Foucault's Pendulum
1988 · 623 pages
Three editors, buried in crank manuscripts about the Templars, invent a secret history of the world as a joke and feed it to a computer. Then the actual occultists arrive, wanting the secret.
★ 5.5
The Books canon
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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 Fortress
1970 · 406 pages
Ahmet Shabo returns from an Ottoman war to a Sarajevo where his family has died of plague and one honest sentence ruins a man. The marriage he makes there is his only refuge.
★ 5.5
Wind, Sand and Stars
1939 · 240 pages
Flying mail over the Sahara and Patagonia, Saint-Exupery writes about what the work did to the men who flew it. The pilot Guillaumet crashed in the Andes and walked out through the snow.
★ 6.6
The Baron In The Trees
1957 · 320 pages
At twelve, refusing a plate of snails his father demands he eat, Cosimo climbs into an oak and never touches ground again. He reads, loves, and fights the eighteenth century from the branches.
★ 6.8
Steppenwolf
1927 · 224 pages
Harry Haller believes he is half man, half wolf: too fine for bourgeois life, too weak to leave it. A dance hall woman leads him into jazz, drugs, and the Magic Theater.
★ 6.9