Sure, this is a 650-page novel about nuns.

But, lord, it’s captivating. Set in a Benedictine abbey near London at midcentury, it brings a community—& a time, as the fresh breeze of Vatican II blows in—convincingly to life. I love this book. (So, I think, does @TerryTeachout1.)

Hoo, boy, this slim memoir. Ohannessian worked at New Directions, but this book is set earlier, when she was a child in Bucks County & Robert Graves & Laura Riding moved in nearby and upended everything. It’s absolutely wild.

“If you’re pouring out your soul, you don’t want other people pouring out theirs. There’d be a flood.”

Alice Thomas Ellis cuts like Compton-Burnett but burns with the fires of deeper concerns and meanings. She’s vicious and funny and strange and even moving.

Nichier than niche, this one. But it’s clever & bookish, as you’d want. And delivers the anecdote that when he worked at Duckworth a reader complained of their catalog: “as I have ... children & young servants, I should be obliged if you would not deliver your cess to my door.”

The Matthew Scudder series is @LawrenceBlock’s greatest achievement.

But he’s written so much other good stuff. This one’s as light as they come, a set of clever, black-hearted puzzles featuring a lawyer who stops at nothing to confirm his clients’ presumed, unlikely innocence.

Small-village municipal politics in the wake of WWI, mixed with love affairs and the rapidly changing place and expectations of women in that time and place? Winifred Holtby’s South Riding is the epic for you. What fun, what memorable characters and wrenching personal choices.

This one is very different from the others I’m sharing, but it’s stayed in my thoughts just as much. Does exactly what it says on the tin: Tells you the details of daily life, from grocery shopping to first dates, in the 1920s & ‘30s in the United States. Wholly fascinating.

This is probably the best-known of the bunch, successful in the UK & US. But it’s 5 years old now & nonfiction sometimes fades—& it deserves to last. Hugely ambitious, but welcoming, approachable, & elegant, & also unexpectedly affecting. One of the best nonfiction books I know.

Hopefully you saw something in that thread that intrigued you. Your local bookstore is, now more than ever, standing by ready to help.

And now to figure out what -I’m- going to read this long weekend . . .