Gilead
2004 · 247 pages
John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.
★ 7.7
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.
Pilgrim's Progress
1678 · 400 pages
Christian sets out with a burden on his back toward the Celestial City, through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. For two centuries only the Bible was read more widely in English.
★ 7.4
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1905 · 392 pages
Calvinists could not know whether they were saved, so they worked without rest and spent nothing. Capitalism grew out of that anxiety, Weber argues, then shed the faith and kept the iron cage.
★ 7.1
The Thirty Years War
1938 · 520 pages
At twenty-eight Wedgwood narrated Europe's most ruinous pre-modern war whole, thirty years of armies eating Germany alive, and her verdict of meaningless conflict still has to be argued with.
★ 6.4
The Way of All Flesh
1903 · 315 pages
Theobald Pontifex beats piety into his son with perfect Christian conviction, and Ernest spends the novel working free of him. Butler handed the revolt against Victorian respectability its sharpest and funniest weapon.
★ 5.7