White Teeth
2000 · 464 pages
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal met in a tank in 1945 and are still arguing in North London, while their children reject every inheritance on offer. Smith made multicultural Britain a comic epic.
★ 5.2
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.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Physiology of Taste
1825 · 464 pages
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
★ 5.4
Arguably
2011 · 816 pages
No English-language essayist of his generation wrote with more range or less caution. These 107 pieces run from Orwell and Jefferson to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hitchens had himself waterboarded before writing one.
★ 5.6
Roll, Jordan, Roll
The World the Slaves Made
1974 · 823 pages
Life on the plantation seen from the slave quarters outward: Genovese shows how the enslaved turned the master's claim of paternal care into leverage and made Christianity mean what the master never intended.
★ 6.2
The Labyrinth of Solitude
1950 · 398 pages
Mexicans wear masks, Paz argues, because the Conquest left them sons of a violated mother, heirs to two pasts they refuse to join. Mexico has quarreled with these essays for seventy years.
★ 6.5
Structural Anthropology
1959 · 410 pages
Myths and marriage rules work like languages, Lévi-Strauss argues, built from unconscious oppositions. His dissection of the Oedipus myth taught Paris to treat culture itself as a code.
★ 6.7
The Cheese and the Worms
1976 · 224 pages
A sixteenth-century Italian miller told the Inquisition that the world formed as cheese forms from milk, and the angels were worms in it. From that file Ginzburg reconstructs an entire peasant mind.
★ 6.8
The Interpretation of Cultures
1973 · 547 pages
Culture is not what people do, Geertz argues, but the meanings hung on it, and thick description means reading a Balinese cockfight the way you would read a poem.
★ 7.0
A Time of Gifts
1977 · 321 pages
At eighteen in 1933 Fermor set off on foot from Holland for Constantinople, sleeping in barns one night and in castles the next, and caught central Europe in its last clear light.
★ 7.1
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
1919 · 490 pages
Late medieval France and the Netherlands ran on public weeping, elaborate tournaments, and constant awareness of death. Huizinga paints this as no Renaissance dawn but a culture worn out by its own forms.
★ 7.2
Democracy in America
1840 · 722 pages
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.
★ 8.6