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.

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 Counterfeiters

1925 · 467 pages

Every life in Gide's novel is a forgery: boys passing false coins, adults faking passions they do not feel, and a novelist inside the book writing a novel called The Counterfeiters.

★ 6.6