The Iliad
750 BC · 848 pages
Achilles withdraws from the fighting over a stolen prize and his friends die outside Troy for it. Nothing written about war since has matched Homer's fury, or the mercy of the final scene.
★ 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.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
1603 · 406 pages
Hamlet's father appears as a ghost and demands revenge, and the prince spends the play failing to take it. Four centuries of readers have found their own divided minds in his hesitation.
★ 9.9
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
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
King Lear
1607 · 316 pages
An old king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and the truthful one says least. Shakespeare wrote nothing bleaker, and the last scene is unbearable.
★ 9.8
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
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
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
Macbeth
1606 · 223 pages
Witches promise a soldier the crown, and he and his wife murder their way to it. Shakespeare's shortest tragedy moves like a nightmare, and the guilt arrives before the blood dries.
★ 9.4
Essays
1580 · 1283 pages
Montaigne wrote short pieces on friendship, fear, sleep, and his kidney stones, and invented the essay doing it. As company on the page he remains unmatched in four centuries.
★ 9.3
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
Plays
Ivanov; The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard
1904 · 358 pages
Three sisters long for Moscow, a family loses its cherry orchard, and everyone talks around what hurts. Chekhov made the unspoken the real action, and modern theater took its shape from him.
★ 9.2
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
Othello
1603 · 314 pages
Iago tells the audience exactly how he will destroy his general, then does it with a handkerchief and patient lying. His reasons never explain it, and watching Othello believe him is agony.
★ 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
Selected Stories
1904 · 467 pages
At Yalta a married man meets a woman walking a small dog and cannot shake her. Chekhov judges no one and resolves nothing, and the stories come out quietly devastating.
★ 8.9
The Gulag Archipelago
1973 · 704 pages
Solzhenitsyn served eight years in the camps, then gathered hundreds of survivors' accounts into a single prisoner's journey from arrest through interrogation to the labor gangs. Publishing it got him deported.
★ 8.9
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 Republic
380 BC · 528 pages
Asked why anyone should be just when nobody is watching, Socrates answers by building an entire city in conversation. The allegory of the cave has never stopped explaining people to themselves.
★ 8.8
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
The Three Theban Plays
429 BC · 430 pages
No drama has matched the moment Oedipus understands. He investigates the crime poisoning his city and the trail turns toward him. His daughter later defies the state to bury her brother.
★ 8.8
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
1776 · 3980 pages
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
★ 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
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
The Diary of a Young Girl
1947 · 283 pages
Two years in hiding behind an Amsterdam office, set down by a girl who wrote about her mother, her boredom, and who she meant to become. She was fifteen when they were found.
★ 8.6
The Oresteia
458 BC · 335 pages
Agamemnon comes home from Troy to a wife who has spent ten years planning her welcome, and the killing runs down the generations until Athena stops it by seating the first jury.
★ 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