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 Art of Eating

1954 · 784 pages

Fisher wrote about oysters, wartime rationing, and eating alone, and made food a way of writing about hunger of every kind. The poet W.H. Auden said nobody in America wrote better prose.

★ 7.0

Honey from a Weed

1986 · 374 pages

Gray gave up an editor's job for stone quarries in Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos, and Apulia, cooking wild greens, snails, and game over wood fires and setting down a Mediterranean already disappearing.

★ 5.3

Kitchen Confidential

2000 · 312 pages

Bourdain cooked for two decades, then told everything: the drugs, the immigrant crews who hold restaurants up, why you never order fish on Monday. He made the line cook a figure Americans envied.

★ 4.7