aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

All :: Novels

    #623
    RANK
    227
    POINTS
    The Alienist

    The Alienist

    Caleb Carr

    4.33 (3)

    <i>January 8th, 1919</i><br> Theodore is in the ground.

    #349
    RANK
    1,562
    POINTS
    Uncle Tom's Cabin

    Uncle Tom's Cabin

    Harriet Beecher Stowe

    4.5 (6)

    Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining-parlor, in the town of P_______, in Kentucky.

    #160
    RANK
    4,682
    POINTS
    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    4.42 (12)

    To Sherlock Holmes she is always ithe/i woman.

    #113
    RANK
    7,257
    POINTS
    The Periodic Table

    The Periodic Table

    Primo Levi

    4.33 (3)

    There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe.

    #483
    RANK
    682
    POINTS
    Magician

    Magician

    Raymond E. Feist

    4.25 (4)

    The storm had broken.

    #441
    RANK
    957
    POINTS
    Talk Before Sleep

    Talk Before Sleep

    Elizabeth Berg

    3.5 (2)

    This morning before I came to Ruth's house, I made yet another casserole for my husband and my daughter.

    #513
    RANK
    554
    POINTS
    Loving

    Loving

    Henry Green

    4.0 (1)

    #569
    RANK
    383
    POINTS
    #574
    RANK
    364
    POINTS
    The Varieties of Religious Experience

    The Varieties of Religious Experience

    William James

    4.0 (1)

    This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh.It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser’s <i>Essays in Philosophy</i>, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s classroom therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.

    #506
    RANK
    595
    POINTS