Middlemarch
1872 · 810 pages
Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar for the wrong reasons and a gifted doctor lets small compromises close around him. Eliot knows more about how people actually fail than any English novelist.
★ 9.6
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.
Invisible Man
1952 · 581 pages
Thrown out of college, then used by a Harlem political movement, a nameless Black man ends up living in a cellar on stolen light. Ellison writes American rage with jazz timing.
★ 9.0
Bleak House
1853 · 1036 pages
Dickens's supreme achievement, and his angriest. A lawsuit over a will has dragged through the courts so long that nobody alive understands it, and its fog settles over every life in England.
★ 8.8
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
1961 · 458 pages
Jacobs watched her Greenwich Village street and argued that crowded sidewalks, short blocks, and eyes on the street are what keep a city alive. After this, bulldozing a neighborhood stopped looking like progress.
★ 8.3
Native Son
1940 · 504 pages
Bigger Thomas drives for a rich white family in 1930s Chicago and kills their daughter in a panic his first night. Wright keeps you inside his head and will not soften him.
★ 7.2
Oliver Twist
1838 · 416 pages
Born in a workhouse, Oliver asks for more, is sold off, and runs to London, where Fagin's gang of child pickpockets takes him in. Dickens made child poverty impossible to ignore.
★ 7.1
A Christmas Carol
1843 · 116 pages
Scrooge hates Christmas until his dead business partner turns up wrapped in chains and three spirits walk him through his own life. The modern Christmas takes its shape from this book.
★ 7.1
A Tale of Two Cities
1859 · 488 pages
Eighteen years in the Bastille have left Doctor Manette making shoes in the dark. Dickens carries his daughter's household from London into the Terror, where Madame Defarge knits a death list.
★ 7.0
Down and Out in Paris and London
1933 · 213 pages
Seventeen-hour shifts in a Paris restaurant kitchen, then the tramps' road between London workhouses. Orwell went into poverty himself and came back able to describe what hunger does to a mind.
★ 7.0
Uncle Tom's Cabin
1852 · 400 pages
Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio on breaking ice with her child. Stowe sold three hundred thousand copies within twelve months and made slavery intolerable to Northerners who had lived comfortably beside it.
★ 6.7
The Jungle
1906 · 290 pages
Jurgis Rudkus comes from Lithuania to work Chicago's killing floors, and the packing plants destroy his family while diseased meat ships out. Roosevelt read it and Congress passed federal food inspection within months.
★ 6.7
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1848 · 576 pages
Helen Graham bolts her bedroom door against a drunk husband, takes her son, and lives by selling paintings. Victorian reviewers called it coarse and unfit to put in a girl's hands.
★ 6.6
Black Skin, White Masks
1952 · 206 pages
A white child points and cries, Look, a Negro. Fanon takes that instant apart to show racism lodged in the skin itself, and half a century of Black thought has worked from it.
★ 6.6
The Uses of Literacy
1957 · 384 pages
Hoggart set down working-class Leeds as he had lived it, then indicted the slick magazines displacing it. Seven years later he founded the Birmingham center that made popular culture an academic discipline.
★ 6.6
Working
1974 · 589 pages
Terkel put a tape recorder before a gravedigger, a receptionist, a steelworker, and asked what the day costs them. Work is violence to the spirit as well as the body, he writes.
★ 6.5
Christ Stopped at Eboli
1945 · 288 pages
Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.
★ 6.5
Delirious New York
1978 · 320 pages
Manhattan built itself without a theory, so Koolhaas supplied one afterward: the grid, the skyscraper, and Coney Island as a culture of congestion. He turned density from planning's disease into architecture's ambition.
★ 6.5
Persian Letters
1721 · 341 pages
Two Persian travelers in Paris write home about a king who conjures money from paper and a pope who makes bread into flesh. In Isfahan, the harem one of them left is collapsing.
★ 5.9
The Organization Man
1956 · 429 pages
Whyte went into corporations and the new suburb of Park Forest and found Americans trading the old ethic of individual striving for belonging. The organization wanted the whole man, and got him.
★ 5.8
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
1914 · 624 pages
The philanthropists of the title are house painters who give their labor away and defend the system that ruins them. Owen, the socialist, cuts up bread to demonstrate the money trick.
★ 5.7