Book Review
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
This book changed my life. Kerouac's follow-up to On the Road trades speed for contemplation. Where the earlier book races across America in cars, this one climbs mountains and sits zazen...
Book Reviews
Book reviews on The Canon.
Book Review
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick isn't just a novel, it's a spiritual odyssey disguised as a whaling voyage. To read it is to embark on your own hero's journey...
Book Review
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's masterpiece isn't just a novel, it's an entire world. Over 1,200 pages, he creates a complete universe of interlocking lives, philosophical inquiry, and historical analysis...
Book Review
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Where War and Peace explores history and philosophy, Anna Karenina focuses relentlessly on the question: how should we live? Tolstoy presents two paths...
Book Review
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's final novel is a theological and philosophical thunderstorm. Through the Karamazov brothers he explores every possible response to a world without God...
Book Review
Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's novella invented the modern anti-hero. The Underground Man is bitter, contradictory, self-aware enough to hate himself but not change...
Book Review
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The first modern novel, and in many ways still the best. Cervantes created the template: self-aware, playful, deeply human, formally inventive...
Book Review
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez's masterpiece invented magical realism as we know it. The seamless blend of the miraculous and the mundane where a woman ascends to heaven while folding sheets...
Book Review
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Brontë's only novel is a Gothic masterpiece of obsessive love and generational trauma. Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship destroys everyone around them...
Book Review
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The greatest revenge story ever written. Dumas takes a simple premise and spins it into 1,200 pages of intricate plotting and moral complexity...
Book Review
Stoner by John Edward Williams
Williams' quiet masterpiece about an unremarkable life is one of the most devastating novels ever written. William Stoner lives without drama yet the novel makes this ordinary life feel profound...
Book Review
The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov's masterpiece is unlike anything else. Satan visits Soviet Moscow, Pontius Pilate appears in nested narrative, a writer and his lover suffer under Stalin...
Book Review
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's masterpiece is a labyrinth of nested stories, historical trauma, and metaphysical mystery. Toru Okada searches for his missing cat, then his missing wife...
Book Review
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's modernist masterpiece uses stream-of-consciousness to capture how we actually experience time and memory. The novel's three sections span a decade but feel both compressed and expanded...
Book Review
The Dead by James Joyce
Joyce's final Dubliners story is his greatest short fiction. A perfect crystallization of paralysis, epiphany, and mortality...
Book Review
Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's fourth novel showcases his greatest strengths: complex female characters, agricultural detail, and the sense that human plans always founder against larger forces...
Book Review
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most devastating novel is a sustained argument against the moral framework of Victorian England. Tess is destroyed not by her own choices but by the society that judges her...
Book Review
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's final play is a perfect comedy of manners. The form executed so brilliantly it becomes something more than satire...
Book Review
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's only novel is a Gothic fable about aestheticism taken to its logical extreme. Dorian Gray stays young and beautiful while his portrait ages and corrupts...
Book Review
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Hemingway claimed all American literature comes from this book. Overstatement, maybe, but not by much. Twain created the American vernacular voice...
Book Review
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Salinger's novel remains definitive for adolescent alienation. Holden Caulfield's voice still resonates despite decades of imitation and parody...
Book Review
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
The defining Beat Generation novel. Spontaneous prose attempting to capture the rhythm of American restlessness...
Book Review
Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's most ambitious novel weaves together two storylines: a teenage runaway named Kafka and an elderly man named Nakata who talks to cats...
Book Review
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's most realistic novel is a departure from his usual surrealism. No talking cats, no alternate dimensions, just young people navigating love and mental illness...
Book Review
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's spiritual fable follows a young man's search for enlightenment in ancient India. Siddhartha rejects his Brahmin upbringing, spends years with ascetics, becomes a wealthy merchant...
Book Review
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's late novella is his most stripped-down work. Just an old fisherman, a giant marlin, and the sea. The prose is elemental, almost biblical...
Book Review
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Machiavelli's political treatise remains shocking precisely because it drops all pretense of morality. He describes how power actually works, not how it should work...
Book Review
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Dickens' ghost story invented Christmas as we know it. The modern holiday's emphasis on generosity, family, and redemption comes largely from this novella...
Book Review
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien's first Middle-earth book is lighter than Lord of the Rings. Children's literature that adults can enjoy rather than epic fantasy...
Book Review
Flush by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel is her most accessible work. Playful, light, yet still formally interesting...