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The Phantom Major by Virginia Cowles (24). This is a straightforward and very entertaining tale of the beginning of the British Army's famous Special Air Service, a commando unit that was established to raid German and Italian supply lines and airfields in North Africa during World War Two. It tells the history of the unit from its creation in 1941 by David Stirling to his capture in 1943. Recommended for its astounding real-life adventure tales and its very genuine-sounding depictions of the personalities and complexities of modern military service. (For example, with his nascent unit starved of supplies by an administrative officer who had taken a personal dislike to him, Stirling engineered the wholesale looting of a nearby encampment of New Zealand troops while they were off on night maneuvers.)

Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard: A Journey Through the Inside-Out Worlds of Iran and Afghanistan by Nicholas Jubber (25). I've been dipping into this book off an on for some time now. I finally finished it during my vacation, and I wished I had a whole second volume to go. A young Englishman decides to imbibe Persian culture, starting with a stay in Tehran, during which he tours all over Iran. He then continues on to Turkmenistan, and winds up with a dangerous but fascinating trip into Afghanistan. Gradually becoming obsessed with the great poet Ferdowsi (the Homer+Chaucer+Shakespeare of Farsi), Jubber first visits all the sites he can find associated with the great man in Iran. Then he goes on pilgrimage to the Afghan city of Ghazni, whose sultan commissioned Ferdowsi's greatest work--the Shahnameh--only to reject it years later when the poet, near the end of his life, had completed it. Jubber provides a kaleidoscope of images of the lands through which he travels, showing the life of the educated elite in Tehran, as well as wrestlers, butchers, students, shrine guardians, and various assorted travellers whom he encounters all throughout Central Asia. A wonderful if idiosyncratic introduction to Persian religion, literature, custom, history, and current events and attitudes.

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (26)
The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (27). Two of Conan Doyle's novels (novellas), including the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and one of the fabulous "ancient Indian treasure" stories beloved of Victorian fiction writers. Both feature one of Conan Doyle's favourite devices for longer tales, the "story within a story". Both are full to the brim with sinister villains, secret societies, murderous "natives", and a tiny (tiny) element of romance. The second includes some very dry self-mockery by Watson that probably contributes to the unfair notion that he's a bit of a cloth-headed dunce.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery (28)
Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery (29)
Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery (30). How could one visit PEI and not see Green Gables, the putative home of one of fiction's pluckiest and most misadventure-prone young ladies? And while I've seen the wonderful TV programmes starring Megan Follows, Colleen Dewhurst, and Richard Farnsworth, I had never actually read the books. So I did, while I was on PEI, with the aid of my trusty iPhone. I can see the why and wherefore of some of the changes, but I'm astonished at how much was made up from whole cloth for television, and some of the pieces that were cut would, I think, have been better left in.

The Other Side of the Dale by Gervase Phinn (31). Advertised with references to James Herriot's autobiographical tales of veterinary practice in rural Yorkshire, this amusing volume on the work and misadventures of a schools inspector in the Yorkshire Dales is very much Herriot-light. Some of the stories are a bit spare or thin, some of the jokes are not absolutely side-splitting, and the book overall is a bit on the slender side. But it's a collection of charming and unaffected stories, replete with the same sort of reflection and humility that Herriot brought to his experiences, and quite enjoyable.

In progress
Little America by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise by Dorothy Dunnett
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell
Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold's March to Quebec, 1775 by Thomas Desjardins
The Western Front: Ordinary Soldiers and the Defining Battles of World War I by Richard Holmes
Knights of the Cross; or, Krzyzacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle