Psychology of the Unconscious
1912 · 566 pages
Jung reads the daydreams of an American woman he never met against myth and religion from every culture, finding the deepest material in a mind is inherited, not personal. It cost him Freud.
★ 5.7
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.
The Greek Myths
1955 · 784 pages
Graves retells every Greek myth, cites his ancient sources, then argues underneath that all of it encodes a matriarchal religion the Greeks overthrew. Generations of English readers got their mythology from him.
★ 5.9
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
1949 · 432 pages
Campbell read the world's myths and found one story under them: a hero leaves home, survives an ordeal, returns changed. Hollywood took the pattern wholesale, from Star Wars to Disney's animated features.
★ 6.5
The Prose Edda
1220 · 180 pages
A Swedish king walks into a hall and asks three strangers how the world began and how it ends. Their answers are nearly all anyone now knows about Thor, Loki, and Ragnarok.
★ 7.3
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
Paradise Lost
1667 · 591 pages
Satan rebels in heaven, loses, and comes for the first two people. Milton meant to justify God and produced a devil so magnificent he nearly walks off with the greatest poem in English.
★ 9.5
The Divine Comedy
1321 · 798 pages
No poem has reached higher. Dante goes down through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and into the light of God, settling scores with real Florentines and arriving where Beatrice waits.
★ 9.8