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
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 Power Broker
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
1974 · 1246 pages
Robert Moses was never elected to anything and remade New York for forty years, throwing up bridges and expressways and flattening the neighborhoods in their way. Caro shows exactly how it was done.
★ 8.9
The Tempest
1611 · 259 pages
Prospero raises a storm to strand the men who stole his dukedom on an island where a spirit and a monster obey him. What he does with that power reads as Shakespeare's farewell.
★ 8.6
Democracy in America
1840 · 722 pages
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.
★ 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
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
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
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
1961 · 458 pages
Jacobs watched her Greenwich Village street and argued that crowded sidewalks, short blocks, and eyes on the street are what keep a city alive. After this, bulldozing a neighborhood stopped looking like progress.
★ 8.3
Leviathan
1651 · 688 pages
Strip away the state, Hobbes argues, and life becomes a war of everyone against everyone, nasty, brutish, and short. The remedy is to hand all our power to one sovereign.
★ 8.2
Dead Souls
1842 · 432 pages
Traveling the Russian provinces, a charming stranger buys serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls. Gogol's landowners are grotesque and hilarious, and then the laughter turns on you.
★ 8.1
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1984 · 320 pages
Kundera puts a Prague surgeon who cannot stop having affairs, the woman who loves him, and the Soviet tanks of 1968 together, then asks whether a life lived once can weigh anything.
★ 7.7
Postwar
2005 · 933 pages
Judt carries Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west in one story, showing a continent that rebuilt itself by forgetting the war and then defined itself by remembering it.
★ 7.6
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
Two Treatises of Government
1689 · 464 pages
People are born free and equal, Locke argues, own what their labor makes, and create government by consent. One that breaks the trust may be thrown out. Jefferson took the argument whole.
★ 7.4
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 the Social Contract
1762 · 356 pages
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Nobody holds natural authority over anyone, Rousseau argues, so law binds you only if you helped make it. Geneva burned the book.
★ 7.3
Henry V
1599 · 292 pages
Outnumbered in France, a young king talks his army into fighting at Agincourt, promising that whoever survives will remember the day forever. After the battle he reads out the names of the dead.
★ 7.3
Demons
1872 · 768 pages
Pyotr Verkhovensky assembles a revolutionary cell of five in a provincial Russian town and binds them together by having them murder one of their own. Dostoevsky saw the whole twentieth century coming.
★ 7.3
Henry IV, Part One
1597 · 274 pages
Falstaff is the greatest comic creation in English, a fat knight who lies about everything, and Prince Hal wastes his youth drinking with him while rebellion gathers against his father the king.
★ 7.2
Nostromo
1904 · 496 pages
In a South American republic of Conrad's invention, silver from a mine props up a dictator, breaks a marriage, and corrupts the man called incorruptible. Conrad's anatomy of capital has not aged.
★ 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
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 Gallic War
50 BC · 260 pages
Caesar reports his own conquest of Gaul in the third person, equally calm about bridge building and massacre. The Latin is so clean that students still learn the language on it.
★ 7.1
Reflections on the Revolution in France
1790 · 400 pages
Modern conservatism begins here, in Burke's fury at revolutionaries who tore down old institutions for the sake of an abstraction. Society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn.
★ 7.1
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 Tale of Two Cities
1859 · 488 pages
Eighteen years in the Bastille have left Doctor Manette making shoes in the dark. Dickens carries his daughter's household from London into the Terror, where Madame Defarge knits a death list.
★ 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
Henry IV, Part Two
1599 · 338 pages
Falstaff ages and the king dies while Prince Hal waits for the crown. Shakespeare wrote no colder scene than the new king telling his old tavern friend that he does not know him.
★ 7.0
The Secret Agent
1907 · 320 pages
Conrad wrote the first great modern novel of terrorism. Verloc keeps a seedy London shop, informs on anarchists for a foreign embassy, and is ordered to bomb the Greenwich Observatory to frighten England.
★ 6.9
The French Revolution
A History
1837 · 798 pages
Carlyle writes the Revolution in the present tense, as though standing in the crowd. The Bastille falls and the Terror arrives as things still happening, history delivered as thunder rather than explanation.
★ 6.9
Parting the Waters
America in the King Years, 1954-63
1988 · 1088 pages
Branch follows Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham, moving between black church basements, the Kennedy White House, and the FBI, and ten years become full American history.
★ 6.9
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
All the President's Men
1974 · 361 pages
Woodward and Bernstein worked doorsteps, phone books, and a source who met Woodward in a parking garage, tracing campaign money into the White House. Journalism has measured itself against this reporting ever since.
★ 6.8
Richard III
1592 · 448 pages
Richard tells the audience in his first speech that he means to be a villain, then makes them accomplices. He courts a widow beside the corpse of the king he murdered.
★ 6.8
All The King's Men
1946 · 656 pages
Willie Stark rises from county treasurer to governor believing good can be made only out of bad. Warren wrote the American novel of power, narrated by the aide he sends to dig dirt.
★ 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
Embracing Defeat
Japan in the Wake of World War II
1999 · 680 pages
Defeated Japan is starving and occupied. Dower tells the years after 1945 from street level, through black markets, pulp magazines, and letters to MacArthur. The Japanese emerge remaking themselves rather than remade.
★ 6.7
The Jungle
1906 · 290 pages
Jurgis Rudkus comes from Lithuania to work Chicago's killing floors, and the packing plants destroy his family while diseased meat ships out. Roosevelt read it and Congress passed federal food inspection within months.
★ 6.7
The Vocation Lectures
1919 · 100 pages
Weber told students in a collapsing Germany what science and politics demand: science can give you clarity but never choose your values, and politics is the slow boring of hard boards.
★ 6.7
The Analects
221 BC · 110 pages
Confucius answers his students in short exchanges: never do to others what you would not want done to yourself, and let ritual shape everything. Chinese officials memorized it to hold office until 1905.
★ 6.7