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.

A Distant Mirror

The Calamitous 14th Century
1978 · 704 pages

Tuchman holds the fourteenth century up as a mirror to our own: plague killing a third of Europe, a war without end, and one French nobleman whose life ran through all of it.

★ 6.8

The Canterbury Tales

1390 · 528 pages

Chaucer's thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury swapping stories, the knight a courtly romance and the miller a filthy joke, and he wrote them in English when serious poetry meant Latin or French.

★ 8.9