Today, December 15, is the last day to order from Amazon.com using free Super Saver Shipping and still receive books in time for Christmas giving. So I’m putting aside my regular look at the New York Times bestseller list this week and instead pointing out some matching sets of books perfect for readers of your list.

Monday: books for conspiracy buffs
Tuesday: celebrating the season
Wednesday: armchair traveling
Thursday: on the lookout for UFOs and strange creatures
Today: lost classics of literature


The Efficiency Expert, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, first published in 1921 and often overlooked by Burroughs’ fans, is a cracking tale of young Jimmy Torrance, an upstanding college graduate in post-World War I Chicago who inadvertently rubs shoulders with mobsters and ends up framed for murder:

Jimmy Torrance sat a long time in thought after the Lizard left. “God!” he muttered. “I wonder what dad would say if he knew that I had come to a point where I had even momentarily considered going into partnership with a safe-blower, and that for the next two weeks I shall be compelled to subsist upon the charity of a criminal?”

Five Weeks in a Balloon is the first of Jules Verne’s novels of imaginative adventures, first published in France in 1863. Much more down to earth — figuratively, if not literally — than his later works, his heroes here encounter no lost civilizations, no anachronistic dinosaurs, and no extraordinary perils beyond that which actual explorers of the era might have met on a balloon voyage across the Dark Continent:

The chiefs are armed with muskets,” said he, “and our balloon is too easy a mark for them.”

“Would a hole make us fall?” asked Joe.

“Not immediately; but the hole would soon become a vast rent, through which all our gas would escape.”

“Then let us keep at a respectful distance. What can they think of us? I’m sure they want to worship us!”

“We will let ourselves be worshipped,” answered the doctor, “but from afar…”

He is considered one of the greatest novelists in any language in all of human history, but many of Leo Tolstoy’s works remain obscure today. His short novel Hadji Murad, published posthumously and recommended by Harold Bloom in his Western Canon, is the writer’s fictionalized account of his service in the Russian army in Chechen in the 1850s and of a Chechen soldier, Hadji Murád, who defects to the enemy with tragic results:

The aoul which had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murád had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado and his family had left the aoul on the approach of the Russian detachment, and when he returned he found his sáklya in ruins… His son, the handsome bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murád, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a búrka; he had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, by Elizabeth von Arnim, first published anonymously in 1898, is a beautiful chronicle of languid days spent in a rejuvenating Italian garden was a tremendous bestseller at the turn of the century, its cheerful satire and fresh charm endearing it to millions of readers. The first work of its author, the Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, it would form the basis of her extraordinary popularity as one of the most admired literary figures in Europe and “one of the three finest wits of her day”:

May 16th.-The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings crowd round me at every step-it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover.

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat is one of the more than 170 book Thornton W. Burgess, one of the most popular writers for children in the English language, produced during his prolific career. This delightful 1914 volume is part of Burgess’s “Bedtime Story-Books” series about the adventures of Buster Bear, Paddy the Beaver, and other enchanting creatures:

“All the Coons and all the Minks must search along the banks of the Laughing Brook, and all the Muskrats and all the Otters must search along the banks of the Smiling Pool. You must use your eyes and your noses. When you find good things to eat where you have never found them before, watch out!”

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