Daily Canon

Not a reading list you will never finish, and not a feed. One novel, poem, play or essay each morning, with a short piece written to make you want to read it, and the whole book waiting behind it if it takes. Some days it will not be for you. That is the point: keep your line in the water and one of them bites, and you have found a book you will press on everyone you meet. Hamlet on Shakespeare's birthday. Ulysses on Bloomsday. Dracula through October. Wuthering Heights on Valentine's Day, because love should always be a little unhinged. Thousands of works, four thousand years of writing, reaching well past the Western shelf to Diwali, Nowruz, Vesak and the lunar new year. TODAY'S WORK The day's work on a background painted by hand for that book alone: a blurb that sets the scene without spoiling it, a line worth keeping, and the gist in plain words for when the blurb leaves you guessing. THE LIBRARY Complete books, properly typeset and read inside the app, with more shelved every week: real page turns, hold a word for the dictionary, your place kept to the word. Download any and read with no signal at all. Many carry their original language beside the translation, switchable mid-chapter: Anna Karenina in Russian, Dante in Italian, the Odyssey in Greek. AMBIENCE Every book gets the weather it was written in. A storm for King Lear, the open sea for Moby-Dick, a fire and rain outside for a Russian winter. Rain, thunder, wind, fire, birds, a reading room after midnight: mix them yourself or leave it to the book. Nothing streams, and it plays on with the screen locked. THE APP BLOCKER Name the apps that eat your evening and The Daily Canon stands at the door. Open one and today's reading is offered first, with an honest fifteen minutes through if you really must. No guilt, no lecture. The feed will keep. BLOOMY A reader who has read the canon and, more usefully, your log. Ask what to read next, or what a passage is doing, or who else wrote like this. It answers in sentences, not links, and will shelve, log and rank things for you once you say yes. WHERE YOU LEFT OFF Put a book down three months ago? Say where you stopped and get back everything up to that point and not one word past it. READING GUIDES Warm, plain-spoken companions to the books that have beaten you before: Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost. READING PATHS Curated routes through the canon. The Russian Soul, through Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. The American Century. Books That Were Banned. Required Reading, every set text the syllabuses share. READ-ALONGS Live inside one book for a while, alongside everyone who signed up. A chapter of Dracula a day to Halloween. YOUR GOAL One book, a little each day, logged by holding a button. A streak underneath it, a forecast for the finish, and a shelf of everything you have seen through. MY CANON Your own ranked canon, built by asking which of two books you liked more. Every ranking is a self-portrait. YOUR LIST AND YOUR LOG Shelves for what you intend to read, and a log of what you actually did. We keep both, and are far too polite to compare them. IT WORKS WITHOUT A SIGNAL Today's work, your log, your streak and every downloaded book live on your phone. Tomorrow turns over at midnight whether or not there is a signal to fetch it. ALSO INCLUDES The Commonplace Book, for every line you keep. Hundreds of authors with a page of their own. The world's literature, mapped. A literary word a day. What happened in literary history today, and the thought Tolstoy chose for it. Ten reading languages. Home and Lock Screen widgets. A reading timer in the Dynamic Island. Streaks, tiers and laurels. Your reading portrait, drawn from what you read. The Colophon, your year in reading, sealed and dated. Goodreads import. Spotlight search. Share cards. The Antipodes, a dare to the far side of your taste.