The Magic Mountain
1924 · 706 pages
Hans Castorp goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks and stays seven years. Time comes loose there while the patients debate everything and Europe drifts into war.
★ 9.1
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.
Great Expectations
1861 · 469 pages
Pip, a blacksmith's boy, is handed a fortune by an unknown benefactor and turns snob. Miss Havisham waits in her rotted wedding dress, and Dickens makes the shame of low birth unbearable.
★ 8.8
Jane Eyre
1847 · 284 pages
English fiction found its first fierce female voice in Jane, plain and poor and conceding nothing. She survives a brutal charity school, becomes a governess, and loves an employer with a secret.
★ 8.8
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1916 · 329 pages
Stephen Dedalus grows from a small boy into a young man set on leaving Ireland to make art. The prose matures sentence by sentence with him, from baby talk to fierce argument.
★ 8.7
Midnight's Children
1981 · 560 pages
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact midnight India becomes independent, which gives him telepathy and welds his life to the country's. Sixty years of history arrive as one unreliable, delighted confession.
★ 8.7
To Kill a Mockingbird
1960 · 376 pages
Scout Finch's father, a lawyer in a small Alabama town, defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman. The trial reaches you through a child who understands less than you do.
★ 8.6
The Red and the Black
1830 · 576 pages
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son with a memorized Bible and enormous nerve, climbs out of provincial France into Paris society by way of two women. Stendhal reports each calculation without excusing him.
★ 8.5
The Catcher in the Rye
1951 · 240 pages
Holden Caulfield is thrown out of prep school and spends three days loose in New York, telling you about it. Salinger got the voice so exact that teenage fiction has echoed it since.
★ 8.4
David Copperfield
1850 · 1024 pages
Put to work in a warehouse as a boy, David escapes to an aunt he has never met. Dickens gave him his own childhood, and loved this novel above all the others.
★ 8.1
Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937 · 219 pages
Janie comes home to a Black town in Florida and tells a friend about her three marriages and how she found her own voice. Hurston writes porch talk exactly as it sounded.
★ 8.0
The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling
1749 · 1024 pages
Found as a baby in a squire's bed, Tom grows up generous and reckless, loses his home, and follows Sophia Western to London. Coleridge ranked the plot beside that of Oedipus.
★ 7.3
My Antonia
1918 · 166 pages
Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.
★ 7.2
Little Women
1869 · 777 pages
Four sisters grow up poor in a Massachusetts town while their father serves in the Civil War. Jo March wants to write, and readers have measured their own ambition against hers ever since.
★ 7.0
The Adventures of Augie March
1953 · 608 pages
"I am an American, Chicago born," Augie announces, and the novel loosened its collar. He takes every job and every mentor the Depression offers him and refuses to be claimed by any.
★ 7.0
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
Gone with the Wind
1936 · 960 pages
Scarlett O'Hara claws her plantation back through the burning of Atlanta, wanting the wrong man. Mitchell's romance of a gallant South sold thirty million copies and fixed a pastoral memory of slavery.
★ 6.7
Black Boy
1945 · 464 pages
Hunger runs through Wright's Southern boyhood: for food, for books, which he gets by forging notes on a white man's library card. He sets down Jim Crow's cruelty without a word of self-pity.
★ 6.7
Of Human Bondage
1915 · 628 pages
Orphaned and clubfooted, Philip Carey tries Germany, Paris, painting, and medicine, then wrecks himself on a waitress who despises him. Nobody has written the humiliation of unreturned love more exactly.
★ 6.6
Winesburg, Ohio
1919 · 153 pages
Twenty-two linked stories about people in an Ohio town who cannot say what they feel, except to the young reporter George Willard. Faulkner called Anderson the father of his generation of American writers.
★ 6.6
Narcissus and Goldmund
1930 · 320 pages
Two friends split the world between them: Narcissus stays in the monastery with logic and God, and Goldmund walks out into women, wandering, and the Black Death, then carves it all in wood.
★ 6.3