Free Book by Book by Michael Dirda

its sentences like drops of rainwater: “Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue-checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.”
    2. Alexander Theroux,
Darconville’s Cat.
“Darconville, the schoolmaster, always wore black.” This impassioned, original novel chronicles obsession, jealousy, and hate with a learned diction (and humor) as magnificent as any in the 17th century. For even more than Darconville loves the college student Isabel, Alexander Theroux loves the heavenly labials and ranting gutturals of the English language. At one moment he can use a word like “deipnosophist” (a person skilled in the art of dining and table talk) and in the next write with utter simplicity: “September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.”
    3. John Crowley,
Little, Big.
The most admired postwar American fantasy, this wistful love story begins when a young man marries a very special young woman. The Drinkwater clan resides in a turn-of-the-century house that seems to grow bigger the farther you go into it; their family photo album includes pictures of elves; and they turn out to be major players in the secret history of the world. The diminuendo of the book’s closing sentences evokes its sad autumnal magic: “The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being, never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”
    4. A. S. Byatt,
Possession: A Romance.
Two modern scholars search for the truth about a secret love affair between two eminent Victorian poets, the consequences of which spread out far more widely than suspected, even into the present. “I read your mind, my dear Mr. Ash. You will argue now for a monitored and carefully limited combustion . . . and there will be—Conflagration.”
    5. Arundhati Roy,
The God of Small Things.
“They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.” This Booker Prize winner chronicles the heartbreaking story of a doomed affair between a young Indian woman and an untouchable, as well as its effect on two young children, Estha and Rahel. Arundhati Roystructures her novel so that it builds to a final chapter of incandescent sexual ecstasy, even as we know too well the horror that will follow. Much of the beauty of the book arises from its similes: “It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into the loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire.”
    6. Penelope Fitzgerald,
The Blue Flower.
There is no waste in this apparently meandering, almost leisurely short novel. Written when its author was approaching eighty, it revolves around the love of the German romantic poet Novalis for an insignificant and rather plain young girl of fifteen. In merely 200 pages, Fitzgerald evokes a vanished world, the follies and realities of love, yearning and suffering. Even its minor characters are indelible. A successful surgeon realizes that the woman with whom he grew infatuated when young has forgotten his name: “What means something to us, that we can name. Sink, he told his hopes, with a kind of satisfaction, sink like a corpse dropped into the river. I am rejected, not for being unwelcome, not even for being ridiculous, but for being nothing.”
    7. Ferdinand Mount,
Fairness.
“How cool and objective we mean to sound, how hot our hearts.” In this funny and heartbreaking novel, a rather staid Englishman finds his life ruined by a woman he adores and can never possess. “She ties men up in knots,” a character warns him, “just because her hair looks like a bunch of