True Stories
History, memoir and science, one chapter-sized reading every morning by 6am ET. Start at day one, free.
The shelf: 20 books, read in order
Everyone starts on day one of book 1. When one book ends, the next begins.
1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
18 days
Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass teaches himself to read, fights back and escapes to freedom, naming names as he goes.
2. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
30 days
Franklin recounts his rise from runaway printer's apprentice to Philadelphia's most useful citizen, plan for moral perfection included.
3. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano
36 days
Kidnapped as a child in West Africa, Equiano survives the Middle Passage, buys his freedom and writes to end the slave trade.
4. On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
65 days
Darwin builds his case, from pigeons, barnacles and island life, that species change over time by natural selection.
5. Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain
68 days
Twain remembers learning to pilot steamboats on the Mississippi, then goes back twenty years later to see what became of the river.
6. The Travels of Marco Polo
Marco Polo (tr. Henry Yule)
52 days
A Venetian merchant describes his years at the court of Kublai Khan and the wonders of Asia, as Europe first heard of them.
7. The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Mary Rowlandson
9 days
Taken in a 1676 raid during King Philip's War, a minister's wife records eleven weeks of captivity, hunger and faith.
8. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (tr. J. P. Richter)
82 days
Leonardo's own notes on painting, anatomy, flight, water and machines: the working mind of the Renaissance in its own words.
9. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs
37 days
Writing as 'Linda Brent', Jacobs tells how she hid for seven years in a tiny attic to escape her enslaver and protect her children.
10. History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides (tr. Richard Crawley)
93 days
An Athenian general chronicles the long war between Athens and Sparta, and how power, fear and pride undid a democracy.
11. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Edwin Lefèvre
51 days
The thinly veiled story of a famous speculator, from teenage prodigy to Wall Street millionaire, and the lesson in every fortune lost.
12. Autobiography of a Yogi
Paramahansa Yogananda
62 days
Yogananda tells of his boyhood in India, his search for a guru, and the saints he met before bringing yoga to the West.
13. De Profundis
Oscar Wilde
8 days
From his prison cell, Wilde writes a long letter to the young man who helped ruin him, and finds in suffering a new kind of art.
14. The Anabasis of Alexander
Arrian (tr. E. J. Chinnock)
54 days
The fullest ancient account of Alexander the Great's campaigns, from Macedonia to India, drawn from his generals' own memoirs.
15. Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington
34 days
Born enslaved in Virginia, Washington works his way to an education and builds the Tuskegee Institute from almost nothing.
16. Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup
39 days
A free Black violinist from New York is kidnapped, sold into slavery in Louisiana, and spends twelve years trying to get home.
17. My Life
Richard Wagner
158 days
The composer tells his own story, from a restless boyhood in Saxony through revolution, exile and debt to the making of his operas.
18. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon
477 days
Gibbon traces thirteen centuries of Roman history, from the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople, in grand, ironic prose.
19. The Principles of Psychology
William James
209 days
The founding text of American psychology, in which James explores habit, attention, memory, emotion and the 'stream of thought'.
20. The Antiquities of the Jews
Flavius Josephus (tr. William Whiston)
225 days
A first-century historian retells Jewish history from the Creation to the eve of the great revolt against Rome.
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