world has. On that off chance, I am recommending it here.

Written in 1899, Three Men in a Boat apparently struck some critics as vulgarly slangy and overly populist. Needless to say it was a ( Read more... )

You might be familiar with the work of Christopher Isherwood at a remove, via "Cabaret." You might have read Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, the novels about interwar Berlin on which "Cabaret" was based. You might have seen the recent BBC production Christopher and His Kind, with Matt Smith of Doctor Who fame playing the title ( Read more... )

Given the recent kerfuffle about gay YA novels (or the lack thereof), I just have to re-recommend David Blaize. It's part of that genre of remarkably queer boarding school stories that flourished in the Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, surviving until romantic friendship went out of fashion and outside observers suddenly ( Read more... )

I found this little gem while looking for reading material for my recent Icelandic holiday. Put together by the Ministry of Education, it starts with a helpful short introduction about the history of Icelandic literature. After a traditional tale from the 13th century, "The Story of Audunn and the Bear," it moves on to feature six stories written ( Read more... )

This is one of the most grueling, gripping adventure stories of all time... and best of all, it's a true story. If you've read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, you know the genre. Nearly a hundred years old, this story is just as vivid and dramatic as anything that could be produced today.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a member of Robert Scott's 1910 ( Read more... )