The Journals
1768 · 646 pages
Cook charts New Zealand and eastern Australia in his own hand, and sails until no southern continent is left to find. The log calls the Aborigines happier than Europeans, then claims their coast.
★ 5.8
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 Four Voyages
1493 · 320 pages
Columbus wrote it all down, and the wonder and the greed are inseparable from the start: islands more beautiful than anything he has seen, and people he judges would make good servants.
★ 5.8
The Oregon Trail
1849 · 951 pages
Twenty-three and fresh from Harvard, Parkman rode onto the 1846 prairie and spent three weeks hunting buffalo with an Oglala Sioux band. He got the West down before the railroads reached it.
★ 5.4
Between Meals
An Appetite for Paris
1962 · 185 pages
Sent to the Sorbonne in 1926, Liebling studied restaurants instead. Proust, he argues, simply lacked the appetite to eat properly. What follows is a young man's gluttonous education in Paris.
★ 5.3
Adventures on the Wine Route
A Wine Buyer's Tour of France
1988 · 288 pages
A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.
★ 4.5