01
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 232 pages
The book almost everyone means to read and almost nobody has. Written by a nineteen-year-old, and it shows in the best way: nothing in it is cautious.
Where to begin
Eight to
start with.
Six hundred and nine volumes is an intimidating way to be welcomed back to reading. So here are eight, chosen by hand: short enough to finish, by writers you already half know, and each with its own century around it — the paintings, the moment, the afterlife.
02
A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle · 128 pages
The first Holmes. Two hours, and you meet Baker Street before it became a museum of itself.
03
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 120 pages
A ghost story that refuses to tell you whether it is one. Short, and it will keep you arguing with yourself for a week.
04
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen · 240 pages
Austen with the joke on the surface: a girl who has read too many gothic novels, walking into a house that half obliges.
05
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 232 pages
Wilde saying the quiet part aloud for three hundred pages. The epigrams are the bait; the ending is the hook.
06
Childhood
Leo Tolstoy · 120 pages
Tolstoy at twenty-three, before the great machines. A hundred pages on what it is to be nine years old and to notice everything.
07
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 352 pages
The longest here, and the one that goes fastest. Nobody in it behaves well and nobody can be put down.
08
The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables
Robert Louis Stevenson · 240 pages
Stevenson in short measure: shipwreck, a haunted sound, and a sentence rhythm that carries you whether you meant to keep reading or not.