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 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.
Lucky Jim
1954 · 264 pages
Jim Dixon loathes lecturing in medieval history, his professor's madrigal weekends, and the colleague trapping him with fake suicide threats. His drunken Merrie England lecture is the great set piece of English comedy.
★ 6.3
The Secret History
1992 · 557 pages
At a Vermont college a transfer student joins five classics majors and their charismatic tutor, then learns their rite to Dionysus left a farmer dead. Dark academia has been rewriting it since.
★ 6.4
Fortress Besieged
1947 · 448 pages
Fang Hongjian returns to wartime China with a mail-order diploma and no plan. Qian gave Chinese its image of the besieged life: those outside the fortress want in, those inside want out.
★ 6.6
Stoner
1965 · 278 pages
Sent to study agriculture, a Missouri farm boy falls for English literature instead and never leaves the university. Williams makes an unremarkable life, badly used by everyone in it, hold you completely.
★ 7.8