Reading path

The Perfect Sentence

For readers who fall in love with how a sentence sounds before they know what it means. These are writers for whom language is not a vehicle for story but the story itself: every clause weighted, every rhythm deliberate, every word chosen as if words were running out. Read them slowly. Read them aloud. Let the prose do what music does.

In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.

Open in the app Download

The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.

The route

1. Madame BovaryGustave Flaubert, 1857
2. MiddlemarchGeorge Eliot, 1872
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManJames Joyce, 1916
4. In Search of Lost TimeMarcel Proust, 1913
5. Mrs DallowayVirginia Woolf, 1925
6. To the LighthouseVirginia Woolf, 1927
7. The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
8. Speak MemoryVladimir Nabokov, 1951
9. LolitaVladimir Nabokov, 1955
10. BelovedToni Morrison, 1987
11. The Blue FlowerPenelope Fitzgerald, 1995
12. The Rings of SaturnW.G. Sebald, 1995
13. GileadMarilynne Robinson, 2004
14. AusterlitzW.G. Sebald, 2001
15. Wolf HallHilary Mantel, 2009
16. Memoirs From Beyond the GraveFrançois-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand, 1849
17. Out of AfricaIsak Dinesen, 1937
18. A Death in the FamilyJames Agee, 1957
19. The Big SleepRaymond Chandler, 1939
20. A Heart So WhiteJavier Marias, 1992
21. Niels LyhneJens Peter Jacobson, 1880
22. ParadisoJosé Lezama Lima, 1966
23. The Death of the HeartElizabeth Bowen, 1938
24. LovingHenry Green, 1945
25. West With the NightBeryl Markham, 1942