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.

The Man Who Planted Trees

1953 · 72 pages

In a dead Provencal valley a shepherd pushes acorns into the ground, one at a time. Thirty years and two wars later the forest holds ten thousand people who never learn his name.

★ 5.2

The World-Ending Fire

The Essential Wendell Berry
2017 · 368 pages

An economy that uses up land and people is not efficient but suicidal, Berry argues. He writes from a Kentucky hillside he farms with horses, and insists eating is an agricultural act.

★ 5.4

The Living Mountain

1977 · 176 pages

Summits barely register. Shepherd spent a lifetime in the Scottish Cairngorms and writes about going into the mountain rather than up it, attending to water and frost until the seeing becomes the point.

★ 6.9