Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1922
1922 is the annus mirabilis of literary modernism, the single year most scholars point to when asked when the twentieth-century novel and poem actually started behaving like themselves. On the second of February, James Joyce’s fortieth birthday, Sylvia Beach publishes the complete Ulysses in Paris after American censors had spent years suppressing its serialised chapters as obscene. In October, T.S. Eliot publishes a long, fragmented poem about a civilisation in ruins that will become the most influential poem written in English in the entire century. Virginia Woolf publishes the novel in which her own mature voice first arrives, and Sinclair Lewis publishes a satire so precisely aimed at American business conformity that its protagonist’s surname becomes, almost instantly, a permanent addition to the English language. In Germany, Hermann Hesse, attempting to cure what he called his own sickness with life, publishes a novel about the Buddha’s era that will not find its largest audience until four decades later, on a different continent entirely, among a generation looking for exactly what it offers.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Poetry · Updated June 2026
Ulysses
Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, a young intellectual, move through Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, in a novel loosely structured around the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey, narrated in a constantly shifting array of styles, stream of consciousness, newspaper headlines, dramatic script, catechism, that mirrors the chaotic, associative texture of actual consciousness more thoroughly than any novel before it had attempted. The book had been partially serialised in the American magazine The Little Review until an obscenity prosecution shut the serialisation down in 1920; Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, published the complete novel there in 1922, since no publisher in any English-speaking country would touch it. Ulysses remained effectively banned in the United States until a 1933 court ruling and in Britain until shortly afterward.
Ulysses is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential novels ever written precisely because Joyce treats the ordinary texture of a single unremarkable day, meals, errands, half-finished thoughts, bodily functions, as worthy of the same formal ambition previously reserved for epic. The novel’s famous final chapter, an unpunctuated, page-long stream of consciousness narrated by Molly Bloom, remains one of the most audacious single passages in the history of the novel. T.S. Eliot said it destroyed the entire nineteenth century and left Joyce with nothing left to write another book on. Difficult, genuinely funny, and unlike anything written before it.
The Waste Land
A long poem in five sections that presents a fragmented, despairing vision of postwar Western civilisation, weaving together the legend of the Fisher King, classical and biblical allusion, multiple narrating voices, and the specific, exhausted texture of London street life into a structure so deliberately discontinuous that it provoked accusations of being either a hoax or a kind of intellectual fraud upon its first publication. Eliot’s original working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices, a phrase taken from Dickens, and Ezra Pound’s extensive editorial intervention substantially shaped the final, far more compressed version that was eventually published. Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound, “il miglior fabbro,” the better craftsman. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, cited specifically for the trail he had blazed in modern poetry.
The Waste Land remains the single most influential poem written in English in the twentieth century, and its fragmented structure, voices and quotations colliding without explanation or transition, was a genuinely radical formal departure that gave subsequent poets permission to abandon the connective tissue traditional verse had always supplied. Critics disagreed furiously and immediately about what the poem actually meant, an argument that has never fully resolved itself, which is part of why the poem has remained so durably alive. Read it slowly, more than once, and do not expect it to resolve into a single, stable meaning.
Babbitt
George F. Babbitt is a prosperous, thoroughly conventional real estate agent in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, comfortable in his marriage, his business, and his social standing, until a vague, persistent dissatisfaction he cannot name or explain begins to surface beneath the surface of his successful, conformist life. Lewis renders Babbitt’s specific brand of American boosterism, his clichéd speech, his anxious conformity to his social club’s expectations, his fleeting and ultimately unsustained attempt at rebellion, with enough precision that the character’s surname entered the language almost immediately as a term for any smugly conventional, conformist businessman. Lewis went on to become the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1930, with Babbitt cited specifically among the works that earned him the honour.
Babbitt is less stylistically innovative than its modernist contemporaries, but its innovation was in subject rather than form: Lewis identified and named a specific kind of unexamined American conformity, prosperous, anxious, deeply conventional, with enough precision that the word Babbittry remains in dictionaries a century later. George Babbitt’s brief, half-hearted rebellion and his eventual retreat back into conformity is genuinely poignant rather than simply satirical; Lewis understood that Babbitt’s emptiness was sincere even when his attempts to escape it were shallow. Read it as the novel that gave an entire social type its permanent name.
Jacob’s Room
Jacob Flanders is glimpsed across childhood, Cambridge, and early adulthood almost entirely through the perceptions and impressions of the people around him, mother, lovers, friends, rather than through any direct, stable access to his own interior consciousness, and the novel’s elliptical, impressionistic structure builds toward a single, devastating absence: Jacob has died in the First World War, a fact the novel never states directly but renders through his empty room and his mother’s bewildered grief in the final pages. Woolf published the novel through her own Hogarth Press, with a jacket design by her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. It was her third novel and the first in which critics and Woolf herself recognised her distinctive mature style fully emerging.
Jacob’s Room is the novel in which Woolf’s later, more famous technique, indirect characterisation built from fragments and impressions rather than direct psychological exposition, first arrives at its full power, and the novel’s refusal to ever let the reader inside Jacob’s own head becomes, by the final pages, the entire emotional argument: a generation of young men is genuinely unknowable to the people who loved them, reduced finally to an empty room and a pair of his old shoes. Read it as the hinge between Woolf’s earlier, more conventional fiction and the fully realised modernist novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, that would follow.
Siddhartha
Siddhartha is a young man in ancient India, a contemporary of the Buddha, who leaves a privileged Brahmin upbringing to wander as an ascetic, then immerses himself fully in worldly pleasure, wealth, and sensual love, before eventually finding, not through any teacher or doctrine but through years spent as a humble ferryman listening to a river, the wordless unity he had been seeking all along. Hesse, writing partly to cure what he called his own sickness with life, spent so long unable to write the novel’s second half that he lived as a virtual recluse, immersing himself in Hindu and Buddhist scripture in an attempt to actually experience the state of understanding he wanted his character to reach. The novel was not published in the United States until 1951 and did not find its largest readership until the 1960s, when an entire generation of young Western readers exploring Eastern spirituality discovered it nearly four decades after Hesse had written it.
Siddhartha is structured on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, twelve chapters built from those traditional frameworks, but its central argument is genuinely subtle: understanding cannot be taught or transmitted directly, not even by the Buddha himself, but can only be earned through the complete, undivided experience of a life, including its detours into asceticism, wealth, and desire that look, from the outside, like failures to find the path rather than necessary parts of walking it. Hesse’s prose is simple, lyrical, and deceptively easy to read for a novel this genuinely difficult to fully absorb. Read it slowly and resist the temptation to extract a tidy lesson from it.
The Velveteen Rabbit
A stuffed velveteen rabbit, given to a young boy as a Christmas present, longs to become Real, the special, mysterious status the nursery’s older, more battered toys describe as belonging only to the toys a child has loved enough and long enough, and the rabbit’s journey toward that transformation runs through being deeply loved, then nearly discarded as worn-out and unhygienic after the boy recovers from scarlet fever, before a final act of nursery magic intervenes. Williams, an English-born American writer, drew the story’s central metaphor, that being truly loved is what makes something real, regardless of how worn or shabby it becomes in the process, with an emotional directness unusual in children’s literature of the period. The book has never gone out of print since its original publication.
The Velveteen Rabbit earns its lasting place in children’s literature because it takes its own central metaphor, that love rather than newness or perfection is what confers genuine reality, completely seriously, treating a child’s emotional life with the same gravity an adult novel might bring to questions of identity and authenticity. The Skin Horse’s explanation of what it means to become Real, that it happens gradually, through being loved, and that it sometimes hurts, remains one of the most quoted passages in children’s literature for exactly that reason: it does not condescend to its young readers about what love actually costs and requires.
Where to start
If you want the single most influential novel of the century
→ Read Ulysses. Difficult, genuinely funny, and structured around a single ordinary day rendered with more formal ambition than almost any novel before or since.
If you want the poem that changed what poetry was allowed to do
→ Read The Waste Land. Critics called it a hoax when it was published. It is now considered the most influential poem written in English in the twentieth century.
If you want the novel that found its real audience forty years late
→ Read Siddhartha. Hesse wrote it in 1922; an entire generation of Western readers exploring Eastern spirituality discovered it in the 1960s, nearly four decades after he wrote it.
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“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” — T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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