War and Peace
1869 · 1392 pages
Five families carried through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with battle, marriage, farming, and a theory of history held in one design. You finish it knowing these people better than your own friends.
★ 9.8
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
Ulysses
1922 · 694 pages
Leopold Bloom walks Dublin for one day in June 1904, and Joyce pours the whole English language into it. Bloom, advertising canvasser and cuckold, is the kindest man in fiction.
★ 9.7
In Search of Lost Time (set of 6)
1922 · 4211 pages
The most complete account of memory ever written. A man tastes a madeleine, and three thousand pages of remembered love, jealousy, and vanished aristocrats change permanently how you look at your own past.
★ 9.7
The Brothers Karamazov
1880 · 832 pages
Old Karamazov is murdered and each of his three sons had reason. Around the crime Dostoevsky stages the fiercest argument fiction has ever made about God and the suffering of children.
★ 9.7
Anna Karenina
1877 · 896 pages
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer while, in the other half of the book, Levin farms and marries and worries about God. Tolstoy gives both lives the same total sympathy.
★ 9.6
Crime and Punishment
1866 · 565 pages
Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to prove he stands above ordinary morality, then comes apart as a magistrate circles him. It reads like a thriller and works like a confession.
★ 9.6
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
Middlemarch
1872 · 810 pages
Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar for the wrong reasons and a gifted doctor lets small compromises close around him. Eliot knows more about how people actually fail than any English novelist.
★ 9.6
One Hundred Years of Solitude
1967 · 417 pages
Seven generations of one family in Macondo, where insomnia comes as a plague and the rain lasts four years. García Márquez reports the impossible as plain fact.
★ 9.5
Pride and Prejudice
1813 · 352 pages
Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy dislike each other on sight and spend the novel being wrong. Austen wrote conversation better than anyone in English, and readers return to it their whole lives.
★ 9.5
Madame Bovary
1857 · 329 pages
Emma Bovary reads romances, takes lovers, and runs up debts trying to feel something in a provincial town. Flaubert weighed every sentence, and modern fiction's idea of style begins with him.
★ 9.4
The Great Gatsby
1925 · 208 pages
Gatsby throws enormous parties hoping the woman he loved will wander into one. Fitzgerald made the Jazz Age America's myth of itself, and the last page is the most beautiful in American writing.
★ 9.4
Beloved
1987 · 360 pages
Sethe escaped slavery years ago and cannot escape the daughter she lost, who comes back to the house as a young woman. Morrison writes American history's worst chapter with unbearable tenderness.
★ 9.4
The Tale of Genji
1021 · 1182 pages
Murasaki Shikibu, a lady at the Japanese imperial court, wrote a thousand pages about a prince, his loves, and his decline, reaching a psychological depth Europe would not manage for six hundred years.
★ 9.3
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 Trial
1915 · 276 pages
Josef K. is arrested one morning, never told the charge, and ruined by his own efforts to clear himself. Kafka made faceless authority funny, and gave the century its word for dread.
★ 9.2
To the Lighthouse
1927 · 209 pages
At a summer house by the sea a trip to the lighthouse keeps being postponed, and Woolf gets so close to how a mind works that years pass and grief arrives in passing.
★ 9.2
The Sound and the Fury
1929 · 321 pages
Four sections circle one Mississippi family's ruin, and the first belongs to a brother who cannot speak or keep time in order. Faulkner makes confusion itself carry the weight of grief.
★ 9.2
1984
1949 · 328 pages
Winston Smith rewrites old newspapers so history agrees with the Party, then risks a diary and a love affair. Orwell built the machinery so exactly that reading it feels like being watched.
★ 9.1
Lolita
1955 · 317 pages
Humbert Humbert explains how he became stepfather to a twelve-year-old girl and drove her across America. Nabokov gives the monster the most beautiful prose in English and dares you to enjoy it.
★ 9.1
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
Blood Meridian
1985 · 337 pages
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.
★ 9.1
Absalom, Absalom!
1936 · 313 pages
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere with a band of slaves and a French architect and builds a dynasty that destroys itself. Two students retell it until it swallows them.
★ 9.0
Mrs. Dalloway
1925 · 197 pages
Clarissa Dalloway buys the flowers herself and gives a party, one June day in London, while a veteran wrecked by the war comes apart nearby. Woolf moves between strangers' minds without warning.
★ 9.0
Invisible Man
1952 · 581 pages
Thrown out of college, then used by a Harlem political movement, a nameless Black man ends up living in a cellar on stolen light. Ellison writes American rage with jazz timing.
★ 9.0
The Grapes of Wrath
1939 · 464 pages
The Joads lose their Oklahoma farm and drive west to California, where the promised work is a lie. Steinbeck's fury at what was done to them still comes off the page.
★ 9.0
The Stranger
1942 · 123 pages
Meursault buries his mother without crying, takes a lover, and shoots a man on a hot Algiers beach. At his trial the tears he never shed matter more than the killing.
★ 8.9
Things Fall Apart
1958 · 209 pages
Okonkwo is a wrestler and a hard man in an Igbo village, terrified of resembling his gentle, indebted father, when the missionaries arrive. Achebe builds a whole world before letting it come apart.
★ 8.9
Animal Farm
1945 · 128 pages
The animals drive out the farmer and run the place themselves, until the rules painted on the barn wall start changing. Orwell reduced the Russian Revolution to a fable no adult forgets.
★ 8.9
Eugene Onegin
1832 · 304 pages
Onegin coolly refuses a country girl's love letter, then kills a friend in a pointless duel. Pushkin wrote it in verse so quick and alive that Russians still know stanzas by heart.
★ 8.8
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
Wuthering Heights
1847 · 353 pages
Heathcliff, a foundling on a Yorkshire farm, spends his life destroying two families over the girl he loves. The poet Rossetti called it a fiend of a book, its action laid in hell.
★ 8.8
Bleak House
1853 · 1036 pages
Dickens's supreme achievement, and his angriest. A lawsuit over a will has dragged through the courts so long that nobody alive understands it, and its fog settles over every life in England.
★ 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
Les Miserables
1862 · 1260 pages
Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for stealing bread, breaks parole, and is hunted the rest of his life by a relentless policeman. Around them Hugo builds the century's great argument for mercy.
★ 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
The Master and Margarita
1967 · 411 pages
The devil arrives in Stalin's Moscow with a retinue that includes an enormous talking cat, and the literary bureaucrats never recover. Threaded through it runs a stark short novel about Pontius Pilate.
★ 8.7
Life and Fate
1980 · 896 pages
During the siege of Stalingrad, a Soviet physicist receives his mother's last letter from a Nazi ghetto. Grossman wrote the war at Tolstoy's scale and said plainly that both tyrannies were one thing.
★ 8.7
Gravity's Rainbow
1973 · 784 pages
In London in 1944 the army notices that an American officer's sexual conquests keep predicting where German rockets fall. What follows is the filthiest, funniest chase ever run across a ruined continent.
★ 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
Catch-22
1961 · 524 pages
Trying to get grounded for insanity, a bombardier learns that asking to be grounded proves he is sane. Heller runs that loop through a whole war until the deaths stop being funny.
★ 8.7
The Plague
1947 · 308 pages
Rats die in the streets of an Algerian port, the gates shut, and a doctor named Rieux keeps working. Camus meant the German occupation, and every epidemic since has proved him right.
★ 8.6
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
Notes from Underground
1864 · 136 pages
Holed up in a shabby Petersburg room, a spiteful clerk talks at you, insisting people will wreck their own lives to prove they are free. Every alienated narrator since speaks in his voice.
★ 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
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
1865 · 171 pages
Alice follows a rabbit down a hole into a country where logic runs sideways, ruled by a queen who wants everyone beheaded. Carroll freed children's books from having to teach anything.
★ 8.5
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
1891 · 342 pages
Zarathustra comes down from his mountain to announce that God is dead and man is something to be overcome. Nietzsche wrote it as scripture rather than argument, and readers take it personally.
★ 8.5
Brave New World
1932 · 281 pages
Babies are decanted from bottles into castes, everyone takes a drug called soma, and nobody is unhappy. Huxley saw that a tyranny of pleasure would hold better than one of fear.
★ 8.5
A Passage to India
1924 · 322 pages
Something happens in the dark of the Marabar Caves, and an Englishwoman accuses the Indian doctor who brought her there. Forster watches a colonial society close ranks and goodwill count for nothing.
★ 8.5
The Castle
1926 · 352 pages
K. arrives in a village claiming the castle above it hired him as land surveyor, and never reaches anyone who can confirm it. Waiting becomes the whole of his life there.
★ 8.4
Doctor Zhivago
1957 · 673 pages
Yuri Zhivago, a doctor who writes poetry, is carried through war and revolution and away from the women he loves. Pasternak lets history arrive like weather, and the Soviets banned it outright.
★ 8.4
The Leopard
1958 · 336 pages
Everything must change so that everything can stay the same, says the prince's nephew as Garibaldi's rebels land in Sicily. Lampedusa writes a class watching itself end with autumnal calm and beauty.
★ 8.4
Pale Fire
1962 · 315 pages
A dead poet's 999 lines arrive wrapped in footnotes by a neighbor certain the poem is about his own lost northern kingdom. The ingenuity is total and the grief underneath is real.
★ 8.4
Song of Solomon
1977 · 337 pages
Hunting gold in the South, a rich man's bored son finds his family's history instead, hidden in a song children sing. Morrison turns it into myth: an African ancestor who flew home.
★ 8.4
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
Slaughterhouse Five
1969 · 215 pages
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, between a Dresden meat locker during the firebombing and a zoo on another planet. Vonnegut was in that cellar, and writes "So it goes" after every death.
★ 8.4
The Book of Disquiet
1982 · 468 pages
Pessoa invented an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon and gave him hundreds of fragments on being alive in a rented room. Open the book anywhere and someone is already thinking your thoughts.
★ 8.4
Love in the Time of Cholera
1985 · 348 pages
Turned down as a young man, Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years for the woman he loves to be widowed. García Márquez makes old age more erotic than youth.
★ 8.4
Invisible Cities
1972 · 165 pages
Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities that cannot exist to the emperor Kublai Khan, a page or two each, and every one of them is another way of describing Venice.
★ 8.4