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