Greetings from London, 

Perhaps you, like me, are fond of sneaking a peek at your friends’ bookshelves when at their homes. Or, maybe likelier, you occasionally peer over someone’s shoulders during a Zoom call. Is that a full set of John Grisham novels or the Complete Works of Shakespeare on the wall behind your boss?

Either way, what someone is reading is helpful information. A recent passion of mine has been learning what books my colleagues recommend—novels, non-fiction, graphic story-telling, journal articles, academic tomes. We’ve launched a feature called The Economist reads, in which our in-house expert on a subject selects a handful of sources for you to read (or occasionally to watch or listen to), in order to become well-read on a given topic. Helpfully, they also explain why they’ve picked those books.

Take modern warfare. Over the past five months of fighting in Ukraine, it’s become clear that everyone has to rethink how wars are fought. No longer are Western armies only confronted by guerrillas and insurgents. As our defence editor notes in his short guide, we’re back to massive artillery duels and urban warfare in the heart of Europe. So which books to read to understand the background to this?

We’ve now published the first two dozen of these The Economist reads, and we’ll build up a library of topics for you over the coming weeks and months. In several cases we’ve tapped foreign correspondents (and former ones) to tell us about countries and regions. We’ve looked at the nature of financial crime, the best biographies ever published and why some countries get rich and others don’t.

May you find the time to dip into these book lists—and please let us know which topics you’d most like covered. Write to me at [email protected] with your suggestions. (And see if you can guess which of our columnists the bookshelf pictured at the top of this newsletter belongs to.)

If you subscribe to The Economist, we have a new weekly newsletter launching today just for you. The Bottom Line will give you a panoramic sweep of the fast-changing world of tech and business. Each edition will contain exclusive commentary from our global editors, from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. I encourage you to sign up here.