aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

All Novels

Explore rankings, reviews, and reader lists for every book in the catalog.

You Bright & Risen Angels

You Bright & Risen Angels

William Vollmann

0.0 (0)

#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
4,686
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
7,266
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
673
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
No Orchids for Miss Blandish

No Orchids for Miss Blandish

James Hadley Chase

3.33 (3)

#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