A High Wind in Jamaica
1929 · 279 pages
A hurricane wrecks their Jamaican home, so the Bas-Thornton children are shipped to England and captured by pirates. Hughes strips childhood of its innocence, and the pirates prove no match for them.
★ 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.
What Hath God Wrought
The Transformation of America 1815-1848
2007 · 928 pages
Morse tapped the title into the first telegraph line in 1844. Howe's Pulitzer-winning account of antebellum America argues that communications, markets, and revival religion remade the country while Jacksonian politics took the credit.
★ 6.3
The Education of Henry Adams
1918 · 560 pages
Adams writes his own life as another man's, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, educated for a world that vanished. A Paris dynamo strikes him with the force medieval pilgrims felt from the Virgin.
★ 6.6
The Cairo Trilogy
1957 · 1313 pages
A Cairo merchant rules his household as a tyrant and drinks his nights away with singers while his wife may not step outside. Over three generations, revolution and war reach inside that house.
★ 7.8
Charlotte's Web
1952 · 184 pages
Wilbur is a runt pig bound for slaughter, saved by a barn spider writing words in her web. Eudora Welty called it just about perfect, and it is where children first meet death.
★ 7.8
Metamorphoses
8 · 764 pages
Ovid runs classical myth through a single idea, transformation, from the creation of the world to Julius Caesar. Girls become trees and hunters become deer, and painters have ransacked him for centuries.
★ 8.6