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.

Pale Fire

1962 · 315 pages

A dead poet's 999 lines arrive wrapped in footnotes by a neighbor certain the poem is about his own lost northern kingdom. The ingenuity is total and the grief underneath is real.

★ 8.4

The Bell Jar

1963 · 288 pages

Esther Greenwood wins a month at a New York fashion magazine and comes home unable to want anything. Plath writes breakdown from the inside, down to the fig tree of futures rotting unchosen.

★ 6.3