The Canterbury Tales
1390 · 528 pages
Chaucer's thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury swapping stories, the knight a courtly romance and the miller a filthy joke, and he wrote them in English when serious poetry meant Latin or French.
★ 8.9
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.
Heart of Darkness
1899 · 110 pages
Marlow steams up the Congo to retrieve an ivory agent gone strange upriver. Conrad found empire hollow, and the novelist Achebe's charge of racism has kept the book under argument ever since.
★ 8.6
If on a winter's night a traveler
1979 · 260 pages
You buy a Calvino novel, the copy is faulty, and the hunt for the rest keeps dropping you into the opening chapter of some other book. Ten beginnings, each hard to leave.
★ 7.7
The Arabian Nights
Author unknown
1100 · 464 pages
Scheherazade marries a king who executes each new wife at dawn and stays alive by telling stories that break off before the end. Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba reached the world through her.
★ 7.5
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
Utopia
1516 · 135 pages
On More's island nobody owns anything, everyone works six hours a day, and gold goes into chamber pots. More invented the word utopia for it and the literature of the ideal society followed.
★ 7.3
The Time Machine
1895 · 320 pages
Wells sent his traveler to the year 802,701, where the gentle Eloi live above ground and the Morlocks feed on them below. Every time machine since is a copy of his.
★ 6.6