Essays
1580 · 1283 pages
Montaigne wrote short pieces on friendship, fear, sleep, and his kidney stones, and invented the essay doing it. As company on the page he remains unmatched in four centuries.
★ 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.
Animal Farm
1945 · 128 pages
The animals drive out the farmer and run the place themselves, until the rules painted on the barn wall start changing. Orwell reduced the Russian Revolution to a fable no adult forgets.
★ 8.9
Leviathan
1651 · 688 pages
Strip away the state, Hobbes argues, and life becomes a war of everyone against everyone, nasty, brutish, and short. The remedy is to hand all our power to one sovereign.
★ 8.2
Gulliver's Travels
1726 · 511 pages
Swift's ship's surgeon washes up among people six inches tall, then among giants, then among rational horses who find humans repulsive. Each voyage is funnier than the last and angrier about us.
★ 8.2
Lord of the Flies
1954 · 192 pages
English schoolboys are marooned on an island without adults, hold a vote, and are soon hunting each other. Golding tells it so plainly that you believe every step of the descent.
★ 7.8
The Art of Rhetoric
350 BC · 291 pages
Persuasion runs on three things, Aristotle found: the speaker's character, the listener's emotions, and the argument. He shows how to make an audience angry or ashamed, and you notice the machinery everywhere afterward.
★ 7.5
The Consolation of Philosophy
524 · 154 pages
Awaiting execution, Boethius is visited by a woman called Philosophy, who explains why fortune's wheel turns and how God's foreknowledge still leaves you free. Medieval Europe read nothing more closely.
★ 7.4
Two Treatises of Government
1689 · 464 pages
People are born free and equal, Locke argues, own what their labor makes, and create government by consent. One that breaks the trust may be thrown out. Jefferson took the argument whole.
★ 7.4
A Treatise of Human Nature
1740 · 677 pages
Look inside for a self and you find only a rush of sensations. Look for cause and effect and you find only habit. Reason itself, Hume concludes, is the slave of the passions.
★ 7.4
On the Social Contract
1762 · 356 pages
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Nobody holds natural authority over anyone, Rousseau argues, so law binds you only if you helped make it. Geneva burned the book.
★ 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
Emile, Or On Education
1762 · 501 pages
Raising an imaginary boy from infancy to marriage, Rousseau insists children learn from things rather than books and should not be reasoned with too early. Our whole picture of childhood descends from it.
★ 7.2
Aesop's Fables
560 BC · 87 pages
Talking animals carry the moral instruction the West grew up on: the tortoise outlasts the hare, the fox decides the grapes were sour. Aesop was a slave, and the lessons show it.
★ 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 Theory of Moral Sentiments
1759 · 494 pages
Smith argues that conscience is imagined company: we judge ourselves by picturing an impartial spectator and wanting his approval. The economist famous for self-interest built his moral system on fellow feeling.
★ 6.8
The Selfish Gene
1976 · 496 pages
Genes, not organisms, are what selection acts on, and bodies are the machines genes build to carry themselves forward. Dawkins turned that inversion into how biologists think, and gave us the word meme.
★ 6.2
The Warriors
Reflections on Men in Battle
1959 · 242 pages
What holds men to war, Gray decided, is the spectacle, the comradeship, and a delight in destruction nobody admits to. The day his Columbia doctorate arrived, so did his draft notice.
★ 5.6
The Zone of Interest
2014 · 306 pages
At Auschwitz a Nazi officer courts the commandant's wife while the commandant, a preening drunk, complains about his workload. The third narrator is a Jewish prisoner made to burn the bodies.
★ 5.0