Summer Time or The Too Long Reading List

And the living is...well not easy but at least it's not difficult right now either. I decided to not take classes full-time this summer. I am not completely slacking because I know that would drive me completely insane. The one class I will be taking is Victorian Gothic Lit. I think it's going to be fun, it's mostly books I've read or wanted to read. All of them are available in the public domain (expired copyright), which means I can download them legally.

I'm really a huge fan of Feedbooks. The Project Gutenberg site is also good, but the formatting can be icky sometimes. People are, after all, doing it for free. It is loads better than spending money on books that I'm not sure I'll keep. I have plenty of books around the house already. If I end up liking them I can still pick them up somewhere.

Bonus points for having free apps on my iPhone that allow me to read the books I've downloaded. Amazon has a Kindle app that lets me find books on Amazon and download them (they also have a ton of books that you can buy). They won't let me import other free books I've found though, so there is a drawback. Stanza is by far my favorite app for reading books on my phone. Not only can I search through the app, it also downloads them and I can push them back and forth from my phone to my laptop. It'll keep track of my place in the book, no matter where I'm reading it.

You'd think that the text would be so ity-bity, but you have complete control over the size, color, background color, etc. I've tweaked mine so it's really comfortable to read. I'm still going to have to print out the pages to bring to class because I just can't imagine any professor being okay with reading from a device yet.

This other site I've known about for a bit, but never really utilized. LibriVox is a site very similar to Feedbooks in that it's done by normal people for free. Instead of these people transcribing the books they read them. You too can read a book and post it for others to listen to. How cool is that? So far I have all of the books I need in Stanza and two of the books from LibriVox.

This is significant for me because I take the bus to work, 15 minute ride each way, and I cannot read in a vehicle. (Apparently thinking about it also makes me queasy.) Instead I've been listening to books on my way to/from work. The added bonus is that I definitely can't read a book while walking. I walk into poles when I'm paying full attention.

Currently I'm listening to the Harry Potter books. Yeah, yeah, shut up. It's not great literature, fine. I'm sucked in to the story. It's cute and the most important point is that it's not for a class. It's just something fun to read and I'm enjoying it. It'll be a nice transition into the books that I need to read for class once I'm done with HP Book 7, which should be this week. (I'm a slow listener...keep falling asleep!)

As an added geek factor I picked up a book at Caliban on S. Craig St called A History of English Literature. I'm sure the chapter on Victorian Lit will be interesting and helpful.