My Family and Other Animals
1956 · 273 pages
On Corfu in the 1930s a boy hunts scorpions and owls while his mother and three grown siblings supply the chaos. Durrell describes every creature exactly and every relative without mercy.
★ 5.0
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.
Black Beauty
1877 · 186 pages
A horse narrates his own life, passed down from a gentleman's stable to the London cab ranks. Sewell wrote to make drivers feel the head-wrenching bearing rein, and England stopped using it.
★ 5.3
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
White Fang (includes Call of the Wild and To Build a Fire)
1906 · 271 pages
Born wild in the Canadian North, a wolf-dog passes from a Native camp to a dogfighting pit to a man who tames him. The Call of the Wild runs the other way.
★ 7.0