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
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.
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
The Prince
1532 · 176 pages
Machiavelli threw out the question of how a ruler ought to behave and asked how power is taken and kept. His answer, that a prince does better feared than loved, still unsettles people.
★ 8.5
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
Romeo and Juliet
1597 · 281 pages
At a party in Verona two teenagers from feuding families meet, marry the next day, and are gone inside a week. Everything they say to each other still sounds newly invented.
★ 8.1
A Farewell to Arms
1929 · 332 pages
Driving ambulances for the Italian army, an American falls in love with an English nurse while the front collapses around them. Hemingway's plain sentences leave you completely undefended by the last page.
★ 8.0
The Name of the Rose
1980 · 579 pages
Monks are dying at an Italian abbey in 1327, the library is a labyrinth no one may enter, and a Franciscan detective and his novice go in. Eco made medieval theology a thriller.
★ 7.7
The Annals
117 · 596 pages
Tacitus promises to write without anger or partiality, then follows Rome from Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, ruining each of them in half a sentence. Power has never had a colder witness.
★ 7.6
The Odes of Horace
23 BC · 200 pages
Horace compresses wine, friendship, and the certainty of death into stanzas of exact and unhurried form, the summit of Latin lyric. Carpe diem is his line, and in context it is not cheerful.
★ 7.5
The City of God
426 · 912 pages
Rome fell to the Goths in 410 and pagans blamed the Christians. Augustine answers by sorting all history into two cities, one built on love of God and one on love of self.
★ 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
The Poems of Catullus
54 BC · 359 pages
Latin love poetry begins with Catullus, counting kisses by the thousand for the aristocrat he calls Lesbia and then admitting he hates and loves her at once. The obscenity still stings.
★ 7.4
On Duties (De Officiis)
44 BC · 423 pages
Cicero tells his son what a decent person owes everyone: keep your word, harm nobody, and stop believing a shameful act can pay. Real Roman cases of profit against honesty carry the argument.
★ 7.4
The Lives of the Artists
1550 · 624 pages
Vasari was a working painter who knew Michelangelo. His lives of the Italian artists, from Cimabue onward, mix workshop technique with pure gossip, and gave us most of what we believe about genius.
★ 7.3
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
1860 · 402 pages
Burckhardt invented cultural history by looking past popes and battles at how Renaissance Italians lived, finding the moment people began to think of themselves as individuals. We still see the period his way.
★ 7.3
The Betrothed
1827 · 736 pages
In seventeenth-century Lombardy two peasants want to marry, and a lord who wants the bride frightens their priest into refusing. Riot, famine, and plague come between them. Italian prose was remade on it.
★ 7.2
The Merchant of Venice
1598 · 288 pages
In Venice a merchant borrows from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender he has spat on, pledging a pound of his flesh. Shylock asks whether a Jew does not bleed, and the comedy never recovers.
★ 7.2
The History of Rome
25 BC · 487 pages
Livy tells Rome's story from the wolf and the twins onward, pausing on the people whose conduct he believes made the city. These are the legends Europe retold for two thousand years.
★ 7.2
Much Ado About Nothing
1599 · 246 pages
Beatrice and Benedick insult each other so expertly that their friends trick each into believing the other is secretly in love. Their war of words gave English comedy its model for courtship.
★ 7.2
The Twelve Caesars
121 · 464 pages
Secretary to the emperor Hadrian, Suetonius wrote the lives of Julius Caesar and eleven emperors after him, omens, gossip, last words and all. Our picture of Nero comes straight from these pages.
★ 7.2
The Charterhouse of Parma
1839 · 520 pages
Seventeen years old, Fabrice del Dongo wanders onto the field at Waterloo and cannot tell whether he fought there. What follows is court intrigue, a prison tower, and love signaled through a window.
★ 7.0
A Room with a View
1908 · 172 pages
Lucy Honeychurch is kissed among violets on a hillside outside Florence, and Forster makes the rest a sunlit comedy about whether English respectability is worth the lie it demands of her.
★ 7.0
The Satires
100 · 320 pages
Bread and circuses came from here, and so did the line about guarding the guards. Juvenal turns sixteen poems of fury on imperial Rome, where an honest man cannot afford to live.
★ 7.0
On Friendship
44 BC · 384 pages
Cicero gives the argument to Laelius, a statesman grieving his dead friend: real friendship binds only good men, is wanted for nothing beyond itself, and makes fortune brighter and hardship lighter.
★ 7.0
I, Claudius
1934 · 468 pages
Stammering, limping, and dismissed as an idiot, Claudius survives the Roman imperial family as it murders its way through Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, then sets down the secret history of what he watched.
★ 7.0
Four Comedies
200 BC · 242 pages
Plautus stole Greek plots and made them Roman, vulgar and fast. Shakespeare lifted his mistaken twins for The Comedy of Errors, Moliere lifted his miser, and farce has run on that machinery since.
★ 7.0
The Baron In The Trees
1957 · 320 pages
At twelve, refusing a plate of snails his father demands he eat, Cosimo climbs into an oak and never touches ground again. He reads, loves, and fights the eighteenth century from the branches.
★ 6.8
The Cheese and the Worms
1976 · 224 pages
A sixteenth-century Italian miller told the Inquisition that the world formed as cheese forms from milk, and the angels were worms in it. From that file Ginzburg reconstructs an entire peasant mind.
★ 6.8
Julius Caesar
1599 · 288 pages
Brutus is persuaded that killing his friend will save the republic. Antony stands over the body, says he comes to bury Caesar and not to praise him, and turns Rome around.
★ 6.8
Augustus
1972 · 305 pages
Rome's first emperor assembled from other people's letters: soldiers, poets, conspirators, and the daughter he sends into exile. Williams shows how a sickly boy became master of the world and what it cost.
★ 6.8
My Brilliant Friend
2011 · 336 pages
No novelist has written female friendship with this much competition. Elena and Lila grow up in a violent Naples neighborhood in the 1950s, and only one is allowed to stay in school.
★ 6.7
SPQR
A History of Ancient Rome
2015 · 608 pages
Beard covers a thousand years of Rome, opening on Catiline's conspiracy and closing the day Caracalla made every free inhabitant a citizen, and she cares as much about slaves as emperors.
★ 6.7
Zeno's Conscience
1923 · 464 pages
Zeno quits smoking constantly and never quits. Told by his analyst to write his life, he sets down a marriage begun by proposing to three sisters in one evening, and lies gorgeously throughout.
★ 6.6
Christ Stopped at Eboli
1945 · 288 pages
Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.
★ 6.5
The Day of the Owl
1961 · 124 pages
A small-time builder is shot running for a bus in a Sicilian square, and every passenger saw nothing. Sciascia named the Mafia as an organization while Italy still insisted it did not exist.
★ 6.5
The Talented Mr. Ripley
1955 · 288 pages
Sent to Italy to fetch a shipping magnate's son, Tom Ripley falls for the life instead, murders his friend, and wears his name. Highsmith makes you want him to get away with it.
★ 6.3
Rubicon
2003 · 464 pages
The Roman Republic destroyed itself, and Tom Holland tells it at the pace of a thriller. Caesar reaches the Rubicon with a single legion, knowing crossing it means war against his own state.
★ 6.0
Foucault's Pendulum
1988 · 623 pages
Three editors, buried in crank manuscripts about the Templars, invent a secret history of the world as a joke and feed it to a computer. Then the actual occultists arrive, wanting the secret.
★ 5.5
Call Me By Your Name
2007 · 256 pages
Elio is seventeen the summer a visiting scholar stays six weeks at his family's house on the Italian coast. Aciman renders desire from the inside, every calculation and humiliation of wanting someone.
★ 5.4
The Gallery
1947 · 342 pages
Occupied Naples, 1944: soldiers and civilians trading cigarettes, sex, and rumor under the arcade. Burns writes Americans who understand nothing of the country they hold, and a bar where gay soldiers breathe.
★ 5.2