And Quiet Flows the Don
1940 · 624 pages
Grigory Melekhov loves his neighbor's wife and rides for the Reds, then the Whites, then neither, while war and revolution finish the Don Cossacks. Sholokhov wrote under Stalin and spared no side.
★ 6.5
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Tain Bo Cuailnge
Author unknown
750 · 256 pages
Seventeen years old, Cu Chulainn holds the fords against the army Medb of Connacht raised to steal a bull, with Ulster's warriors paralyzed by birth pangs. Yeats built a national mythology on him.
★ 6.6
East of Eden
1952 · 602 pages
Two generations of a Salinas Valley family repeat Cain and Abel, and Steinbeck stakes everything on one Hebrew word: timshel, thou mayest, which leaves a man free to choose against his blood.
★ 6.7
Shahnameh
977 · 1040 pages
Fifty thousand couplets carry Iran from creation to the Arab conquest, past a tyrant with snakes growing from his shoulders and the hero Rostam meeting a young champion he does not recognize.
★ 7.1
Inferno
1321 · 296 pages
Lost in a dark wood, Dante follows the Roman poet Virgil down through nine circles, past lovers, popes, and traitors frozen in ice. Every punishment is built to answer its sin.
★ 7.3
Beowulf
Author unknown
1000 · 213 pages
For twelve years a monster has emptied a Danish king's hall, until a young warrior sails over to wait for it in the dark. Fifty years on, the poem comes back for him.
★ 7.4
Gilgamesh
Author unknown
1700 BC · 304 pages
Literature begins here. Gilgamesh bullies his city until the gods send a wild man to match him. They become friends, one dies, and grief drives the survivor to the end of the world.
★ 7.5
Les Miserables
1862 · 1260 pages
Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for stealing bread, breaks parole, and is hunted the rest of his life by a relentless policeman. Around them Hugo builds the century's great argument for mercy.
★ 8.8
The Lord of the Rings
1954 · 1178 pages
Frodo the hobbit inherits a ring that could rule the world and carries it across a continent to destroy it. Tolkien invented its languages first, and modern fantasy still works inside his world.
★ 8.9
Paradise Lost
1667 · 591 pages
Satan rebels in heaven, loses, and comes for the first two people. Milton meant to justify God and produced a devil so magnificent he nearly walks off with the greatest poem in English.
★ 9.5
Aeneid
19 BC · 484 pages
Aeneas carries his father out of burning Troy and is sent to found Rome, abandoning the queen who loves him. Duty wins, and Dido's grief is the greatest passage in Latin poetry.
★ 9.5
Moby Dick
1851 · 672 pages
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
★ 9.6
The Divine Comedy
1321 · 798 pages
No poem has reached higher. Dante goes down through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and into the light of God, settling scores with real Florentines and arriving where Beatrice waits.
★ 9.8
The Odyssey
700 BC · 592 pages
Ten years of storms, monsters, and a goddess who will not let him go stand between a soldier and his own front door. Every adventure story since descends from Odysseus.
★ 9.9
The Iliad
750 BC · 848 pages
Achilles withdraws from the fighting over a stolen prize and his friends die outside Troy for it. Nothing written about war since has matched Homer's fury, or the mercy of the final scene.
★ 9.9