Moby Dick
1851 · 672 pages
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
★ 9.6
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.
Naomi
1924 · 237 pages
Joji, a Tokyo engineer, takes home a fifteen-year-old cafe waitress to raise into a Western-style wife, and she ruins him instead. Naomi became the emblem of Japan's modern girl and scandalized older readers.
★ 6.3
The Tunnel
1948 · 138 pages
Writing from a prison cell, the painter Juan Pablo Castel explains why he killed the woman who understood his work. Sabato follows a jealous mind step by step until its logic feels ordinary.
★ 6.0
Flaubert's Parrot
1984 · 190 pages
Barnes sends a retired English doctor after the stuffed parrot once on Flaubert's desk. The search becomes chronologies, a bestiary, a mock exam, and under all of it the doctor's dead wife.
★ 5.4
The Blind Owl
1937 · 108 pages
Persian fiction's darkest book: an opium-addicted painter of pen cases draws the same scene, an old man and a girl in black offering a lily, then finds it living behind his wall.
★ 5.3
The Pledge
1958 · 192 pages
An inspector swears to a murdered girl's mother he will find her killer, then quits, buys a filling station, and waits with a child as bait. Durrenmatt wrote it against the detective genre.
★ 5.2