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.
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 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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