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.

In Cold Blood

1966 · 343 pages

In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.

★ 8.0

The Moonstone

1868 · 528 pages

T.S. Eliot called it the first and best of modern English detective novels. A diamond looted from an Indian shrine arrives as a birthday present and vanishes that night.

★ 6.6