Philosophy in the Boudoir
1795 · 173 pages
Two libertines take a girl of fifteen through atheism, pleasure and cruelty, pausing for a pamphlet urging the Republic to abolish God with the king. Sade takes reason to its worst conclusion.
★ 4.2
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.
Justine
1791 · 336 pages
Twelve years old and orphaned, Justine chooses virtue and is punished for it by monks, surgeons, and noblemen who argue at length that nature rewards cruelty. Napoleon had Sade arrested for writing it.
★ 4.2
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
1930 · 141 pages
Hergé sent his boy reporter into a Soviet Union he had never visited, cribbed from one anti-Bolshevik tract of rigged elections and staged factories. Crude work, and the series it opened conquered Europe.
★ 4.4
Adventures on the Wine Route
A Wine Buyer's Tour of France
1988 · 288 pages
A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.
★ 4.5
The Tiger in the Smoke
1952 · 288 pages
A war widow receives photographs of the husband she buried. The trail runs into a London fog where the killer Jack Havoc is loose, and Allingham makes the thriller an argument about evil.
★ 4.6
Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret)
1931 · 176 pages
Inspector Maigret arrives fully formed in his first case, following a con man off the Paris express to a Normandy fishing port. He solves people rather than puzzles, and Simenon wrote seventy-four more.
★ 4.6
A Coffin for Dimitrios
1939 · 304 pages
Le Carré called Ambler the source on which we all draw. An English novelist is shown a body from the Bosphorus and traces the dead man through Balkan assassination and Paris drug trafficking.
★ 4.6
The Daughter of Time
1951 · 206 pages
Bored in a hospital bed, a Scotland Yard inspector studies a portrait of Richard III and reopens the murder of the two princes, working entirely from chronicles and documents fetched to his bedside.
★ 4.7
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
1992 · 736 pages
Marcella Hazan taught America what Italians actually eat, region by region, and her rule is exacting: buy well, do less, wait. Her tomato sauce is a can, an onion halved, and butter.
★ 4.7
Gaudy Night
1935 · 544 pages
Harriet Vane, mystery novelist, returns to her Oxford women's college, where someone is sending obscene letters and destroying scholarship. Nobody dies. The question is whether a woman can have both work and love.
★ 4.7
The Honored Society
1964 · 265 pages
Lewis walked postwar Sicily and found monks running extortion from the confessional and Mafia bosses installed as mayors by American liberators, whose invasion, he argues, restored what Mussolini had nearly destroyed.
★ 4.7
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 Thirty-Nine Steps
1915 · 128 pages
Wanted for a murder in his own flat, Richard Hannay bolts across the Scottish moors with a dead spy's coded notebook. Hitchcock filmed it, and the innocent fugitive became the thriller's engine.
★ 4.8
Pippi Longstocking
1945 · 160 pages
Pippi is nine, lives alone with a monkey and a horse she can lift with one arm, and answers to no adult. Lindgren handed children a heroine no grown-up can manage.
★ 4.8
The Diary of a Nobody
1892 · 176 pages
Charles Pooter, a London clerk of vast unearned dignity, records every slight from tradesmen and every dinner-party triumph. He paints his bath red with enamel and mistakes the dissolving water for blood.
★ 4.8
South from Granada
1957 · 320 pages
In 1920 an Englishman settled in the mountains south of Granada, in a village called Yegen. Brenan sets down its customs, its poverty and its gossip, an Andalusia the Civil War would erase.
★ 4.8
Three Men in a Boat
1889 · 361 pages
Three Victorians and a fox terrier row up the Thames, and Jerome turns the holiday into English comedy: a tin of pineapple nobody can open, a Hampton Court maze that traps everyone.
★ 4.9
Fatale
1977 · 98 pages
Aimee Joubert kills for hire. She arrives in a smug French seaside town, learns everyone's secrets over dinner, and sets the notables to destroying each other. Manchette writes crime as class war.
★ 4.9
The Laughing Policeman
1968 · 211 pages
On a rainy Stockholm night a gunman empties a submachine gun into a bus, killing a detective from Martin Beck's own squad. Sjöwall and Wahlöö make Swedish social democracy the real suspect.
★ 4.9
Band of Brothers
1992 · 336 pages
Easy Company jumped into Normandy on D-Day, held Bastogne through the snow short of ammunition and coats, and finished the war at Hitler's alpine retreat. Ambrose built it from the men's own accounts.
★ 4.9