BookShelves

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This Day in Literature - July 4

Remembered today: Thomas Jefferson (1826)

Independence Day Read: Common Sense by Thomas Paine

A small, dumpy Catholic priest who solves crimes by understanding sin. Not forensics. Not deduction. He catches murderers because he knows what it feels like to want to commit murder.

Chesterton's mysteries work like philosophical puzzles wrapped in short stories. Each one is self-contained, clever, and surprisingly dark. The perfect collection to read one story at a time before bed.

The one most people haven't read, and it might be the most important dystopian novel ever written. Published four years before Brave New World and twenty-four years before 1984.

A glass-walled city where citizens are numbers and freedom is considered a disease. Strange, feverish, and uncomfortably relevant. Orwell himself acknowledged its influence.

If you've read 1984 and Brave New World, you owe it to yourself to read the book that came first.

"All right, then, I'll go to hell."

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

This is not a love story. Or it is, but the kind that leaves scorch marks. Heathcliff and Catherine don't complete each other. They destroy each other, and everyone around them.

Bronte wrote this at 28 and died at 30. There's nothing else like it in English fiction. The moors feel like a character. The characters are almost universally awful, and you can't stop reading about them.

Don't come expecting comfort. Come expecting to understand why people keep writing about love that ruins everything.

Did You Know?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

"Reader, I married him."

Jane is poor, plain, and absolutely refuses to compromise on what she deserves. Rochester is magnetic and hiding something enormous. The gothic atmosphere is thick, the moral stakes are real, and the ending feels earned rather than convenient.

The first hundred pages are harrowing. Push through them. Everything after depends on them.

T.S. Eliot called it "the first and greatest of English detective novels," and he wasn't wrong. A diamond goes missing at a country house party. Multiple narrators tell their version. Everyone is unreliable. Collins invented the locked room, the red herrings, the bumbling local police. In 1868. Everything after this is a remix.

In 1895, a retired sea captain rebuilt a derelict oyster boat and sailed it solo around the world. First person ever to do it. This is his account, and it reads like a novel.