The Collected Poems
1954 · 583 pages
Stevens sold insurance in Hartford and wrote sumptuous poems about what the imagination makes once God is gone. Read "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" aloud and the sound arrives before the sense.
★ 8.6
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 Little Prince
1943 · 96 pages
Crash-landed in the Sahara, a pilot meets a boy from a tiny planet who worries about his rose. Saint-Exupéry writes for children and lands hardest on adults who have stopped looking properly.
★ 8.6
Invisible Cities
1972 · 165 pages
Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities that cannot exist to the emperor Kublai Khan, a page or two each, and every one of them is another way of describing Venice.
★ 8.4
Arctic Dreams
1986 · 474 pages
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
★ 5.6
Where the Sidewalk Ends
1974 · 176 pages
The garbage of Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout piles past the ceiling. Silverstein drew as well as he rhymed, and American children have been raised on his nonsense and sudden tenderness since 1974.
★ 4.9
Bridge to Terabithia
1977 · 144 pages
Jess can outrun everyone in fifth grade until Leslie moves in next door. They swing over a creek into Terabithia, the kingdom they rule together, and Paterson refuses to protect them from grief.
★ 4.8