Rebecca's Reading RoomWhat Was on Reading Lists a Century Ago?
What Was on Reading Lists a Century Ago?
I have often wondered what people chose to read a hundred years ago. Not what they were assigned or instructed to read, but what they carried with them throughout 1926. The books tucked under an arm, slipped into a bag, opened again and again.
In 1926 books were companions. They were read on porches and verandas, in boarding houses by the sea, on park benches and in shaded libraries where the air barely moved. Reading was not hurried. A book was allowed to linger, to unfold slowly, to keep company with a reader over days or even weeks.
The world those readers inhabited was unsettled and newly alive. The Great War had ended less than a decade earlier. Its losses were still present, though no longer always spoken aloud. At the same time, life was accelerating. Jazz filled rooms, cities expanded, women stepped more fully into public life, and modernity announced itself with confidence. Reading reflected that tension, between longing and hope, disillusionment and beauty, escape and understanding.
One slender novel published in 1925 would eventually come to define that uneasy brightness: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Readers encountered its glittering parties and quiet heartbreak not yet knowing it would become iconic. It was simply a story of longing and illusion, perfectly suited to evenings when glamour and melancholy often share the same hour.
That same year, readers willing to turn inward found themselves absorbed by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a novel that unfolds over the course of a single June day yet opens into a vast interior world. It was not light reading, but it was deeply attuned to memory, grief, and consciousness, subjects many readers knew intimately, whether or not they named them.
Others gravitated toward larger, weightier narratives. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser was widely read, its moral questions mirroring anxieties beneath the promise of success. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis spoke to a society grappling with progress, science, and idealism, asking whether advancement always meant improvement.
Not all reading in 1926 sought reflection. Adventure and romance were equally welcome companions. Beau Geste by Percival Christopher Wren offered distant landscapes, loyalty, and courage, stories that transported readers far from their daily concerns. Romantic novels such as The Sheik by E.M. Hull still widely read years after publication, provided emotional intensity and imaginative escape, especially for women readers who recognized the power of private reading lives.
Mysteries, too, found their place in 1926. Agatha Christie’s reputation was growing, and novels like The Secret of Chimneys offered readers absorption without heaviness, stories that held attention without demanding too much of a warm afternoon.
Poetry, meanwhile, continued to speak quietly but profoundly. In 1926, The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes appeared, bringing rhythm, music, and lived experience into the literary conversation. Alongside poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, it reminded readers that poetry could be both modern and rooted, both intimate and expansive.
What lingers for me, looking back, is not simply what was popular, but why these books mattered. Reading a century ago was not frivolous. It was restorative. People turned to books to make sense of change, to sit with sorrow without being overwhelmed by it, and to find beauty where they could.
If I imagine myself stepping into that year, perhaps settling into a chair as the light shifts across the page, I know I would not have chosen just one kind of book. Poetry in the early hours. A novel in the heat of the day. A mystery as evening gathered. Not to finish them quickly, but to live alongside them for a while.
And I can’t help but wonder what someone, a hundred years from now, will make of our own reading lists. What will still be opened? What will be forgotten? What quiet book, scarcely noticed in its own time, will continue to speak?
Perhaps that, too, is part of the enduring comfort of reading. That is, the sense that when we open a book, we are never entirely alone in time.
Until the next page turns,
Rebecca
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