Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1930
1930 opens the decade that the Wall Street collapse the previous October has already started to define, though the literature of the year has not yet fully caught up to the scale of what is coming. William Faulkner, working night shifts shovelling coal at a university power plant, writes an entire novel by hand between midnight and four in the morning over six weeks, narrated by fifteen different voices including, in one chapter, a woman speaking from inside her own coffin. Evelyn Waugh, recently divorced and freshly converted to Catholicism, publishes a savage, increasingly bleak satire of the same bright young aristocrats he had skewered two years earlier, except this time the jokes curdle by the final pages into something closer to despair. Dashiell Hammett gives detective fiction a voice as flat and unsentimental as Hemingway’s, and Bertrand Russell, already one of the most famous philosophers alive, publishes a practical, almost cheerful guide to being less miserable, just as the world is about to give everyone considerably more reason to be.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
As I Lay Dying
Addie Bundren is dying in rural Mississippi, watching her eldest son Cash build her coffin from her own bedroom window, and the novel follows her poor, often quietly absurd family’s journey to honour her dying wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, encountering flood, fire, and their own competing motives, noble and selfish in roughly equal measure, along the way. Faulkner narrates the novel in fifty-nine short chapters across fifteen different voices, including, in one of the most startling formal choices in American fiction, a chapter narrated by Addie herself after she has already died. He later said he wrote the entire novel by hand in six weeks, working from midnight to four in the morning after twelve-hour shifts at the University of Mississippi power plant, and claimed he never changed a single word.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most technically audacious novels in American literature, moving between fifteen radically different interior voices, including a young child’s confused literalism and a brother’s escalating psychological breakdown, without ever losing the reader’s grip on what is actually happening to the Bundren family on their journey. Faulkner’s decision to let Addie narrate from beyond her own death is not a gimmick; it is the novel’s clearest statement that the dead continue to act on the living long after their bodies have stopped. Funnier, stranger, and more formally controlled than its grim premise suggests.
The Maltese Falcon
Sam Spade is a San Francisco private detective whose partner is murdered the night after a mysterious woman hires their agency to follow a man, drawing Spade into a tangled, double-crossing search for a small, jewel-encrusted statuette that several increasingly dangerous parties are willing to kill for. Hammett, who had worked as an actual Pinkerton detective before turning to fiction, wrote in a flat, unsentimental prose that refused the puzzle-box conventions of British Golden Age detective fiction in favour of something closer to the genuine moral murk of organised crime and institutional corruption. Spade is loyal to almost nothing except a private, idiosyncratic code of his own, including, famously, the obligation to avenge a partner he did not particularly like.
The Maltese Falcon is one of the foundational texts of American hard-boiled crime fiction, and Hammett’s achievement was to write a detective who solves his case not through brilliant deduction in the English tradition but through stubborn persistence and a refusal to be played by anyone, including the women who try hardest to manipulate him. The novel’s famous ending, in which Spade hands over a woman he may genuinely love because his own code requires it, gives the book a moral seriousness that pulp detective fiction rarely achieved before it. Read it as the template for nearly every hard-boiled American crime novel that followed.
Vile Bodies
Adam Fenwick-Symes is a young writer whose engagement to Nina Blount survives a series of farcical reversals, fortune won and lost on a drunken bet, a manuscript confiscated as obscene, an endless circuit of increasingly absurd costume parties among London’s so-called Bright Young Things, until the novel’s final pages abandon comedy almost entirely and strand Adam on a battlefield as another war begins. Waugh wrote much of the novel while his first marriage was collapsing, and later said the tonal shift partway through, from light farce to genuine bleakness, directly reflected his own state of mind during composition. The novel made Waugh’s reputation and his fortune, and Rebecca West predicted on its publication that he was destined to become the dazzling figure of his age.
Vile Bodies is the funniest and the bleakest book on this list in roughly equal measure, and that combination is precisely the point: Waugh shows the same emptiness and amorality in his characters’ endless parties that, two decades later, would feel considerably less funny in his own retrospective accounts of the era. The novel’s closing image, a comic hero of frivolous engagement comedies abandoned on an actual battlefield, gives the entire preceding farce a different, much colder meaning in hindsight. Read it as the book where Waugh’s comedy first revealed how much genuine despair was sitting underneath it.
Cakes and Ale
A young writer named Willie Ashenden is asked by a pompous, socially ambitious novelist to help write a flattering biography of a recently deceased literary great, which forces Ashenden to confront his own much more vivid and far less respectable memories of the great writer’s first wife, Rosie, a former barmaid whose warmth, generosity, and casual sexuality made her, in Ashenden’s clear personal estimation, a far more honest and admirable figure than any of the literary establishment now scrambling to construct a sanitised version of her late husband’s career. Maugham, drawing on real literary feuds and rumoured real-life models, used the novel to satirise the literary world’s tendency to flatten genuinely complicated, often disreputable real lives into respectable myth after death.
Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his most pointedly satirical about the literary establishment’s hypocrisy, and Rosie remains one of his most fully realised and most sympathetically drawn characters precisely because the novel refuses to judge her by the standards the era’s respectable society would apply. Maugham’s own contemporaries speculated extensively about which real novelists had inspired the unflattering portraits in the book, adding a layer of literary scandal to its original reception. The novel’s argument, that a woman’s generosity and warmth matter more than her respectability, was genuinely ahead of its moment.
Narcissus and Goldmund
Narcissus is an ascetic young monk firmly committed to a life of intellectual and spiritual discipline within his monastery; Goldmund is his closest friend, a romantic, sensuous young man hungry for worldly experience who eventually leaves the monastery to wander the world pursuing art, women, and adventure, while Narcissus remains behind, rising within the monastic hierarchy. Hesse structures the novel as a sustained meditation on the apparent conflict between the contemplative, ascetic life and the sensual, experiential one, following both men’s diverging paths across decades before bringing them back together near the novel’s end, each having learned something the other already understood from the beginning. The novel draws on Hesse’s own lifelong preoccupation with the tension between intellectual discipline and lived experience.
Narcissus and Goldmund is the most serene and the most philosophically patient of Hesse’s major novels, refusing to declare either the ascetic or the sensual path correct and instead suggesting that both are genuinely necessary, incomplete expressions of a fuller human life. The novel’s eventual reunion of its two central characters, each transformed by a path the other never took, gives the book an emotional resolution that the more anguished Steppenwolf, published three years earlier, deliberately withholds. Read it as Hesse’s most balanced statement on a conflict he spent his entire career examining from different angles.
The Conquest of Happiness
Russell, already one of the most famous living philosophers, sets out a practical, deliberately unsentimental account of what actually makes people unhappy, competitiveness, boredom, envy, excessive self-absorption, and what genuinely seems to counter it, work, interest in the world outside oneself, and a tolerance for ordinary, unspectacular contentment rather than constant intensity. The book predates the modern self-help genre by decades but anticipates many of its central concerns, while remaining noticeably more rigorous and less prescriptive than most of what followed it. Russell wrote the book in a deliberately accessible, almost conversational register, distinct from the technical philosophical work for which he was already famous.
The Conquest of Happiness is one of the earliest and still one of the most genuinely useful examples of a serious philosopher addressing ordinary human contentment in plain, practical language rather than abstract theory. Russell’s insistence that happiness is largely a matter of redirecting attention outward, toward genuine interests and other people, rather than inward toward constant self-examination, remains a more durable piece of advice than much of what the later self-help industry produced. Read it as popular philosophy from a writer who never stopped being a serious one.
Strong Poison
Harriet Vane, a mystery novelist, is on trial for the murder of her former lover, who died from a poison closely resembling one she had researched for one of her own novels, and Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic amateur detective, becomes convinced of her innocence and determined to prove it, falling in love with her over the course of the investigation despite, or perhaps partly because of, the considerable obstacles her trial presents to anything resembling a conventional courtship. Sayers introduces Harriet Vane in this novel specifically to give Wimsey, previously a somewhat two-dimensional aristocratic detective, a genuine emotional and intellectual equal, setting up the relationship that would develop across several subsequent novels, including Gaudy Night five years later.
Strong Poison is the novel that transformed Sayers’s detective fiction from clever puzzle-construction into something with genuine emotional and intellectual stakes, by introducing a heroine capable of matching Wimsey’s wit while having every reason to resent being indebted to him for her own life. Harriet Vane’s prickly, justified reluctance to fall for the man who saved her from the gallows gives their courtship a complexity rare in detective fiction of the period. Read it as the beginning of one of the more intellectually honest romantic pairings in the genre’s history.
Where to start
If you want Faulkner’s most formally daring novel
→ Read As I Lay Dying. Fifteen narrators, including one speaking from beyond her own death, and Faulkner claimed he wrote the whole thing in six weeks without changing a word.
If you want the book that defined hard-boiled American crime fiction
→ Read The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s flat, unsentimental prose and Sam Spade’s stubborn private code became the template nearly every detective novel since has worked from or against.
If you want comedy that turns genuinely bleak without warning
→ Read Vile Bodies. Waugh’s satire of London’s Bright Young Things ends on a battlefield, and the shift from farce to despair was, by his own account, exactly how he felt while writing it.
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“My mother is a fish.” — William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
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