Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Sunday, March 04, 2007

DailyLit - a great idea - emailing you a page a day from the Great Books

I am so loving the DailyLit service, which emails you a page a day from books you choose. I cannot believe that I am actually reading the weighty tome War and Peace; and having begun, I cannot believe that I have gone so long without it. It has very little to do with war or peace - rather it is about romance, and drunken bets, and duels, and everything else that makes a soap opera addictive.

And today I received the first page of the Life of Johnson - another one of those classics whose dull book covers repel you from the bookstore aisle, yet contain fascinating and amusing stuff inside.

The 360 books in the DailyLit Classics section are called "classic" for a reason - it's because there's good, page-turning stuff inside.

2 Comments:

  • Hey Jon, I used DailyLit to read Ethan Frome (classic - my "review" here) and am currently using it to read Down and out in the Magic Kingdom (not yet classic "sci-fi" by Cory Doctorow) and love using it too.

    I may have read about DailyLit on your blog first, and if so, thanks!

    People often scoff that reading a book on a computer is not enjoyable. However, if I can read some great literature via email that I would otherwise never get a chance to read, then I'm all for it.

    I'm surprised at how quickly I can get used to a different "form factor", GMail in this case. Previously, I had read Anna Karenina on a Palm Pilot and actually found that the tiny, cold screen freed me from the bonds of a paperback, whose cover image or font would often negatively affect my reading experience (for some reason).

    By Blogger Sean O'Hagan, at 3/05/2007 12:20 a.m.  

  • Sean - super! And I definitely need to check out those two books you mentioned.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 3/05/2007 9:25 p.m.  

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