Mildred Pierce
1941 · 298 pages
Abandoned in Depression-era Glendale, Mildred bakes pies and builds a restaurant chain, spending every dollar on the gifted, glacial daughter who despises her for working. Cain needs no corpse to write noir.
★ 5.1
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 Bonfire of the Vanities
1987 · 720 pages
Sherman McCoy, a Park Avenue bond trader who calls himself a Master of the Universe, takes a wrong turn into the Bronx. A boy is struck, and Wolfe feeds him to New York.
★ 5.3
The Siege of Krishnapur
1973 · 344 pages
Besieged by rebels in 1857 India, British colonials run out of shot and fire the head of a Shakespeare bust from a cannon. Farrell lets their faith in progress starve alongside them.
★ 5.8
The Miser and Other Plays
1668 · 304 pages
Harpagon keeps a cash box buried in his garden, intends to marry his son's beloved himself, and gives his daughter to whoever asks no dowry. Moliere made him Europe's byword for greed.
★ 6.0
Main Street
1920 · 898 pages
Carol Milford marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, determined to civilize it. The town wins, and Lewis made Main Street a byword for everything narrow and self-satisfied in American life.
★ 6.1
Distinction
1979 · 640 pages
Taste is class in disguise, Bourdieu argues, and his survey of French preferences in music, food, and interiors proves it. The pure aesthetic judgment Kant called universal is a privilege of the comfortable.
★ 6.4
An American Tragedy
1925 · 972 pages
Clyde Griffiths, raised by street preachers and starving for money, gets a factory girl pregnant as a rich one turns toward him. Dreiser drew the lake that follows from a 1906 murder case.
★ 6.5
Effi Briest
1895 · 255 pages
Married at seventeen to a baron of thirty-eight who once courted her mother, Effi is stranded in a bleak Baltic town. Fontane lets a code nobody believes in destroy her anyway.
★ 6.6
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
1831 · 483 pages
Medieval Paris rebuilt around the cathedral, where a deaf bell-ringer loves a dancer the archdeacon also wants. The novel made crumbling Notre-Dame a national cause and saved it from the wreckers.
★ 6.6
The Woman in White
1860 · 671 pages
Walking home from Hampstead at night, a drawing master meets a woman all in white escaped from an asylum. Collins tells it as sworn testimony, and Victorian England bought Woman in White perfume.
★ 6.7
The Jungle
1906 · 290 pages
Jurgis Rudkus comes from Lithuania to work Chicago's killing floors, and the packing plants destroy his family while diseased meat ships out. Roosevelt read it and Congress passed federal food inspection within months.
★ 6.7
The God of Small Things
1997 · 333 pages
Twin brother and sister in Kerala watch their divorced mother fall in love with Velutha, a carpenter of the untouchable caste. Roy hands you the catastrophe first and then makes you understand it.
★ 6.7
Love in a Fallen City
1943 · 321 pages
Bai Liusu, a divorcee her Shanghai family treats as a disgrace, follows a rich bachelor to Hong Kong. Chang writes their courtship as cold accounting until the Japanese bombardment reaches the city.
★ 6.8
This Earth of Mankind
1980 · 368 pages
Minke, a Javanese student under Dutch rule, loves the daughter of a concubine running the estate its Dutch owner cannot. Indonesia banned it for a generation and now claims it as its greatest.
★ 6.8
Down and Out in Paris and London
1933 · 213 pages
Seventeen-hour shifts in a Paris restaurant kitchen, then the tramps' road between London workhouses. Orwell went into poverty himself and came back able to describe what hunger does to a mind.
★ 7.0
Sister Carrie
1900 · 494 pages
Carrie Meeber leaves Wisconsin for Chicago and rises through two men to the New York stage. Dreiser lets her prosper without remorse or retribution, and American fiction has been freer ever since.
★ 7.0
The House of Mirth
1905 · 368 pages
Lily Bart is beautiful, twenty-nine, and unmarried, which in Old New York is a countdown. Wharton tracks her slide from ballroom to boarding house without once softening the arithmetic.
★ 7.0
A Tale of Two Cities
1859 · 488 pages
Eighteen years in the Bastille have left Doctor Manette making shoes in the dark. Dickens carries his daughter's household from London into the Terror, where Madame Defarge knits a death list.
★ 7.0
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China
1922 · 448 pages
Modern Chinese literature begins here. Ah Q, a village laborer, turns every beating into a spiritual victory, and a madman reads the Confucian classics until the words eat people surface between the lines.
★ 7.0
A Christmas Carol
1843 · 116 pages
Scrooge hates Christmas until his dead business partner turns up wrapped in chains and three spirits walk him through his own life. The modern Christmas takes its shape from this book.
★ 7.1
Old Man Goriot
1835 · 336 pages
In a shabby Paris boarding house, an old man sells off everything for two daughters ashamed to be seen with him. Balzac counts every franc and shows what money does to love.
★ 7.2
The Age of Innocence
1920 · 336 pages
Newland Archer, engaged to the right New York girl, falls for her cousin the Countess Olenska, back from a ruinous European marriage. Old New York moves against them without ever raising its voice.
★ 7.2
The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling
1749 · 1024 pages
Found as a baby in a squire's bed, Tom grows up generous and reckless, loses his home, and follows Sophia Western to London. Coleridge ranked the plot beside that of Oedipus.
★ 7.3
Capital
Volume 1
1867 · 1152 pages
Workers create more value than their wages return, Marx argues, and that gap is profit. No economic book has reshaped politics more, and the chapter on the working day still burns.
★ 7.5
The Remains of the Day
1989 · 245 pages
Driving across England in 1956 to see the housekeeper he worked beside, a butler remembers the Nazi sympathizer he served with pride. What he cannot bring himself to say is the whole novel.
★ 7.7
David Copperfield
1850 · 1024 pages
Put to work in a warehouse as a boy, David escapes to an aunt he has never met. Dickens gave him his own childhood, and loved this novel above all the others.
★ 8.1
A Passage to India
1924 · 322 pages
Something happens in the dark of the Marabar Caves, and an Englishwoman accuses the Indian doctor who brought her there. Forster watches a colonial society close ranks and goodwill count for nothing.
★ 8.5
Jane Eyre
1847 · 284 pages
English fiction found its first fierce female voice in Jane, plain and poor and conceding nothing. She survives a brutal charity school, becomes a governess, and loves an employer with a secret.
★ 8.8
Wuthering Heights
1847 · 353 pages
Heathcliff, a foundling on a Yorkshire farm, spends his life destroying two families over the girl he loves. The poet Rossetti called it a fiend of a book, its action laid in hell.
★ 8.8
Mrs. Dalloway
1925 · 197 pages
Clarissa Dalloway buys the flowers herself and gives a party, one June day in London, while a veteran wrecked by the war comes apart nearby. Woolf moves between strangers' minds without warning.
★ 9.0
War and Peace
1869 · 1392 pages
Five families carried through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with battle, marriage, farming, and a theory of history held in one design. You finish it knowing these people better than your own friends.
★ 9.8