More eBook Sources

I posted the entry Free Books Online on one of my LinkedIn groups, and received back some other great links:

From Paul Wilson:

From Ronald Snijder:

Here are some others I stumbled on to while perusing the above links:

These are just a selection of site. There must be hundreds of sites offering free eBooks or free online books.
Happy reading

Free Books Online

Have you visited the Project Gutenberg site? It carries many, many out-of-copyright books. The project is dedicated to making these books available to any and all. They are experimenting with ebooks, pdf, html, and plain text formats. Over 33,000 books are available. That’s a lot of reading material.

The project is great for accessing text files of books. Any one can take the text and format it in any way they want. The books can’t be sold for their interior – that’s free. But a book that has been cleaned up, reformatted, and published can be sold. Amazon has some of these books for a really low price of $2.00. But if they are for free on the Project Gutenberg site, why should I have to pay for them?

There is lies the problem. The formatting provided by Project Gutenberg is not always the most appealing presentation. Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott is a good example. Within the body there are numerous references and citations, along with explanatory notes. The version provided by Project Guttenberg has the notes, citations, and references running in the body text instead of being called out. That level of reformatting took 8 hours.

The moral of the story is, there’s no free lunch. Either you take the free file from Project Guttenburg and deal with the lack of formatting, or you reformat it yourself.

Take a look at these two. You can decide which you like better and choose accordingly. For now, French Creek Press is posting the link to Project Guttenberg files and the corresponding French Creek Press of any out-of-copyright formatted ebooks. If you have a favorite book you would like to have formatted into an ebook, write a note in the comments section of this blog entry.

Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott, Project Gutenberg file:
Volume 1
Volume 2

Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott, French Creek Press ebook:
Old Mortality Vol 1
Old Mortality Vol 2

By the way, if you don’t have an ebook, you can download the free Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac from Amazon. It’s a great way to test out how you do with ebooks. The only caution I have is that reading from a computer is much harsher on the eyes than the Kindle device. I’m glad I was able to try out ebooks with no investment, and I’m even more thrilled to now have a Kindle.

Faulkner Influence in Stephen King Stories

At the same time I was marveling at Martha Grimes’ Emma Graham series (Hotel Paradise, Cold Flat Junction, and Belle Ruin) and having a grand time with Jury in the Richard Jury series, I was also having fun identifying and guessing at the literary and cultural influences on Martha Grimes. I finally had a reason to be well-read, well-rounded, as was pounded into my hard teenage head that only wanted to read science fiction. I can read imagery, phrases, names, situations, that are not plagiarized, but instead are shaped and molded by the author into a new creation. Faulkner and Henry James leap off the pages of Ms. Grimes works. At the same time I recognized many cultural references, political hot spots, and incredible imagery as seen through Ms. Grimes’ eyes.

I did not expect the same from Stephen King. Not many people believe that the horror genre has any merit, unless one is studying Poe. Asimov and Lovecraft are not touted as great literature. Stephen King belonged in the category of “never-admit-that-I-read-his-stuff” when I’m near a writer. And that’s a shame. The gift of time was granted to me recently – time to do only non-stressful tasks, like reading. I chose to read everything I could get my hands on authored by Stephen King: short stories, essays, novels (if you find anything, like notes or sketches, be sure to send them to me). In the middle of rereading It I stumbled upon character names right out of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county, names like Sartoris and Snopes, the irony being the characters in King’s story were African American, and the characters in Faulkner’s stories sole purpose in life seemed to be to uphold the “White” Southern institution. I really got a chuckle out of that. To read more about these influences see Faulkner Sightings, about half-way through the page. Faulkner Sightings only reports direct influence. You have to know Faulkner’s stories to see Faulkner’s incredible stream of consciousness through Stephen King’s eyes. It turns the horror genre on its head.

Then I turned on my limited literary analysis tools, limited because the only analysis class I ever took was in high school. Stephen King is only a few years older than me, ok, maybe 10 years older. I heard shades of Neil Young singing through the pros, “…out of the blue and into the black…”. Vietnam underlying everything,  the turtle under Vietnam, and the gunslinger/cow poke at the bottom. All that shaped me had already shaped King enough that he could write about it, and I could relive it.

I saw this question in my search for the Faulkner influence, “Will Stephen King ever be part of the American Literature Canon?” If he does not enter that hall of American lit it will be because people cannot get past the “horror” angle. That’s unfortunate. Stephen King is versatile, his characters live and breathe, his story lines are real enough to be truly horrible, and his mastery of human nature is spooky.

Billy and Stevie, Storytellers Par Excellence

One of my favorite authors, Martha Grimes, gained even more points when one of her characters in Belle Ruin carries around a battered William Faulkner reader in his back pocket. The character is so attached to William Faulkner that he refers to him as “Billy”. If I was stranded on a desert island with only one book I’d choose “Billy’s” Absalom, Absalom! for my companion.

William Faulkner

With such great stories as The Unvanquished and Intruder in the Dust it is a wonder that most High School American Literature classes introduce Faulkner’s work with As I Lay Dying, a difficult stream of consciousness masterpiece. The only story on par with it (in difficulty) is Faulkner’s first novel, The Sound and the Fury. Both are incredible examples of living within the mind of the character, but perhaps the younger reader needs more context from which to read these two novels. Once the reader has Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in mind, and has read stories of the Snopes, Sartoris, and Sutpen, the reader can then understand As I Lay Dying in context.

Around the same time I discovered Stephen King’s Carrie. King was a continuation of my horror education started by Edgar Allen Poe. Alfred Hitchcock did not grab me the way King did. I read every book King published, up through The Gunslinger. And then I moved on. I thought I was grown up, and grown ups didn’t read horror. I graduated to Science Fiction, but the Dark Tower series was not sci fi, even though it had its elements as such.

Stephen King

Last fall I began reading Hearts in Atlantis,  then read through the entire Dark Tower series, went back to Insomnia, and started reading everything King published that I could find. I even paid for Under the Dome to be shipped to me instead of waiting to find it in the used bookstore.What I discovered, that I didn’t pay attention to in those younger reading years, is that Stephen King also intertwines his stories. And most of his stories connect to the area around Bangor, Maine. But even more, I found King to be a great story teller.

When I read Faulkner I see, feel life in spirals, going ever so deeper on each iteration of the story, stories within stories that connect to other stories in other books. I read “history” by following each generation to the next, from the Native American land grab through the Civil War through the First World War. King does a similar thing by connecting his worlds across 30+ years of story telling.

I’ve changed my opinion about reading horror, at least about reading Stephen King’s works. He is a great storyteller. I don’t think I would want him to visit my campfire and tell scary stories – I would be too scared. I do, however, want to read more, and reread all that I read before. He doesn’t supplant Faulkner, but I don’t know that any author will. King has taken a spot right next to Martha Grimes, whose works I read as soon as I can, including buying them first hand.

Angst (from the diary of Joseph Kaufman)

It is difficult to describe the degree and nature of tension which aggravates the fault line between being a religious man and writer of fiction. Call it a type of existential strife, a goading and constant friction, a frustrating and at times debilitating clash, which leaves neither of these sides of me alone or unharmed. And as we are trained to lead with our heads—this whole western Judeo-Christian model—let’s suppose that this conflict begins ontologically: whilst the purview and focus of any orthodox man will be to perceive, learn, then be informed by the revealed and the hidden Torah as well as Judaism’s weltanschauung on spiritual, intellectual, and emotional matters of weight—in short, to be involved and utterly engaged with reality-as-is—the purpose of any writer of fiction, somewhat contrarily, is nothing short of the attempt to remake reality convincingly in one’s own image. I say, ‘somewhat’, because great books do get at great truths; and I say, ‘contrarily,’ because Judaism’s version of truth apprehension couldn’t be more distant than that of a novelist’s.

For that remaking is nothing if not a sign of the writer’s unhappiness with the unadorned world, the visceral need for escape. And though a novelist uses the palette of the world for his conceptions—the way things really do feel, taste, smell, sound, and provoke thought—the writer’s love of the quotidian is at best sketchy and, frankly, more akin to the kabbalistic concept of the yearning of the soul to free itself from its bodily shell. And so while writing—nay, all art—is also the desire to conjure, arrange, systematize, concretize, beautify, magnify, highlight, criticize, good writing will paste onto one’s cognition a subtext and ubertext for a way to sense the world. Which is precisely why books change lives. And which leads us toward the most uncomfortable conclusion of all: that it is perhaps this very fault line of tension between warring parts of the psychic whole which produces both a competent sense of reality as well as the means of its stylization which produces the stuff of good writing. The trick, of course, to being a wizard—for isn’t that the goal of all the conjuring?—is to ply your black magic while remaining a healthy citizen, to somehow live with and not at odds with your angst and resist the all-too-present allure of alcohol, women, drugs, debilitating distraction and procrastination.

Insanity is a third type of solution.

The fourth option is, as Flaubert wrote, ‘Faire et se taire,’ which means, roughly, Shut up and get on with it.