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Canon Books
Showing 1-50 of 31,398
The Great Gatsby (Paperback)
by (shelved 100 times as canon)
avg rating 3.93 — 6,156,063 ratings — published 1925
The Odyssey (Paperback)
by (shelved 94 times as canon)
avg rating 3.86 — 1,291,502 ratings — published -800
The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback)
by (shelved 86 times as canon)
avg rating 3.80 — 4,020,395 ratings — published 1951
Pride and Prejudice (Hardcover)
by (shelved 81 times as canon)
avg rating 4.30 — 5,022,774 ratings — published 1813
To Kill a Mockingbird (Paperback)
by (shelved 77 times as canon)
avg rating 4.26 — 7,137,322 ratings — published 1960
Frankenstein (Paperback)
by (shelved 76 times as canon)
avg rating 3.92 — 2,010,899 ratings — published 1818
1984 (Paperback)
by (shelved 76 times as canon)
avg rating 4.21 — 5,783,978 ratings — published 1949
Hamlet (Paperback)
by (shelved 73 times as canon)
avg rating 4.03 — 1,093,167 ratings — published 1601
Wuthering Heights (Paperback)
by (shelved 72 times as canon)
avg rating 3.89 — 2,301,203 ratings — published 1847
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Paperback)
by (shelved 68 times as canon)
avg rating 4.13 — 2,012,465 ratings — published 1890
The Metamorphosis (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 67 times as canon)
avg rating 3.91 — 1,568,909 ratings — published 1915
The Iliad (Hardcover)
by (shelved 66 times as canon)
avg rating 3.94 — 539,028 ratings — published -750
Jane Eyre (Paperback)
by (shelved 66 times as canon)
avg rating 4.16 — 2,420,762 ratings — published 1847
Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Paperback)
by (shelved 62 times as canon)
avg rating 3.57 — 636,648 ratings — published 1851
The Stranger (Paperback)
by (shelved 57 times as canon)
avg rating 4.03 — 1,535,725 ratings — published 1942
Don Quixote (Paperback)
by (shelved 56 times as canon)
avg rating 3.92 — 315,503 ratings — published 1605
Romeo and Juliet (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 56 times as canon)
avg rating 3.74 — 2,895,526 ratings — published 1590
Animal Farm (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 56 times as canon)
avg rating 4.03 — 4,826,009 ratings — published 1945
Anna Karenina (Paperback)
by (shelved 55 times as canon)
avg rating 4.11 — 970,736 ratings — published 1878
Crime and Punishment (Paperback)
by (shelved 54 times as canon)
avg rating 4.29 — 1,163,842 ratings — published 1866
Macbeth: Moment by Moment (Paperback)
by (shelved 52 times as canon)
avg rating 3.89 — 1,058,435 ratings — published 1623
The Scarlet Letter (Paperback)
by (shelved 51 times as canon)
avg rating 3.44 — 943,566 ratings — published 1850
Brave New World (Paperback)
by (shelved 50 times as canon)
avg rating 3.98 — 2,159,331 ratings — published 1932
Lolita (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 50 times as canon)
avg rating 3.87 — 981,365 ratings — published 1955
Of Mice and Men (Paperback)
by (shelved 49 times as canon)
avg rating 3.90 — 2,959,807 ratings — published 1937
The Grapes of Wrath (Hardcover)
by (shelved 48 times as canon)
avg rating 4.04 — 1,030,438 ratings — published 1939
Fahrenheit 451 (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 47 times as canon)
avg rating 3.97 — 3,001,160 ratings — published 1963
Great Expectations (Paperback)
by (shelved 47 times as canon)
avg rating 3.80 — 896,777 ratings — published 1861
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Adventures of Tom and Huck, #2)
by (shelved 47 times as canon)
avg rating 3.83 — 1,355,335 ratings — published 1885
The Aeneid (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 46 times as canon)
avg rating 3.88 — 149,311 ratings — published -19
Madame Bovary (Paperback)
by (shelved 45 times as canon)
avg rating 3.71 — 390,953 ratings — published 1856
Heart of Darkness (Paperback)
by (shelved 45 times as canon)
avg rating 3.43 — 576,855 ratings — published 1899
The Old Man and the Sea (Hardcover)
by (shelved 45 times as canon)
avg rating 3.82 — 1,380,420 ratings — published 1952
The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso (Hardcover)
by (shelved 45 times as canon)
avg rating 4.09 — 180,146 ratings — published 1304
Paradise Lost (Paperback)
by (shelved 44 times as canon)
avg rating 3.86 — 188,788 ratings — published 1667
Mrs. Dalloway (Hardcover)
by (shelved 44 times as canon)
avg rating 3.77 — 376,259 ratings — published 1925
Little Women (Little Women, #1)
by (shelved 44 times as canon)
avg rating 4.18 — 2,547,826 ratings — published 1868
A Tale of Two Cities (Paperback)
by (shelved 42 times as canon)
avg rating 3.88 — 1,035,847 ratings — published 1859
The Brothers Karamazov (Paperback)
by (shelved 42 times as canon)
avg rating 4.40 — 417,358 ratings — published 1879
Ulysses (Paperback)
by (shelved 41 times as canon)
avg rating 3.76 — 141,979 ratings — published 1922
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 41 times as canon)
avg rating 3.94 — 594,895 ratings — published 1595
The Sound and the Fury (Paperback)
by (shelved 41 times as canon)
avg rating 3.86 — 202,126 ratings — published 1929
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 40 times as canon)
avg rating 4.13 — 1,155,151 ratings — published 1967
War and Peace (Paperback)
by (shelved 40 times as canon)
avg rating 4.17 — 378,922 ratings — published 1868
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Paperback)
by (shelved 40 times as canon)
avg rating 4.30 — 4,643,706 ratings — published 1937
The Bell Jar (Paperback)
by (shelved 40 times as canon)
avg rating 4.04 — 1,321,695 ratings — published 1963
Middlemarch (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 39 times as canon)
avg rating 4.05 — 188,171 ratings — published 1872
Dracula (Paperback)
by (shelved 39 times as canon)
avg rating 4.03 — 1,547,389 ratings — published 1897
The Canterbury Tales (Paperback)
by (shelved 39 times as canon)
avg rating 3.53 — 242,182 ratings — published 1400
To the Lighthouse (Paperback)
by (shelved 38 times as canon)
avg rating 3.81 — 227,025 ratings — published
“The white masters, masters though they may be, are oblivious to those experiences of bigotry and exclusion that are condemnably common for the rest of us. In this essential matter, those writers of the literary canon are utterly ignorant, and so their reports on the human condition are gapingly incomplete. And still there are critics who argue that lyricism is a finished thing, that a white account of the self is a sufficiently universal contemplation, that any emphasis on race will only diminish its universality.”
― Of Color
― Of Color
“Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”
― The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
― The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
