Bartleby the Scrivener (and other short stories)
1853 · 176 pages
Hired to copy documents in a Wall Street office, a clerk answers every request with "I would prefer not to." He explains nothing, and quiet refusal turns out to be unanswerable.
★ 7.1
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.
Illuminations
1955 · 304 pages
Benjamin asks what photography did to art and answers that a work loses its aura once anyone can copy it. Elsewhere history appears as an angel blown backward, staring at the wreckage.
★ 7.1
Steppenwolf
1927 · 224 pages
Harry Haller believes he is half man, half wolf: too fine for bourgeois life, too weak to leave it. A dance hall woman leads him into jazz, drugs, and the Magic Theater.
★ 6.9
A Secular Age
2007 · 896 pages
In 1500 disbelief in God was barely possible. By 2000 it is ordinary. Taylor explains the shift not as science clearing away superstition but as Christian reform building a self sealed against transcendence.
★ 6.7
After Virtue
1981 · 286 pages
Modern moral argument never ends, MacIntyre says, because we speak in fragments of a tradition we have forgotten. He sent philosophy back to Aristotle's virtues and made ethics a fight about character again.
★ 6.2
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
1889 · 410 pages
Knocked cold in a Hartford arms factory, Hank Morgan wakes in Camelot and sets about industrializing it. The comedy runs a long way before Twain turns it into mechanized slaughter.
★ 5.5