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The Door In The Wall by H. G. Wells
At first, "the door in the wall" seems like a novel idea, but when I give it even a moment of thought , I find that that's exactly what and where a door is meant to be.
Many years ago, I read Wells' The Time Machine. The Door In The Wall was told in a similar style, being that the majority of the plot is conveyed not by the narrator themself, but by someone speaking to him, creating an interesting blend of two first-person perspectives. I might go out of my way to look for more books in this style. Historically, I've struggled to follow books that switch first-person perspectives, but after Wells I theorise that this may be less of a function of the style itself, and more of the complexity of the other works I've read, with higher numbers of perspectives and overlap between members of social encounters.
For all my upbringing (raised by an English teacher, went to a primary school with a strong focus on reading comprehension and literacy, applied to Oxford), I'm not exactly the best at interpreting the motivations behind literary works. Despite having suffered through countless hours of analysis of J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls in high school, which is set around the same time, I can't find any obvious social message from The Door In The Wall, though it doesn't feel like something that was written "just for fun" either (as I find few surviving celebrated works from the early twentieth century are). It's certainly a skill I could stand to develop, so I think next time I read something of the sort, I might brush up on my history for the time and place it was written before going in (and avoiding learning of the author's personal values where I can), aiming to guess the message as I read.
All of this reflection on what and how I should read next suggests to me that I might do well to make a more mindful and curated TBR.