War and Peace
1869 · 1392 pages
Five families carried through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with battle, marriage, farming, and a theory of history held in one design. You finish it knowing these people better than your own friends.
★ 9.8
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1860s
1860 – 1869
Showing 19 books from the 1860s
Crime and Punishment
1866 · 565 pages
Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to prove he stands above ordinary morality, then comes apart as a magistrate circles him. It reads like a thriller and works like a confession.
★ 9.6
Great Expectations
1861 · 469 pages
Pip, a blacksmith's boy, is handed a fortune by an unknown benefactor and turns snob. Miss Havisham waits in her rotted wedding dress, and Dickens makes the shame of low birth unbearable.
★ 8.8
Les Miserables
1862 · 1260 pages
Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for stealing bread, breaks parole, and is hunted the rest of his life by a relentless policeman. Around them Hugo builds the century's great argument for mercy.
★ 8.8
Notes from Underground
1864 · 136 pages
Holed up in a shabby Petersburg room, a spiteful clerk talks at you, insisting people will wreck their own lives to prove they are free. Every alienated narrator since speaks in his voice.
★ 8.6
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
1865 · 171 pages
Alice follows a rabbit down a hole into a country where logic runs sideways, ruled by a queen who wants everyone beheaded. Carroll freed children's books from having to teach anything.
★ 8.5
The Idiot
1869 · 656 pages
Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss clinic, epileptic and incapable of guile, and Petersburg cannot decide whether to adore him or use him. The world takes a genuinely good man apart.
★ 8.1
Capital
Volume 1
1867 · 1152 pages
Workers create more value than their wages return, Marx argues, and that gap is profit. No economic book has reshaped politics more, and the chapter on the working day still burns.
★ 7.5
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
1860 · 402 pages
Burckhardt invented cultural history by looking past popes and battles at how Renaissance Italians lived, finding the moment people began to think of themselves as individuals. We still see the period his way.
★ 7.3
Fathers and Sons
1862 · 215 pages
Home from university, Arkady brings his friend Bazarov, who believes in nothing but science and refuses to respect anyone. Turgenev made the word nihilist famous and named a quarrel every family keeps having.
★ 7.2
Sentimental Education
1869 · 479 pages
Frédéric Moreau spends his youth in Paris loving a married woman he will never have and drifting through the 1848 revolution. Flaubert made wasted life a permanent subject for the novel.
★ 7.0
Little Women
1869 · 777 pages
Four sisters grow up poor in a Massachusetts town while their father serves in the Civil War. Jo March wants to write, and readers have measured their own ambition against hers ever since.
★ 7.0
The Subjection of Women
1869 · 109 pages
The legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and a hindrance to human improvement. Mill wrote that when a married Englishwoman could own nothing and had no vote.
★ 6.8
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
1861 · 176 pages
Seven years in a crawlspace three feet high, watching her children through a peephole. Jacobs named what men's slave narratives left out: the owner who pursued her from her teens.
★ 6.8
Silas Marner
1861 · 209 pages
Robbed of gold he hoarded for fifteen years, a lonely weaver finds a golden-haired child on his hearth. Eliot turns a village fable into a full account of how a person is repaired.
★ 6.7
The Woman in White
1860 · 671 pages
Walking home from Hampstead at night, a drawing master meets a woman all in white escaped from an asylum. Collins tells it as sworn testimony, and Victorian England bought Woman in White perfume.
★ 6.7
The Moonstone
1868 · 528 pages
T.S. Eliot called it the first and best of modern English detective novels. A diamond looted from an Indian shrine arrives as a birthday present and vanishes that night.
★ 6.6
First Love
1860 · 298 pages
Turgenev said this was the only work of his that still gave him pleasure. Vladimir, sixteen, loves the princess next door, twenty-one, and her secret lover is nobody he can fight.
★ 5.6
The Cossacks and Other Stories
1863 · 480 pages
Sick of Moscow, a young nobleman soldiers in the Caucasus and sets about living like the Cossacks he admires, wanting a girl promised to one of them. Turgenev called it his favorite Tolstoy.
★ 5.5