Goldfish-brained as we are, if a non-fiction book doesn’t have some kind of catchy, er, catch, the odds that we’ll wade through its cumbersome statistics tend to be slim. That’s why Time’s recent listicle of the Top 10 Literary Stunts found all our summer reading for us (thanks Time!), with its New Journalism-y personal narratives of infiltration and exposé.

We’ll probably start with the subgenre’s ancestor, when the New York World’s Nellie Bly got herself committed to a mental institution for ten days in 1887. The book that resulted from her series of articles on time spent at the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum (at right) was titled, quite bluntly, Ten Days in a Mad-House, and sounds like an uplifting beach trip read.