The Book of Psalms
500 BC · 560 pages
One hundred fifty poems of praise, terror, and rage at God, restored to their Hebrew compression by the translator Robert Alter. The shepherd psalm sits beside one ending with infants dashed on rocks.
★ 6.7
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 Ramayana
Valmiki and Arshia Sattar
500 BC · 157 pages
Rama accepts fourteen years of exile to keep his father's promise, and the demon king of Lanka carries off his wife. Indian towns still act the story out in the streets each autumn.
★ 6.7
Hebrew Torah
Author unknown
400 BC · 400 pages
These five books make the world, drown it, and follow one family from Abraham to the law given at Sinai. Four billion people now worship the God who speaks in them.
★ 6.7
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Author unknown
1386 · 592 pages
Chanted to the newly dead across the forty-nine days between one life and the next, Tibetan Buddhism's manual for dying insists that the radiant and monstrous deities arriving are the mind's own projections.
★ 6.7
The Upanishads
Author unknown
500 BC · 446 pages
You are that, an Indian sage tells his son: the self inside you and the power holding up the universe are one thing. Elsewhere a boy corners Death and demands answers.
★ 7.4
Mahabharata
A Modern Retelling
400 BC · 928 pages
Five brothers gamble away a kingdom and their wife, then return from exile to a war that swallows their world. Carole Satyamurti's English verse holds the whole Sanskrit epic, Krishna's counsel included.
★ 7.5
The Bhagavad Gita
Author unknown
150 BC · 140 pages
Facing his cousins across a battlefield, Arjuna drops his bow. Krishna tells him to act without grasping at results, then takes a form of countless mouths with the worlds burning inside.
★ 7.6
The Holy Bible (King James Version)
Various
1611 · 1728 pages
God makes the world, loses the people in it, and spends the rest of the book getting them back. The English of this translation is the English later writers have had to answer.
★ 9.8