Non-treadmill oldies

Catching up on some classics | Marvin Olasky

This column for eight years has emphasized newly published books, but I was recently laid up involuntarily for a month and had time to read oldies but goodies.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) struck a nerve throughout Europe and made Goethe one of the first literary celebrities. Emotional torment, romanticism, suicide—here's the beginning of moral relativism and ambiguity. Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853) is the classic book recommended by disillusioned lawyers.

For precise social observation from the late 19th century, Henry James is hard to one-up: Daisy Miller (1878) shows the wages of naïve idealism and Washington Square (1880) the cost of cynicism. Ford Madox Ford's slow-starting The Good Soldier (1915) shows more of trans-Atlantic culture and is interesting technically through its use of an unreliable narrator.