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lesser-known works (use the "Full View" filter) Wikisource - use to access and read public-domain primary sources and historical documents Kindle Store (Amazon) - use to download free Kindle editions of many public-domain classics Bookshare - use to gain access to a library of digital texts in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

Just sold a copy of the Iliad to a 10 year old who wants to try Homer. She's read 5 Percy Jackson books and wants "the originals" now. Kudos to her and to her mom who brought her down to the bookshop.

Yo trabajando en un artículo con 37 PDFs abiertos.

For children to flourish, they need to grow up reading and being read to. The following is a list of essential books for any beloved children in your life. And they’re brilliant enough that they can be enjoyed equally well by adults. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, preferably in a kid-friendly version. These shockingly strange stories of magic and adventure fired the minds of authors like Lovecraft, Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. FIVE CHILDREN AND IT and THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET, by Edith Nesbit. A series of books about four children who have misadventures with a Psammead and a phoenix. The way Edith portrays kids was a major influence on Narnia and Harry Potter. A WRINKLE IN TIME, by Madeleine L’Engle. Awkward, brainy Meg Murry must travel to the ends of the universe to rescue her father, in a visionary fusion of science, mysticism and cosmic horror leavened by L’Engle’s gentle Episcopalianism. LITTLE WOMEN, by Louisa May Alcott. Not just for girls. Alcott is second to none as a writer of characters, and in telling the story of the March sisters and Laurie, she becomes the closest thing we have to an American Dickens. ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Harold Bloom called them the greatest children’s fantasies ever written, and they are my personal favorites. Every child needs to know the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN, by George MacDonald. A girl named Irene must battle a race of sinister goblins with soft feet who are threatening to abduct her and force her into marriage. The influence of MacDonald’s Goblins can be seen in The Hobbit. THE WESTING GAME, by Ellen Raskin. A child’s first introduction to the mystery genre. Turtle Wexler is one of the all-time great children’s book heroines, and reading the end of this book as an adult still brings me to tears. A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH and TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, by Jules Verne. Some of the most thrilling adventure stories ever written, satisfying a child’s fascination with things that live in the sea or beneath the earth. A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, by Lemony Snicket. A masterpiece of contemporary fantasy, Snicket’s unique blend of whimsy, Gothic horror and clever wordplay birthed a generation of darkly funny, verbally precocious readers. Read to your kids. Teach them that reading is for pleasure, not to pass a test. Let them read what they love. Let them see you reading books with joy and enthusiasm. That’s how you get a child to fall in love with reading. That’s how you make a lifelong reader.

I've spoken with many parents of readers. Often, I find that their children became readers because those parents took an active role in handing them books. My daughter has always loved reading... anything, really. My son was much harder. Through trial and error, we found what he loves: fantasy adventure. I've always believed that every child is a reader. They just might not know it yet. It's up to parents and good teachers to help them find "their books." And I still love reading middle-grade stories as an adult, especially with my kids. The Silver Chair. The Hobbit. Treasure Island. The Secret Garden. Redwall. I think we'd all be better off if grown ups were a little more childlike.

If I could only read the works of 10 authors for the rest of my life: 1. C. S. Lewis 2. J. R. R. Tolkien 3. The Brothers Grimm 4. Shakespeare 5. Jane Austen 6. Mary Brunton 7. Robert Louis Stevenson 8. Virginia Woolf 9. Charles Dickens 10. Victor Hugo The Bible is a given.

I hate to say it, but while a text is meant to move you, the book itself is a product. Because it's the literature we care about, it's easy to forget that the publishing world exists. Just as there are today, there were trends in publishing in the past. Books were very expensive to print, but many people subscribed to newspapers and periodicals. So, it made sense to publish stories as a series of installments in those publications. Publishers also needed to cater to circulating libraries, which preferred triple-deckers (a novel published in three separate volumes), making them a popular form. None of this in any way proves that a novel is slop or lacks depth simply because it's long and was written with serialized pacing and suspense in mind. Instead, it shows that there was a human author behind the novel, adapting to the market and doing what it took to get their extraordinary story out there. And I think most of us are very glad they did.

Insane. Publishing in serial was the best of everything: it built urgency, entertained & demanded the writer keep engaging his audience. Literature is what endures. Dostoevsky, Dumas, Shakespeare, Austen, Lessing, Baum. Come to @Storyaliz and we'll show you. 2 weeks free.

Northrop Frye wrote this in 1957. Things briefly got better in his immediate wake, then promptly got much, much worse.

Many of my peers at Columbia insisted that they would “never read the Bible” as if this gave them bragging rights. Little did they realize that by ignoring the most influential book in human history, they were missing the point of half the literature they claimed to study.

I'm a PhD student studying the sociopolitical ideals in early novels by British women, and part of my research has involved revising existing scholarship because many modern scholars have little knowledge of the Bible – a text that the novelists they study knew well and frequently incorporated into their works. That gap is incorrectly reshaping how literature is interpreted and received today. It's a real problem.

Sorry, but the hand flex always bothered me. I think the gesture gives off disgust. That is exactly how I'd respond after touching something unpleasant. It should have been a soft clench, which draws inward and, I think, better conveys a passionate desire for connection.

So, I took multiple classes on Moby-Dick as an undergrad & one of the first things you learn is that Ishmael is NOT his name; it’s an allusion to Ishmael from the Book of Genesis (the exiled son of Abraham, of whom it was prophesied, “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”). The narrator imagines himself an outcast, rejected by society & forced to seek his destiny on the high seas. His self-understanding is beautifully transformed during the scene in which he shares a bed with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg, who becomes his bosom friend. As his heart softens, he writes, “I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.” Love has come to redeem him. He is Ishmael no more.

Four of the textbooks Tolkien assigned while teaching at Leeds:

Dostoevsky's point on rationalism makes me think of Jesus weeping upon the death of Lazarus. There was no rational reason for him to do that. Jesus knew very well what was coming and that Lazarus would be raised. But he wept anyway – because the experience moved him. It was a deeply human response and it was the right one. And to Cian's point, AI prioritizes what is rational and predictable and, thus, grossly underestimates the human experience. There is so much more to humanity than logic and reason, black and white, patterns and data. It's the messy bits of our existence that are sometimes the most meaningful.

Storytime: When Eric Carle was a little boy growing up in Nazi Germany, he had a brave art teacher named Fridolin Krauss who recognized his talent and showed him some reproduction prints of art that had been deemed "degenerate" by the Nazi party. Carle couldn't share this story until years later because his art teacher had put himself at great risk with saving these images and by showing them to his student, but Carle said, "Their strange beauty almost blinded me." They were not the images shown by Megha below. I'm going to give you a degenerate art show in the replies with the artists that Eric Carle specifically said that he was inspired by and shown that day by his brave teacher, and I think you'll easily see how it was reflected in his art.

Reading the favorite books of your favorite authors is the quickest path to becoming well-read. As a teen I set out to read the works that inspired Lewis & Tolkien, which is how I fell in love with The Faerie Queene, the Arabian Nights, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight and a dozen others. As an artist you have a sacred mission to pass down works you love that are in danger of being forgotten, keeping them alive for the next generation. This is how the great tradition is handed on from one age to the next.

"I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone." - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 1937.

Smut is not literature. Please read *anything* else. Centuries of brilliant books are available to you for free online or from your local library. Read those.