To the Lighthouse
1927 · 209 pages
At a summer house by the sea a trip to the lighthouse keeps being postponed, and Woolf gets so close to how a mind works that years pass and grief arrives in passing.
★ 9.2
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.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1690 · 416 pages
Nothing is in the mind at birth, Locke says. It is blank paper, and everything you know arrives through the senses or through watching your mind work. British empiricism runs out from there.
★ 7.1
The Living Mountain
1977 · 176 pages
Summits barely register. Shepherd spent a lifetime in the Scottish Cairngorms and writes about going into the mountain rather than up it, attending to water and frost until the seeing becomes the point.
★ 6.9
Experiencing Architecture
1957 · 245 pages
Rasmussen teaches you to feel a building before you name its style: the hardness a child finds bouncing a ball off a wall, Rome's Spanish Steps descending in the rhythm of a polonaise.
★ 6.0
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
1975 · 72 pages
For three days in October 1974, Perec sat in cafes on the Place Saint-Sulpice and wrote down every bus, pigeon, and passerby. Look long enough, he shows, and nothing is background.
★ 5.0