The Books canon

Sourced and shelved.

Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
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The Decameron

1353 · 909 pages

Ten young Florentines flee the plague to a country house and spend ten days telling a hundred stories of seduced wives, crooked friars, and lucky fools. The jokes still land six centuries later.

★ 7.5

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