Matilda
1988 · 240 pages
Matilda finished Great Expectations at four, which her parents treat as an insult. Her headmistress at school throws children by the pigtails, and Matilda discovers she can move objects with her eyes.
★ 4.8
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.
At the Mountains of Madness
1936 · 192 pages
Antarctic explorers find a stone city older than mankind, its history painted on the walls. Lovecraft's real monster is deep time, and this novella is where his cosmic dread reaches full scale.
★ 5.0
The Call of Cthulhu
1928 · 420 pages
Lovecraft pitched horror at cosmic scale, where the terror is an indifferent universe rather than any monster. A sculptor's dreams and a Louisiana swamp cult lead to a sunken city.
★ 5.1
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
1889 · 410 pages
Knocked cold in a Hartford arms factory, Hank Morgan wakes in Camelot and sets about industrializing it. The comedy runs a long way before Twain turns it into mechanized slaughter.
★ 5.5
Ubik
1969 · 227 pages
Dick's most vertiginous novel. After a bomb on the Moon, Joe Chip's world rots and slides back toward 1939, and nobody can say who died. An aerosol called Ubik holds it off.
★ 5.8
Watership Down
1972 · 476 pages
Fiver the rabbit senses blood covering the field, and others follow him out before the bulldozers come. Adams gives them their own language and mythology, then sets them against a rabbit police state.
★ 6.0
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone
1997 · 326 pages
Letters arrive for the boy in the cupboard under the stairs: he is a wizard and Hogwarts wants him. Rowling built that school so completely that the series has sold 600 million copies.
★ 6.3
Gargantua and Pantagruel
1564 · 1104 pages
Two giants eat, drink, and study their way across Renaissance France while a monk and a scoundrel debate marriage. Rabelais packed in so much filth and learning that his name became an adjective.
★ 7.4
The Hobbit
1937 · 300 pages
Thirteen dwarves turn up at a comfortable hobbit's door and talk him into helping them rob a dragon. The comedy is real, and the riddle game in the dark still frightens children.
★ 7.8
Gulliver's Travels
1726 · 511 pages
Swift's ship's surgeon washes up among people six inches tall, then among giants, then among rational horses who find humans repulsive. Each voyage is funnier than the last and angrier about us.
★ 8.2
The Castle
1926 · 352 pages
K. arrives in a village claiming the castle above it hired him as land surveyor, and never reaches anyone who can confirm it. Waiting becomes the whole of his life there.
★ 8.4
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
1865 · 171 pages
Alice follows a rabbit down a hole into a country where logic runs sideways, ruled by a queen who wants everyone beheaded. Carroll freed children's books from having to teach anything.
★ 8.5
The Master and Margarita
1967 · 411 pages
The devil arrives in Stalin's Moscow with a retinue that includes an enormous talking cat, and the literary bureaucrats never recover. Threaded through it runs a stark short novel about Pontius Pilate.
★ 8.7
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