The Odyssey
700 BC · 592 pages
Ten years of storms, monsters, and a goddess who will not let him go stand between a soldier and his own front door. Every adventure story since descends from Odysseus.
★ 9.9
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.
Don Quixote
1605 · 940 pages
An old man reads himself mad on chivalry, names himself a knight, and rides out with a farmer for a squire. Four hundred years on the book is still hilarious and still heartbreaking.
★ 9.7
Moby Dick
1851 · 672 pages
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
★ 9.6
Aeneid
19 BC · 484 pages
Aeneas carries his father out of burning Troy and is sent to found Rome, abandoning the queen who loves him. Duty wins, and Dido's grief is the greatest passage in Latin poetry.
★ 9.5
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1884 · 400 pages
Huck runs off down the Mississippi with Jim, who is escaping slavery, and the moment he decides he would rather go to hell than turn him in is the hinge of American fiction.
★ 9.3
The Lord of the Rings
1954 · 1178 pages
Frodo the hobbit inherits a ring that could rule the world and carries it across a continent to destroy it. Tolkien invented its languages first, and modern fantasy still works inside his world.
★ 8.9
Gulliver's Travels
1726 · 511 pages
Swift's ship's surgeon washes up among people six inches tall, then among giants, then among rational horses who find humans repulsive. Each voyage is funnier than the last and angrier about us.
★ 8.2
Lord of the Flies
1954 · 192 pages
English schoolboys are marooned on an island without adults, hold a vote, and are soon hunting each other. Golding tells it so plainly that you believe every step of the descent.
★ 7.8
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author unknown
1375 · 198 pages
At Arthur's Christmas court a huge green man offers his neck to anyone willing to take the same blow a year later. Gawain swings, and the real test waits in a bedroom.
★ 7.4
Le Morte d'Arthur
1485 · 576 pages
Arthur pulls the sword from the stone and the finest knights come to his table, until his wife's love for Lancelot brings it down. Every Camelot since comes from Malory.
★ 7.4
The Conquest of New Spain
1568 · 412 pages
Fifty years on, writing in Guatemala, one of Cortés's foot soldiers set down the conquest of Mexico as the ranks saw it. He never got over his first sight of Tenochtitlan.
★ 7.3
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1922 · 550 pages
Lawrence rode with the Arab tribes revolting against the Ottoman Empire, dynamited their trains, and took Aqaba from the desert side. He tells it as epic and never stops accusing himself.
★ 7.2
The Worst Journey in the World
1922 · 573 pages
Three men hauled sledges through five weeks of Antarctic winter darkness to fetch penguin eggs, in cold that cracked Cherry-Garrard's teeth. That was before Scott's polar party failed to come back.
★ 7.1
The Persian Expedition (Anabasis)
370 BC · 375 pages
Ten thousand Greek mercenaries, stranded in Persia with their prince dead and their generals murdered, elect Xenophon and march north through snow until the men in front shout that they see the sea.
★ 7.0
Robinson Crusoe
1719 · 304 pages
Twenty-eight years on an island near the Orinoco, counting days on a post and keeping his own moral ledgers, until a footprint appears in the sand. The English novel grew from this.
★ 7.0
Billy Budd, Sailor
1924 · 385 pages
Struck dumb by a false charge of mutiny, a beautiful young sailor answers with his fist and kills his accuser. Melville leaves his captain to choose between the law and the plain truth.
★ 7.0
The Count of Monte Cristo
1844 · 1276 pages
Edmond Dantes, a sailor about to marry, is denounced by rivals and buried in an island prison for fourteen years. He returns rich and unrecognizable, and revenge fiction still runs on his design.
★ 7.0
White Fang (includes Call of the Wild and To Build a Fire)
1906 · 271 pages
Born wild in the Canadian North, a wolf-dog passes from a Native camp to a dogfighting pit to a man who tames him. The Call of the Wild runs the other way.
★ 7.0
Into Thin Air
1997 · 332 pages
Krakauer climbed Everest on assignment for Outside magazine, summited on May 10, 1996, and came down through the storm that killed eight climbers. He is hardest on his own conduct.
★ 6.8
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1876 · 184 pages
Tom cons the neighborhood boys into whitewashing his aunt's fence, then witnesses a graveyard murder and attends his own funeral. Twain gave America the childhood it has claimed to remember ever since.
★ 6.7
The Three Musketeers
1844 · 625 pages
Arriving in Paris from Gascony, d'Artagnan duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis into friendship, then serves the queen against Cardinal Richelieu. No adventure novel has ever moved faster or been better company.
★ 6.6
Kim
1901 · 240 pages
Kim, a white orphan of the Lahore streets, serves two masters: a Tibetan lama searching for a sacred river, and the British officers who train him for the spy war against Russia.
★ 6.6
The Tain Bo Cuailnge
Author unknown
750 · 256 pages
Seventeen years old, Cu Chulainn holds the fords against the army Medb of Connacht raised to steal a bull, with Ulster's warriors paralyzed by birth pangs. Yeats built a national mythology on him.
★ 6.6
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
Treasure Island
1883 · 336 pages
Hiding in an apple barrel, a boy overhears the ship's cook planning mutiny. Stevenson invented the pirate everyone pictures: Long John Silver's parrot and missing leg, the treasure map marked with crosses.
★ 6.6
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1870 · 528 pages
The monster ramming ships proves to be an electric submarine whose captain has renounced every nation above. Submarine builders read it as boys, and the first nuclear boat took the Nautilus name.
★ 6.5
Arabian Sands
1959 · 400 pages
Thesiger crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter twice with Bedu companions, on a pint of water a day. He loved that life, knew oil money would end it, and wrote this as its elegy.
★ 6.5
Annapurna
1951 · 256 pages
Herzog and Lachenal reached Annapurna's summit in June 1950, the first men atop an eight-thousand-meter peak. Frostbite cost Herzog every finger and toe during the descent. No mountaineering book has sold like it.
★ 6.4
Memed, My Hawk
1955 · 392 pages
Five villages belong to Abdi Agha. The boy Memed runs, is dragged back, kills, and takes to the mountains, where Kemal turns a peasant's revolt into an epic of Turkey's Çukurova plain.
★ 6.2
Watership Down
1972 · 476 pages
Fiver the rabbit senses blood covering the field, and others follow him out before the bulldozers come. Adams gives them their own language and mythology, then sets them against a rabbit police state.
★ 6.0
The Right Stuff
1979 · 448 pages
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with two cracked ribs hidden from the flight surgeon. Wolfe named the code such men flew by, and America still tells the space race in his words.
★ 5.9
The Journals
1768 · 646 pages
Cook charts New Zealand and eastern Australia in his own hand, and sails until no southern continent is left to find. The log calls the Aborigines happier than Europeans, then claims their coast.
★ 5.8
Sailing Alone Around the World
1900 · 273 pages
Slocum rebuilt an oyster sloop, left Boston in 1895, came back three years later the first person to circle the earth alone. He recounts it in the practical voice of a working sailor.
★ 5.7
Endurance
Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
1959 · 357 pages
Antarctic pack ice crushes their ship in 1915, leaving twenty-eight men on a drifting floe. Shackleton sails an open boat eight hundred miles for help. Lansing reconstructed it all from the crew's diaries.
★ 5.6
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
The Last of the Mohicans
1826 · 398 pages
The scout Hawkeye and the last two Mohicans guide two sisters through the French and Indian War. Cooper made the frontiersman a national hero, and the Western has lived off him since.
★ 5.5
The Extraordinary Journeys
Around the World in Eighty Days (Oxford World's Classics)
1872 · 247 pages
Phileas Fogg wagers half his fortune that steamships and railways have shrunk the world to eighty days, and leaves that evening. Seventeen years later the reporter Nellie Bly ran the route in seventy-two.
★ 5.5
King Solomon's Mines
1885 · 320 pages
Allan Quatermain, an aging elephant hunter, follows an old map into unmapped Africa and finds a lost kingdom ruled by a tyrant. Hidden-city adventure from Tarzan to Indiana Jones runs on Haggard's machinery.
★ 5.3
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
1958 · 260 pages
Quitting the London fashion trade with almost no climbing behind him, Newby set out for an unclimbed Afghan peak. The funniest travel book in English comes out of that mismatch.
★ 5.0
Magellan
Conqueror of the Seas
1938 · 352 pages
Five ships left Seville in 1519 and one came home three years later with eighteen men aboard. Zweig tells the circumnavigation as the story of an obstinate will set against an unmapped ocean.
★ 4.9