PhD Candidate | English Lecturer | Executive Director | Aspiring Writer | Book Wrangler | Christian
Joined October 2024
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In addition to Project Gutenberg, the following are also helpful, free resources, especially for reading classic novels:
Standard Ebooks - use to download carefully and aesthetically formatted public-domain classics
HathiTrust - use to find and download library-verified scans of some rare texts and historical collections
Internet Archive - use to find scans of old, out-of-print books
Google Books - use to find and download scans of first editions or lesser-known works (use the "Full View" filter)
Wikisource - use to access and read public-domain primary sources and historical documents
Kindle Store (Amazon) - use to download free Kindle editions of many public-domain classics
Bookshare - use to gain access to a library of digital texts in accessible formats for those with verified print-related disabilities
LibriVox - use for free audiobook versions of public-domain classics
Libby and Hoopla - (check to see if your local library offers these) use to borrow ebooks or audiobooks of both modern and classic novels
We need more lists like this! I know teens who love to read, but they are intimidated by the classics. Many have had bad experiences with how the texts are taught in school. So, I try to tailor lists to their specific interests and goals. Great variety on this one.
Rachel Christine retweeted
Nine books to get you started if you’re only just getting into classics
![[Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, Passing, War & Peace, Alice in Wonderland, Les Miserables, The Man Who Was Thursday, Beowulf (Tolkien translation), Cat’s Cradle]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HUyAyG0bgAEyJUT.jpg?name=orig)
ALT [Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, Passing, War & Peace, Alice in Wonderland, Les Miserables, The Man Who Was Thursday, Beowulf (Tolkien translation), Cat’s Cradle]
Rachel Christine retweeted
Especially excited for this one - finally (!) can share that @Palgrave has published my encyclopedia entry on Romantic-era women's writing and the anticipation of science fiction! link.springer.com/rwe/10.100…
Rachel Christine retweeted
Not kidding when I say, a lot of the misery of modern life derives from the fact that we live on computers when we should be living in villages bordered by woods, canopied by stars, hearing the owl shriek in the night and waking to the clear ringing of bells.
Yes! I don’t care what anyone says, Austen will always be fascinating!
I wanted to share a fun nineteenth-century review (dated 1848) that expresses frustration over Austen’s lack of popularity and interest among American readers. Many thought her novels weren’t sufficiently sensational or sufficiently didactic. But, as the reviewer so astutely noted, the power of these novels was in their “truth to nature.” That’s just as much the case today as it was then.
“Miss Austen’s books, the best of all this class, have we believe never been popular in this country; a fact which argues most strongly against the taste of the class of readers here… Their simplicity and reality—their truth to nature and their absence from pretension… are, we fear, more or less, at the bottom of the fruitless appeal they make to the vitiated taste of ordinary novel readers; while those who delight in ‘moral stories of a religious tendency,’ see not their wholesome purport, because they never blow the trumpet of sanctimony.”
One thing about me is that when I get interested in a subject, it will inevitably become an obsession. I started reading Mansfield Park in the summer and now I find myself buying up Jane Austen biographies, acquiring annotated editions of her novels, reading her unabridged letters. It’s like being in school, except there are no grades and the only reward is the joy of learning. But if you want any kind of intellectual life, you need to cultivate these passions.
Rachel Christine retweeted
The argument going forward will be that expecting them to read by three or four is unrealistic or unreasonable. When we know that the majority of people who become lifelong readers are those who started early. The goal is the complete abolition of reading.
xitter.cf/RachelXReads/status/21…
Rachel Christine retweeted
Every English BA should have a poetics requirement covering tropes, schemes, and prosody.
This makes me think of Jean Valjean having his soul "bought" with candlesticks. When it comes to getting kids to read, the end matters more than the means. A little incentive can go a long way until habit and interest take over. Honestly, brilliant.
Rachel Christine retweeted
Since getting married, I’ve endeavored to buy more physical books. Between myself, my wife and her parents downstairs, we have between two and three thousand books. They fill every nook & corner of our home. A home library is the single best investment you can make.
Everyone needs to be buying physical books and building a home library. Ours contains literature for all ages, beginning with nursery rhymes. It has sections on science, philosophy, religion, history, geography, cultures, languages, music, art, crafting, and even mathematics.
Almost all of these books are purchased used, dog-eared and annotated ad nauseam. Library sales, thrift sales, church sales, yard sales. Local fill-a-bag-for-five-bucks sales. And yes, online retail sales, too.
Why do we do this when we could just go digital? Physical books are less expensive when bought used. Physical books cannot be changed, manipulated, or deleted. Physical books are refreshingly analog in an excessively digital world. And yes, digital texts are convenient. We have those, too. But our house prioritizes purchasing, reading, and rescuing physical books.
Because we're building a legacy. Surrounding ourselves with brilliance and beauty. It is a gift for our children and their children... and for us, of course.
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
Rachel Christine retweeted
“We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye, glanced towards us;
‘I seen ‘em myself,’ he said fiercely.”
- C.S. Lewis
My amazing husband spent most of yesterday fixing a hole in our roof before a coming storm. It was sickly hot, but my son, afraid that his exhausted father would fall, sat up on the roof with him for hours, refusing to come down. He whispered to me that he didn't want to leave because Dad looked so tired, and his legs were beginning to shake. Then he watched his father slip off the lower part of the roof. Thankfully, he landed well, making it out with only scratches and cuts. Quietly, my son climbed down and wrapped his arms around me. His body shook as he cried. Then he went right back up on that roof to hand his father tools and keep watch. I pray that the world will be kind to these boys with hearts of gold.
I have two boys, they are old enough to already have experience with this, from conversations with them I know they already have a sense that the world will expect everything of them and offer no quarter - that they must be strong, and good, and reliable, and smart, and hardworking, and even this may not be enough, is not what I want them to believe, and yet they already do. 💔
I'm tired of complacency, mediocrity, and defeatism. I'm tired of the idea that, because we have to "work for the man" forty hours a week, we're entitled to spend the other 128 scrolling and sleeping. And because we are too tired to do anything but scroll, we then let our children scroll... and scroll. Why do we delight in shutting off our minds? Why do we feel we have to protect ourselves from the effort of personal growth? Does no one remember the thrill of a good book? Maybe our children wouldn't find reading so hard if we didn't tell them with both our words and our own bad habits that it is.
I grew up reading. So will my children. I set up mandatory reading time for them when they were first learning to sound out words, and now I can't get them to put books down. I limit their screen time. I limit my own screen time. We take walks. We play board games. We laugh.
The human spirit is capable of so much. We all need to return to enjoying our humanity before we forget what that even means.
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