​So begins Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a book born out of a summer storytelling session on the Thames. The opening stanza sets the tone: playfulness, dreaminess, and the idea of tales spun for children, which these were. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), was a Mathematics lecturer and Oxford University. There he wrote both of Alice's adventures for the children of the Christ Church’s Dean. unsurprisingly, Carroll was also fond of puzzles, chess, riddles, jokes, and codes. 

A Dreamlike Descent
The story begins with Alice, bored beside her sister, dismissing a book “without pictures or conversation.” Then: the White Rabbit, waistcoat and pocket-watch in tow, running late. Alice follows him down a rabbit-hole into the dreamscape below. Here she grows and shrinks by eating and drinking enchanted food, floods a room with her tears, and swims with a menagerie of creatures who try to “dry off” by reciting the driest thing they know—the history of William the Conqueror. Carroll delights in absurdity and parody: the logic of children’s play stitched into nonsensical scenes.

Jane Austen begins Northanger Abbey with irony. Catherine Morland, a plain, outdoorsy girl with good, sensible parents and nine siblings, is hardly the stuff of gothic romance heroines. And yet, at seventeen, she is sent to Bath under the care of family friends, ready to step into society.
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A Coming-of-Age Tale in Bath
Bath introduces Catherine to the rituals of balls, teas, and theater-going. At first she is overlooked, but soon she is noticed—and even admired—for her fresh prettiness. It is here that she meets Henry Tilney, witty and kind, who charms her with dancing, tea, and the idea that she ought to keep a journal of her “adventures.” Catherine develops a crush, but Henry remains elusive, his family duties distracting him.

Meanwhile, Catherine befriends Isabella Thorpe, who delights in gossip and introduces Catherine to Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic romance full of haunted castles and dark secrets. Their conversations—half silly, half sincere—fuel Catherine’s imagination and prime her for the Abbey that awaits her.

Invitation to Northanger Abbey
When the Tilneys invite Catherine to Northanger Abbey, she is thrilled. The stormy night of her arrival convinces her she is finally entering the world of midnight corridors and dreadful secrets. She even invents a sinister story about General Tilney having imprisoned his wifein a forbidden wing. 

But Austen uses this setup to puncture the gothic illusion. Catherine’s real disillusionment comes not from ghosts or murder but from social pettiness, greed, and a friend's betrayal. Isabella reveals herself shallow and scheming, throwing aside Catherine’s brother when his modest £400-a-year future fails to satisfy her ambitions. And worse, Catherine herself suffers heartache when Henry’s feelings seem uncertain, and her worth is weighed against her family’s supposed fortune.

Austen’s Point: The Real “Horrors” of Life
By the end of the novel, the obstacles were not gothic horrors and evil villainy but small-mindedness, manipulation motivated by jealously, and fears of money. Catherine is not a heroine in the grand sense—just a kind, earnest, “almost pretty” girl whose imagination sometimes runs away with her. Isabella, with her showier charms, collapses into ridicule. Austen’s irony is clear: the true terrors of life are not skeletons behind sliding wall panels, but jealousy, lies, and the fragility of social standing.

Final Thoughts
Compared to Pride and Prejudice, I found Northanger Abbey much more enjoyable. It is a simpler story, easier to follow, and more directly told. Its humor comes from deflating gothic expectations while exposing the real dangers facing young women in society: bad friends, manipulative suitors, and the constant pressure of money in marriage. Still, the ending felt underwhelming—Henry’s love is clarified not by grand passion but by correcting a misunderstanding about Catherine’s fortune caused by the jealous suitor John Thorpe. [JG]
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Survival, Providence, and the Long Return
First published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe blends spiritual reflection, survival narrative, and exotic adventure into what is often regarded as the first English-language novel. Despite some pacing and thematic problems in the second half, Crusoe remains a compelling journey of mind and body. 

A Young Man Against His Father’s Wisdom
Crusoe, the privileged son of a merchant, rejects his father’s counsel to seek the “middle state” of life—moderate work, moderate comfort, far from poverty and excess. Instead, Crusoe craves the extreme life, an adventure at sea and abroad. Quickly, the young man encounters the destructive power of nature, the depravity of man, and a before-unfathomable spiritual isolation. In his first voyage, he gets seasick and nearly is thrown overboard. A second voyage takes him to Africa, where he’s captured by Barbary pirates and enslaved. His daring escape with the boy Xury brings him face to face with lions, cannibalistic savages, and finally a merchant ship that promises to carry him to safety.

Shipwreck
On this third voyage, Crusoe is shipwrecked on a deserted island. He is the lone survivor. October 1 marks his “first day,” as he is physically and spiritually a newborn. His will to survive is desperate and he tackles the task of food and shelter methodically. He salvages gunpowder, tools, and seeds. He builds a tent, then a fortified cave, whose location he chooses for three reasons: for a view of passing ships, for safety from predators, and shelter from rain.

In subsequent journal entries, he charts his survival and his spiritual reckoning. Illness nearly kills him, and a vivid vision drives him to repent to God for his sinful preceding life. As he heals, his gratitude grows for his circumstances—for the European barley sprouting near his cave one morning, for the divine mercy of other provisions, for the breath in his lungs. 

Solitude
Years pass. Crusoe learns agriculture—reaping and sowing barley, corn, wheat—by trial and error. He domesticates goats, bakes bread, studies seasons. He explores nearby islands, but fears encountering savages, with which there is no communication except for violence. The discovery of a single footprint shatters his sense of safety, and later he finds bones and ash from cannibal feasts.

​After 25 years, he rescues a captive from such a feast—naming him Friday, for the day he rescued him on. Crusoe teaches him English, Christian morals, and “civilized” ways of thinking and being. Together they free other captives, fight off attackers, and aid shipwrecked sailors.

The Return
Eventually, Crusoe leaves the island to help retake a mutinied ship, promising his home and the buried treasure he has accumulated to those who help him. After 28 years, he returns to England. There he tends to family affairs and also his Brazilian plantation, which he had established before his shipwreck. Then, curiously, the novel drifts into a wintry trek through France, during which Crusoe fends off wolves with his musket, before ending the tale with the promise of even more adventures.

Overall
The first half of Robinson Crusoe surprised me with its powerful, personal, philosophical meditations.  As I read the yearning of young Crusoe for an adventure at sea and experienced his heartbreaking captivity by Barbary pirates, his ingenious emancipation, and tragic shipwreck onto the island, I greatly appreciated most Crusoe's internal dilemmas. He wrestles with God, cursing his physical and spiritual isolation. Upon many years of toil on-island and honest self-reflection, he celebrates his victories over the sea, bouts of bad health, his escape from and evasion of cannibals, and from the constant threats of famine. This transformation from victimhood to a kind of stoic gratitude, is earnest and enthralling. 

As mentioned above, I do feel that that the second half loses a chronological focus, which in turn scatters the novel's thematic power. There’s no reunion with his father and mother, nor is there a climactic spiritual awakening with God, whom he communes with in his diary and daily prayers. Non-essential affairs are wrapped up succinctly in a kind of travel-journal form, a form different and less dramatic than the novel's initial aim. Still, Crusoe’s adventure on the island remains a compelling, personal quest: a transformation from sin and folly by means of hard work and self-reflection, to arrive at a foundation of gratitude and salvation. [JG]

Goethe’s Faust: From Thirst for Life to Heavenly Redemption
Goethe’s Faust is a sweeping two-act drama that begins in intimacy and moral tension, then expands into a kaleidoscope of myth, politics, and pageantry. At its heart is one man’s restless hunger for human experience; that is, to be and feel and live in totality; to have the greatest successes and even the most tragic falls. Faust yearns to "drink from living streams." 
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On the Page: Spectacle & Depth
Goethe’s language bursts with lush detail: "soft-footed deer," "babbling brooks", pageants of satyrs, fauns, and dancers in silken ribbons. The Carnival scenes are especially vivid: bright flowers braided into hair, sun-tanned fruit-sellers in shady bowers, and “bits and bobs” of costume catching the light. All the while, these rich details that Faust experiences lead him to his highest heights of human industry and passionate romance; the totality of human experience is his to achieve and feast on.

In addition to enjoying anthropomorphic fiction, I've always loved learning about animals and the natural world. It probably started with the '90s TV show Kratt's Creatures as well as a handful of nature documentaries from the Discovery channel, and it even drove me to try to build a submarine in my parent's basement out of wood(!) to hopefully one day explore the ocean depths. Well, the (mini) submarine never materialized except in the form of Legos, but my curiosity continued to lead me to dozens of books on birds, octopuses, reptilians, dinosaurs, and more. 

Here are my ten favorite non-fiction books about animals: 

1. Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park by Alston Chase. Chase is a 'gadfly' in the alleged garden of Eden, curiously exploring and uncovering dark secrets of the National Park program and its mismanagement of wilderness. The plight of bears, wolves, elk, beaver, and more is truly heartbreaking. This book is one of the most impactful I have ever read, so much so that I called his landline phone to thank him in 2018. Chase passed in 2022. I wrote a longer recommendation for it here and highly recommend this speech he gave in 1994 on environmentalism.

2. American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee. In 1995, after passionate public debate, legal suits, and political agendas, fifteen Canadian wolves were introduced to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The next year, they added sixteen more. By 2003, 174 wolves called America's first and largest national park home and were divided into fourteen packs. This led to a new, golden age of research in not just wolves, but whole ecosystems. For example, When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, rivers came back. Willow is a riparian shrub that beavers love to eat. However, the elk in the park also love to eat it and the great herd had essentially stripped the riverbanks clean for generations. So there were fewer beavers for many years and the waterways languished in the park. When the wolves came back in 1995, the elk moved away to higher ground for better defense from and visibility of these super-predators. So the willow grew back. The beaver population grew too. The newly dammed waterways lead to streams, ponds, and thus more flora and fauna. You can read my full recommendation here. 

3. The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony. In South Africa, rogue elephants are shot. So when Lawrence Anthony, "the Indiana Jones of conservation," was asked to take in a whole herd in 1999—a herd who had tried to escape from their owners many times and seen their leader killed by humans, he knew his answer was the animals' life or death sentence. Fighting off desperate poachers, building electric fences from scratch, protecting other creatures on the reserve, treating various sicknesses—Anthony's obstacles were endless. And perhaps most difficult of all was achieving what few humans ever have with rogue elephants: heal their trust in humans. I wrote a longer recommendation for it here. 

4. One Man's Wilderness by Dick Proenneke. Dick lived alone for thirty years in Twin Lakes, Alaska. This is his journal covering the first 18 months of the odyssey. It's full of animals — bear, fish, elk, eagles, big-horned deer, and a rascally red squirrel who gives Dick a lot of grief. I wrote a longer recommendation for it here.

5. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. I wrote a longer recommendation for it here.

6. The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. Birds are smart. They make tools. They count. They imitate behaviors of other birds and even humans. They invent new solutions to old problems. They remember where they put things—especially the Western scrub jay which can recall up to 33,000 winter food caches. They can anticipate and guard against storms. They exploit opportunities, like the great tits and blue tits of the 1920's who learned how to open cardboard bottle tops to drink the cream off the top of milk bottles, and spread their knowledge over the next twenty years to hundreds of localities throughout England, Wales, and Ireland. Birds make nests up to idiosyncratic esthetic standards, even in the absence of females and the chance of mating. The allegedly 'bird-brained' pigeon has an incredible homing instinct and ability to traverse foreign landscapes...These incredible feats and others suggest profound mental capacities and abilities, ones comparable to those found in some primates.I wrote a longer recommendation for it here.

7. An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi. A clever picture book full of 19 logical fallacies and 19 cute animal illustrations. Some of the examples were a bit too on-the-nose-political for my taste, but I appreciate the Aesopian spirit of the book a lot. I wrote a longer recommendation for it here.

8. The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman. Also, excellent. It looks more into birdsong, parenting, and communication methods within social settings. 

9. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte. One of those rare non-fiction works that reads more like a thrilling yarn. It's 400+ pages though, so you gotta love dinosaurs and science writing for this one. I've heard that The Rise and Reign of Mammals is also quite good. 

10. The Tiger by John Vallant. This is a true account of the hunt for a man-eating tiger in eastern Russia. It reads like a tense thriller and I cannot believe it hasn't yet been made into a movie.