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 painted background made for it: 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. Often a painting beside it, with its story. THE LIBRARY Complete books, properly typeset, 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. Some carry our own notes on the hard words. THE BOOKSHOP Real books by post: clothbound and paperback editions of the works in the app, and prints of their paintings. 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. Mix your own, 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. 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. 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 there, and not one word past it. A YEAR OF NIGHTS Ray Bradbury's challenge: a short story, a poem and an essay every night, for a thousand nights. READING PATHS AND GUIDES Curated routes through the canon, from The Russian Soul to Books That Were Banned, and plain-spoken guides to the books that have beaten you before: Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost. READ-ALONGS Live inside one book for a while, alongside everyone who signed up. A chapter of Dracula a day to Halloween. THE SALON Book clubs, letters by pigeon post, and the Common Room, where readers post what they are reading, a photograph of the pile, or a canon of their own. YOUR GOAL One book, a little each day, logged by holding a button. A streak under it, a forecast for the finish, and a shelf of what you have seen through. YOUR LIST AND YOUR LOG Shelves for what you mean to read, and a log of what you did. We 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, signal or not. ALSO INCLUDES My Canon, your own ranking, built two books at a time. The Commonplace Book, for every line you keep. Hundreds of author pages. The world's literature, mapped. Daily puzzles, a quiz and Charades. A literary word a day. On this day in literary history, and Tolstoy's thought for it. Ten reading languages. Home and Lock Screen widgets. A reading timer in the Dynamic Island. Streaks, tiers and laurels. Reading stats. The Colophon, your year in reading. Goodreads import. The Antipodes, a dare to the far side of your taste.