Nobel Prize for Literature: Theodore Mommsen, German historian and author of History of Rome.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Owen Wister, The Virginian. I tried but was unable to conquer. Becky read it and loved it. Maybe I need to try again.
2. Alice Caldwell Hegan, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. I have this classic on my Kindle, but I haven’t read it yet.
3. Charles Major, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
4. Emerson Hough, The Mississippi Bubble.
5. Mary Johnston, Audrey.
6. Gilbert Parker, The Right of Way.
7. A. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I have read my Sherlock Holmes. I had a friend in high school who was mad about Holmes and Watson both.
8. Booth Tarkington, The Two Vanrevels. I’ve read Penrod and The Magnificent Ambersons, enjoyed them both, but not this one. Both Penrod (1914) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) are set during this time period, the first decade of the twentieth century.
9. Henry van Dyke, The Blue Flower. Short stories about the search for happiness by the author of The Other Wise Man and of the hymn lyrics Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.
10. Lucas Malet, Sir Richard Calmady.

Critically acclaimed and historically significant:
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
André Gide, The Immoralist
Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove. Reading The Wings of the Dove by Elizabeth Gaffney at Salon.com.
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Ms. Potter and I share a birthday, and so I wrote about her here. Go here for even more information about Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

Fiction Set in 1902:
Zora and Me by Victoria Bond. Fictionalization of the life of author Zora Neale Hurston from age nine to age eleven. In the book Zora becomes a girl detective who tries with her friends to figure out what happened to a man who was murdered or accidentally killed in their small Florida town.
Land of Promise by Joan Lowery Nixon.