The Books canon

Sourced and shelved.

Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
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The Loser

A Novel
1983 · 208 pages

Two pianists at the Salzburg Mozarteum hear Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations and understand they will never be that. Bernhard gives the ruin that follows in one unbroken paragraph of spite.

★ 6.8

Subtle Is the Lord

The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein
1982 · 576 pages

Einstein's physics taken as seriously as Einstein's life. Pais knew him at Princeton, could follow the mathematics, and produced the account against which every later scientific life of Einstein is measured.

★ 6.5

But Beautiful

1991 · 240 pages

Dyer imagines his way into the nights of jazz musicians, Lester Young after the army broke him and Thelonious Monk alone at a piano, inventing scenes to reach what no biography can.

★ 6.2