The Books canon

Sourced and shelved.

Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.

Coming of Age in Samoa

1928 · 223 pages

Sixty-eight girls on the Samoan island of Ta'u convinced Mead that the turmoil of adolescence is made by culture, not biology. She turned anthropology into an argument ordinary Americans took sides in.

★ 6.4

Tristes Tropiques

1955 · 424 pages

Levi-Strauss opens by declaring he hates traveling and explorers, then takes you into Brazil's interior among the Bororo and Nambikwara. Science, memoir, and philosophy run together in mourning for what contact destroyed.

★ 6.6