Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Four sisters, one thin purse and a long war, learning to work, quarrel, write and love in a New England town that feels like your own street.
Memoir & biography: books to read
What ties these books together is the plain fact of a life being turned into words: a childhood, a marriage, a mind learning its own shape. You might start with «My Reminiscences», where Tagore recalls a boy in a vast Calcutta house and a school he hated, or with Educated, Tara Westover's account of growing up without school on an Idaho mountain and teaching herself a way out.
A page that shows it
What a small bird can do for someone who is very tired.
Jo could not speak; and for several minutes there was no sound but the sigh of the wind and the lapping of the tide. A white-winged gull flew by, with the flash of sunshine on its silvery breast; Beth watched it till it vanished, and her eyes were full of sadness. A little gray-coated sand-bird came tripping over the beach, “peeping” softly to itself, as if enjoying the sun and sea; it came quite close to Beth, looked at her with a friendly eye, and sat upon a warm stone, dressing its wet feathers, quite at home. Beth smiled, and felt comforted, for the tiny thing seemed to offer its small friendship, and remind her that a pleasant world was still to be enjoyed. -
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Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery, 1908
A vibrant, deeply imaginative coming-of-age story woven through the lush landscape of rural Canada.
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My Reminiscences
Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
A boy in a vast Calcutta house, a school he hated, a first snowfall, a mother's death: Tagore's own account of how a poet's mind is made.
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David Copperfield
Charles Dickens, 1850
A boy survives debt, school and unreliable adults, and learns how memory turns a life into a story.
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Educated
Tara Westover, 2018
A girl grows up without school or doctors on an Idaho mountain, then teaches herself enough to leave—and has to decide what leaving costs.
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Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006
A woman walks out of a marriage and a script she never wrote, and spends a year in Italy, India and Indonesia finding out what she actually wants.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, 1916
A boy in Dublin grows up inside a family, a religion and a language, and tries to invent a self that none of them wrote for him.
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Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson, 2011
The authorized life of Apple's cofounder, built from years of interviews with a man who demanded perfection and often got it.
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The Pilgrim’s Progress
John Bunyan, 1678
A tinker in a Bedford jail dreams a man running from his own conscience, through a monster, a fair and a river — the strangest, most gripping allegory in English.
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Agnes Grey
Anne Brontë, 1847
A clergyman's daughter with no money takes a post as a governess and learns how little the world allows a woman who must earn her own bread.
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Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup, 1853
A free Black man is kidnapped into slavery and spends twelve years using memory, music and stubborn hope to survive and testify.
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Born Free
Joy Adamson, 1960
A lioness raised by hand, then taught to hunt and live wild: the true story that changed how people looked at animals.
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Seabiscuit
Laura Hillenbrand, 2001
A true Depression-era story about a discarded racehorse, a damaged jockey and the salesman who bet on both.
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Geronimo’s Story of His Life
Geronimo, 1906
The Apache leader's own account of a life spent at war with two nations, dictated in captivity — and full of sharp, curious attention to the world that imprisoned him.
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για το έργο του Μακρόνησος. Όταν η, 2024
A compact collection of aphorisms that turns madness into a lens on love, conformity and independent thought.
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The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams, 1918
A president's grandson measures his own life against the century's machines and finds his education never once finished.
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Memoirs of a Revolutionist
Peter Kropotkin, 1899
A prince trained as a geographer gives up court, career and inheritance to organize with workers — and reports on power from both sides of the wall.
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The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
W. H. Davies, 1908
A Welsh poet's account of riding freight trains, begging, and sleeping rough across America and England—funny, precise, and unsentimental about hunger.
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His Way
Kitty Kelley, 1986
Kitty Kelley's unauthorized life of Frank Sinatra, built from the voices of family, lovers and hangers-on: a portrait of ambition, loyalty and the cost of being in the room.
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A Negro Explorer at the North Pole
Matthew Henson, 1912
A Black explorer's own account of the polar campaigns: hauling sledges, living as an Inuit among Inuit, and pushing north with Peary.
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A Daughter of the Samurai
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, 1925
A samurai's daughter is raised for one world — brushwork, bowing, an arranged marriage — then sent to Cincinnati. A memoir of translating yourself, line by line.
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Tombstone
Walter Noble Burns, 1926
Silver boom, saloons and hired guns in the Arizona desert, told by a newspaperman who hunted down the ageing survivors and let them talk.
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Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer, 1996
A young man gives away his money and walks into the Alaska bush; the book follows the dream and the questions it leaves.
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Wild
Cheryl Strayed, 2012
A grieving, divorced twenty-six-year-old with no hiking experience walks the Pacific Crest Trail alone—and finds a way back to herself.
A taste of the feed
What does the limitless geography of a child's mind look like?
Anne was curled up Turk-fashion on the hearthrug, gazing into that joyous glow where the sunshine of a hundred summers was being distilled from the maple cordwood. She had been reading, but her book had slipped to the floor, and now she was dreaming, with a smile on her parted lips. Glittering castles in Spain were shaping themselves out of the mists and rainbows of her lively fancy; adventures wonderful and enthralling were happening to her in cloudland—adventures that always turned out triumphantly and never involved her in scrapes like those of actual life.
Anne of Green Gables · L. M. Montgomery
Grief keeps returning you to the same place, to look for what isn't there.
The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing.
My Reminiscences · Rabindranath Tagore
The eerie certainty that you have lived this exact moment before.
We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.
David Copperfield · Charles Dickens
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