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 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.
A Doll's House
1879 · 72 pages
Nora Helmer forged a signature to save her husband's life and has been paying the debt in secret ever since. The play ends on a closing door that modern theater still hears.
★ 8.0
Beowulf
Author unknown
1000 · 213 pages
For twelve years a monster has emptied a Danish king's hall, until a young warrior sails over to wait for it in the dark. Fifty years on, the poem comes back for him.
★ 7.4
The Prose Edda
1220 · 180 pages
A Swedish king walks into a hall and asks three strangers how the world began and how it ends. Their answers are nearly all anyone now knows about Thor, Loki, and Ragnarok.
★ 7.3
Hunger
1890 · 206 pages
Starving in Kristiania, the city that became Oslo, a young writer gives away money he lacks and refuses food when offered. Hamsun tracks a mind sliding toward derangement, and modern fiction followed.
★ 7.0
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
1966 · 128 pages
Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.
★ 6.4
My Struggle
2009 · 448 pages
Six volumes of one man's life recorded to the last cornflake and cigarette, and at the center a father who drank himself to death, leaving a house his sons had to scrub clean.
★ 5.1
The Laughing Policeman
1968 · 211 pages
On a rainy Stockholm night a gunman empties a submachine gun into a bus, killing a detective from Martin Beck's own squad. Sjöwall and Wahlöö make Swedish social democracy the real suspect.
★ 4.9
Pippi Longstocking
1945 · 160 pages
Pippi is nine, lives alone with a monkey and a horse she can lift with one arm, and answers to no adult. Lindgren handed children a heroine no grown-up can manage.
★ 4.8