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.

Cod

1997 · 304 pages

One fish shaped the whole Atlantic world. Kurlansky follows cod from the Basques and their secret fishing grounds through the slave-trade economies it fed to the Grand Banks collapse of 1992.

★ 4.5

Americanah

2013 · 588 pages

The defining novel of African immigration to America. Ifemelu leaves Lagos for university, discovers there that she is black, and turns the discovery into a blog that flays the country's racial pieties.

★ 5.2