Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

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Classic novels and stories

Novels and short stories from before about 1970 that stay in print and on syllabuses, from Austen, Tolstoy and Dickens to Hemingway, Kafka, Camus and Borges.

Start here

  1. The JungleUpton Sinclair, 1906
  2. The New AtlantisFrancis Bacon, 1627
  3. Resurrection from the UndergroundRene Girard, 1963
  4. Robinson CrusoeDaniel Defoe, 1686
  5. CandideVoltaire, 1759
Upton Sinclair · 1906

A novel of a Lithuanian immigrant family ruined in Chicago's meatpacking yards.

Recommended by: Nat Eliason, Benedict Evans

Francis Bacon · 1627

Bacon's utopia of organised research; science as an institution

Recommended by: Patrick Collison, Peter Thiel

Rene Girard · 1963

Girard reading Dostoevsky; mimetic rivalry and resentment

Recommended by: Peter Thiel

Vladimir Nabokov · 1777

Recommended by: Ev Williams, Mario Gabriele

Anthony Trollope · 1809

Recommended by: Tim O’Reilly

Susan Ferrier · 1818

Recommended by: Paul Graham

Charlotte Brontë · 1847

Recommended by: Sophie Bakalar

Louisa May Alcott · 1848

Recommended by: Audrey Gelman

Herman Melville · 1851

Captain Ahab drives his whaling crew to hunt the white whale that maimed him.

Recommended by: Steve Jobs

George du Maurier · 1894

Recommended by: Tim O’Reilly

Edith Wharton · 1910

Recommended by: Caterina Fake

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1920

A novel of a rich man of unknown origin on Long Island and the woman he wants back.

Hermann Hesse · 1922

A novel of a Brahmin's son in ancient India who seeks understanding his own way.

P. G. Wodehouse · 1923

Bertie and Jeeves help, and sometimes hinder, the love-struck Bingo Little.

Aldous Huxley · 1932

A novel of a future world where people are bred in hatcheries into contented castes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1933

A psychiatrist marries his wealthy patient, and the marriage destroys him.

Recommended by: Patrick Collison, Bob Iger

Ernest Hemingway · 1940

A novel of an American with Spanish guerrillas sent to blow up a bridge.

Austin Tappan Wright · 1942

Recommended by: Tim O’Reilly

Jorge Luis Borges · 1945

Recommended by: Naval Ravikant

Vladimir Nabokov · 1945

A novel built around a 999-line poem a fictional poet wrote in his last 20 days.

Recommended by: Mario Gabriele

J.D. Salinger · 1945

A novel of a sixteen-year-old's days alone in New York after his school expels him.

Franz Kafka · 1946

Short parables and paradoxes from Kafka's fiction and letters, in German and English.

Recommended by: Ricardo Semler

Ernest Hemingway · 1952

An old fisherman, a boy and a giant fish in the Gulf Stream off Havana.

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Jack Dorsey

William Golding · 1954

A novel of schoolboys stranded on an island whose self-rule collapses into violence.

Jack Kerouac · 1957

Young writer friends wander from coast to coast in search of whatever they find.

Recommended by: Ev Williams

Joseph Heller · 1961

Recommended by: Sophie Bakalar

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1962

One day of a prisoner in a Soviet Gulag labour camp, and the suffering it holds.

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai

Henry Miller · 1964

Recommended by: Naval Ravikant

Mikhail Bulgakov · 1966

A novel in which the devil, as Professor Woland, brings chaos to Soviet Moscow.

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 2000

Recommended by: Alex and Books

T4 1984
George Orwell · 2003

A novel of a clerk who rewrites history under a totalitarian state that watches all.

Marcel Proust · 2016

Recommended by: Susan J. Fowler

Leo Tolstoy · 2025

A novel setting Anna's ruinous affair against Levin's search for how to live.

Albert Camus

Recommended by: Guy Proops

More fiction