Anna Karenina
1877 · 896 pages
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer while, in the other half of the book, Levin farms and marries and worries about God. Tolstoy gives both lives the same total sympathy.
★ 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.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
1774 · 118 pages
Werther writes to a friend about Lotte, who is engaged to a decent man, and about feelings he cannot govern. Young men across Europe dressed like him and read themselves into his condition.
★ 7.3
The Myth of Sisyphus
1942 · 212 pages
The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.
★ 7.2
The Good Soldier
1915 · 256 pages
This is the saddest story I have ever heard, an American begins, then tells it out of order, circling two couples whose friendship at a German spa hid adultery, debt, and ruin.
★ 7.0
Ethan Frome
1911 · 77 pages
Snowbound on a failing Massachusetts farm, Ethan Frome works beside a wife who is perpetually ill and the young cousin he has fallen for. Wharton makes poverty and duty feel like weather.
★ 7.0
Suicide
A Study In Sociology
1897 · 405 pages
Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics, single people more often than married. Durkheim turned the most private act into a social fact, and every social science since counts the way he counted.
★ 6.8
Appointment in Samarra
1934 · 240 pages
At a country club on Christmas Eve, a Pennsylvania Cadillac dealer throws a drink in the wrong man's face. O'Hara tracks the next three days with pitiless attention to who outranks whom.
★ 6.2
Dark Elderberry Branch
2012 · 80 pages
No more passionate voice ever sounded in twentieth-century Russian poetry, the poet Brodsky said of Tsvetaeva. She came back from exile to Stalin's Russia, where the secret police took her husband and daughter.
★ 5.5