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.

Imagined Communities

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
1983 · 256 pages

Nations are imagined communities, Anderson argues, assembled by print: strangers reading the same newspapers and novels came to feel like one people. He gave the study of nationalism its vocabulary.

★ 6.3

India After Gandhi

2007 · 960 pages

Guha carries India from independence in 1947 to the present and asks why it never broke apart, given partition, famine and insurgency. He calls it an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy.

★ 6.4