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All 7 reviews, latest first

• 7.0good The Time Machine H. G. Wells A Victorian scientific romance whose inventor-host shows dinner guests a machine that moves through time, then returns in rags to tell what he saw.
• 6.8competent A Study in Scarlet Arthur Conan Doyle A dry, observant doctor narrates taking rooms with a consulting detective who can read a stranger's whole history at a glance.
• 7.0good The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde A portrait that ages while its subject stays young, set in a fin-de-siècle London of roses, fog, opium and impossible epigrams.
• 7.3good The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells A groundbreaking, atmospheric landmark of speculative fiction that balances sublime cosmic terror with occasional 19th-century craft contrivances.
• 7.5good Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome A comic masterpiece in stretches and a padded magazine anthology in others — skim the guidebook pages and you hold one of the funniest books ever written.
• 8.0exceptional The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle A canon detective classic whose moorland atmosphere and fair-play clueing still outclass the genre — read it for the fog and the deductions, not for a tidy final confrontation.
• 7.0good The Call of the Wild Jack London A brutal, beautiful dog's-eye epic of the frozen North, dated in its caricatures but still propulsive.