Books like Hapworth 16, 1924

Many years ago, a writer friend recommended Mrs. Caliban to me, without hinting about the plot or characters. “Just try it,” she said. “It’s so you.” She knew me well! I fell hard in love with this book that seemed like a wacky, comic, poetic collage of suburban reality, romance, and sci-fi thriller, with even a bit of horror thrown in.

The genius of Rachel Ingalls sneaks up on you until you’re totally verklempt over protagonist Dorothy’s fearless befriending of “Aquarius the Monsterman,” or, as she called him, “Larry.” A classic novella, and the perfect book for those moments you need to be mercifully transported from everyday life.

I find the very word “novella” delicious. Edith Wharton is one of my favorite writers, and this book is near the top of my deliciousness list. How can you resist a book with a killer first line like this: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”

The setting is so important here, too: a bitter Massachusetts winter that reflects the tale’s somber mood. Unlike the characters in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the characters here are not of the upper class, but in both books the characters share the internal crisis of whether to honor the moral constraints of their times or follow their aching hearts.

I have tremendous admiration for the way this author created the characters, the epistolary structure, and the gorgeous, surprising, poetic, intimate, riveting prose that seems to effortlessly unravel as if it were the telling of a beautiful dream.

For me, the absolute proof of a novella‘s success is that you are left stunned and begging for more. I do want more, but at the very same time, I’m grateful for what I have and happy to relive it over and over again in my mind. Here is a book you’ll want to return to, so you can meet up again with this collection of unlikely soulmates.

I get really happy when I can say this about a book: “I’ve never read anything like it!” This book isn’t fiction—or at least the author insists it isn’t, but it’s one of the most compelling books I’ve read, possibly because I’m the kind of animal lover who, in one way or another, puts animals in all her stories.

J. Allen Boone spins mesmerizing tales about animal intelligence and animal communication, filling his pages with philosophy and observations about animal lives from his friend, the German Shepherd movie star Strongheart, to a common house fly named Freddie. It’s not a children’s book—it’s a human’s book!

This book sucked me into the world of wine sommeliers and soon had me practicing my spittoon skills in the shower. I’m a wine historian who’d worked in restaurants, but I knew little about serving fine wine professionally. Bianca Bosker started with even less knowledge and embarked on a successful year-long crash course in wine.

She shadows sommeliers, learning their memory hacks and sharing their tasting tips, writing with empathy and humor. This book made me feel like I was lurking behind a sommelier on the floor of a Michelin-starred restaurant, except it was a lot funnier and had more swearing.  

The Lesser Dead is set in the past, but it’s not what you’d expect from an historical vampire novel. The setting is New York City, 1978, and so the atmosphere is more like the American police movies and TV shows that I grew up with than a gothic shocker.

Told by an unreliable narrator with an authentic, claustrophobic voice, the story follows an internecine conflict between two groups of the undead beneath the streets of Manhattan. Buehlman expertly mixes a twisting plot with believable vampires, who both disturb the reader and elicit their compassion, making this my favourite vampire novel of the 21st century.

I loved this book because it reads like a thriller but contains little-known wine history. Dinkelspiel follows the history of one of California’s early wine families, the Hellmans, when the California wine industry was located around Los Angeles.

She also documents a wild scandal of wine fraud and arson in the early twenty-first century by following a precious bottle of nineteenth-century wine from their legendary but forgotten Rancho Cucamonga vineyard. I really admire this book because it balances passion and delight in wine with a frank description of the abuses that have dogged the wine industry for centuries.  

I write about beer, cider, spirits, and cocktails. In fact, I'll write about almost anything that will get you drunk, plus a few liquids that won't, but I don't write about wine. That's my off-duty drink, the one side of booze I don't need to know about beyond asking myself whether I want more of the wine in my glass.

So you could say that for me all wine is from another galaxy. It can seem too big, the world of wine. Too deep. Too stuffy. This book makes it fun again, makes it fresh and exciting. I almost want to learn about the stuff, despite my best efforts not to!

After reading this, I feel I'd happily follow Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew into any cellar to swill and swig the hours away.

I majored in history and have always been fascinated by anything related to the Second World War and, more recently, wine. When I saw this book on the shelves, it was easy to pick it up. Like a fine bottle of wine between friends, I consumed this book in one sitting.

The more I learn about the ‘war to end all wars,’ the more disturbed my understanding becomes. This wasn’t solely a war over land, or even power, it was economic in origin and to this day was one of the greatest transfers of wealth in our planet’s history. At least in France, a significant portion of that wealth was grown, produced, and stored by the French Vignerons, the winemakers of the most famous wine regions.

Reading of their heroic exploits in Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy to hide, save, and preserve their wines, heritage, and dignity made for a gripping… show more.

Alice’s book is a manifesto against homogenization, wine consultants, and 100-point scoring systems.

She travels to the Loire and Champagne in France, to Piedmont in Italy, and to Spain. She reveals what goes into industrial wines, the mechanical treatments like reverse osmosis, and the additives like yeasts and enzymes, tannins, sawdust, and oak chips.

This book is an excellent compendium of anecdotes, interesting people in the wine world, and why natural wine is good. You’ll learn about the world of wine, but especially about the world of wine through the lens of Alice Feiring’s passion, natural wine.