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
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.
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
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 Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1
The Golden Days
1764 · 540 pages
Bao-yu, born with a jade in his mouth, would rather write poems with his cousins than study for the exams, while his great eighteenth-century Chinese family slides toward ruin. Their world is ending.
★ 8.2
Hiroshima
1946 · 152 pages
Six people survived the bomb at Hiroshima and Hersey follows them through the year after: a clerk, a widow, two doctors, and two clergymen. He writes flatly and it is unbearable.
★ 8.0
The Things They Carried
1990 · 256 pages
O'Brien lists what a platoon in Vietnam hauled around, down to the ounce, then tells war stories and takes them back. The invented ones carry the war more exactly than facts could.
★ 7.8
The Wisdom Books
Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes
Author unknown
400 BC · 416 pages
Job loses everything, demands an explanation, and gets a whirlwind of questions back. Ecclesiastes calls all of it breath. Proverbs, unmoved by either, tells you how to live anyway.
★ 7.6
The Bhagavad Gita
Author unknown
150 BC · 140 pages
Facing his cousins across a battlefield, Arjuna drops his bow. Krishna tells him to act without grasping at results, then takes a form of countless mouths with the worlds burning inside.
★ 7.6
The Complete Writings
300 BC · 336 pages
Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure which one is dreaming. The jokes, tall tales, and arguments with logicians that follow work to loosen your grip on your own categories.
★ 7.5
Records of the Grand Historian
94 BC · 208 pages
Castrated rather than executed for defending a general, Sima Qian lived to finish his history: twenty-five centuries of China told through emperors, assassins, and merchants. The portraits are alive on the page.
★ 7.5
Gilgamesh
Author unknown
1700 BC · 304 pages
Literature begins here. Gilgamesh bullies his city until the gods send a wild man to match him. They become friends, one dies, and grief drives the survivor to the end of the world.
★ 7.5
Mahabharata
A Modern Retelling
400 BC · 928 pages
Five brothers gamble away a kingdom and their wife, then return from exile to a war that swallows their world. Carole Satyamurti's English verse holds the whole Sanskrit epic, Krishna's counsel included.
★ 7.5
The Journey to the West
1592 · 272 pages
A monkey born from stone storms heaven, is pinned under a mountain for five hundred years, then escorts a monk to India for Buddhist scriptures. Eighty-one disasters later it is still funny.
★ 7.4
The Pillow Book
1002 · 364 pages
A thousand years ago in the Japanese court, a lady-in-waiting kept lists of things that make the heart beat faster and things she found hateful. Her snobbery is part of the pleasure.
★ 7.4
The Upanishads
Author unknown
500 BC · 446 pages
You are that, an Indian sage tells his son: the self inside you and the power holding up the universe are one thing. Elsewhere a boy corners Death and demands answers.
★ 7.4
The Art of War
500 BC · 109 pages
Win without fighting, Sun Tzu writes, and he means it literally. Twenty-five centuries ago this Chinese general reduced war to deception, terrain, and knowing the enemy as thoroughly as you know yourself.
★ 7.3
The Recognition of Sakuntala
400 · 147 pages
King Dushyanta secretly marries a girl raised in a forest hermitage, then a curse erases her from his memory. Kalidasa writes the forest so beautifully that Goethe borrowed the play's prologue for Faust.
★ 7.3
Mencius
300 BC · 320 pages
Seeing a child about to fall into a well, anyone feels alarm before thinking. Human nature is therefore good, Mencius argues, and a ruler who starves his people forfeits the throne.
★ 7.3
Siddhartha
1922 · 132 pages
Siddhartha leaves home to seek enlightenment, meets the Buddha and declines to follow him, then spends years chasing money and a courtesan. What finally teaches him is a river and its ferryman.
★ 7.2
The Book of Songs
Author unknown
600 BC · 400 pages
Three hundred and five songs from ancient China about courtship, harvest, soldiers on campaign, and bad government. Confucius taught from them, and every Chinese poet since has written with them in earshot.
★ 7.2
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 Story of My Experiments with Truth
1929 · 448 pages
The method that would break an empire took shape over twenty years in South Africa, and Gandhi sets it down beside his vows, his diets, and his failures, with disarming candor.
★ 7.2
Snow Country
1948 · 175 pages
At a hot spring in Japan's snow country, a wealthy Tokyo idler keeps visiting a geisha who loves him past anything he can give. Kawabata states almost nothing and it lands anyway.
★ 7.2
Shahnameh
977 · 1040 pages
Fifty thousand couplets carry Iran from creation to the Arab conquest, past a tyrant with snakes growing from his shoulders and the hero Rostam meeting a young champion he does not recognize.
★ 7.1
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
1702 · 167 pages
Basho sold his house and walked hundreds of miles into northern Japan, writing prose that stops for a haiku. At a battlefield he finds summer grass, all that remains of warriors' dreams.
★ 7.1
In Praise of Shadows
1933 · 56 pages
Tanizaki, a Japanese novelist, argues in earnest that the beauty of his country was made for dim rooms and wrecked by electric light. Lacquer, gold leaf, and old toilets all make his case.
★ 7.1
Lord Jim
1900 · 400 pages
Jim jumps from a sinking pilgrim ship that then does not sink, and never afterward proves to himself the jump was not really him. Conrad makes one second of cowardice bottomless.
★ 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
Essays in Idleness
1330 · 224 pages
Writing in fourteenth-century Japan, the monk Kenko set down fragments on manners, boredom, and death, asking why we look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom. Impermanence makes attention urgent.
★ 7.0
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China
1922 · 448 pages
Modern Chinese literature begins here. Ah Q, a village laborer, turns every beating into a spiritual victory, and a madman reads the Confucian classics until the words eat people surface between the lines.
★ 7.0
Hojoki
1212 · 109 pages
Writing from a hut ten feet square, a Kyoto recluse recalls the fire, whirlwind, famine, and earthquake that destroyed the capital, and concludes that nothing built by people is meant to stay.
★ 7.0
Kokoro
1914 · 248 pages
Modern Japanese literature turns on this book. A student attaches himself to a withdrawn man he calls Sensei, and the letter that finally explains him confesses a betrayal that has never healed.
★ 7.0
Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore
1941 · 208 pages
Tagore wrote the songs that became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. His Bengali lyrics address God as a lover who is late, plainly and without a trace of religious machinery.
★ 6.9
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
1940 · 368 pages
Four people in a Georgia mill town confide everything to John Singer, a deaf man who lip-reads them and answers little. McCullers fills the place with people who cannot reach each other.
★ 6.9
A History of the Crusades
1951 · 336 pages
Runciman tells the Crusades from Constantinople looking west, and the men in armor come off badly. Three volumes of grand narrative build toward his verdict: one long act of intolerance in God's name.
★ 6.9
The Color Purple
1982 · 287 pages
Celie is fourteen, writing to God because there is nobody else to tell. Walker took her from there to a life she owns and won the first fiction Pulitzer given a Black woman.
★ 6.8
The Road to Oxiana
1937 · 291 pages
Byron crossed Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s hunting domes and minarets, and the diary he kept is funny, rapturous, and cruel about everyone he meets. Paul Fussell called it travel writing's Ulysses.
★ 6.8
The Lover
1984 · 117 pages
Crossing the Mekong by ferry in 1929, a French girl of fifteen meets the Chinese man who becomes her lover. Duras writes it in fragments that refuse both romance and pity.
★ 6.8
Love in a Fallen City
1943 · 321 pages
Bai Liusu, a divorcee her Shanghai family treats as a disgrace, follows a rich bachelor to Hong Kong. Chang writes their courtship as cold accounting until the Japanese bombardment reaches the city.
★ 6.8
Red Sorghum
A Novel of China
1986 · 359 pages
Bandits waylay a bride bound for a leprous distiller, and the son conceived in the sorghum grows up under Japanese occupation. Mo Yan makes rural Shandong's violence gorgeous and unbearable at once.
★ 6.8