The Books canon

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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
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2 volumes
SortEditorial Year Title
Genre·Oral history✕clear
Nonfiction · Oral history

Akenfield

Portrait of an English Village
Ronald Blythe
1969 · 353 pages

Forty-nine Suffolk villagers talk about horse teams, hunger and the Great War. Blythe caught a rural England that machinery was erasing as he wrote, and English country life has had no better witness.

★ 6.0
Nonfiction · Oral history

Secondhand Time

The Last of the Soviets
Svetlana Alexievich
2013 · 496 pages

Kitchen by kitchen, Alexievich recorded Soviet citizens describing what the collapse did to them. They talk about lost savings and lost faith, and a bewildering grief for the country that jailed their parents.

★ 5.5