PhD Candidate | English Lecturer | Executive Director | Aspiring Writer | Book Wrangler | Christian
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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Wikisource - use to access and read public-domain primary sources and historical documents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
More people should know about Project Gutenberg. It makes reading classics so accessible to everyone.
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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.
nitter.net/RachelXReads/status/21…
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Rachel Christine retweeted
Every English BA should have a poetics requirement covering tropes, schemes, and prosody.
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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.
My daughter was a big reader in m. school, then abruptly quit. We've tried various coaxings. She would start books and then stop not far in. This summer I just tried straight up bribery--a certain amount of pocket money per chapter, a bonus for a finished book. Voila! 1/2
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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.
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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🤗
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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
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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. 💔
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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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In 2026, which is better: traditional publishing or self-publishing? Why? All tips and suggestions welcome!
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Rachel Christine retweeted
Not exaggerating when I say the future depends on this catching on en masse. Kids, adults. Book clubs, silent reading groups. For the past twenty-five years tech has corroded our attention, intelligence and basic pleasure in living, and books are the key to winning them back.
My kids have mandatory silent reading time every day. Neighbors didn't want to leave, so they were invited to stay. That means 6 kids sat in silence in a room for 20 minutes. Miracles do happen!
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Rachel Christine retweeted
Magna Carta, 1215, England (USA's copy, reissued 1297)
Medieval English history is American history!
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Rachel Christine retweeted
Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸
Today we’re grateful for freedom—and even more grateful for the hope we have in Christ.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom! 🙏
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If you’re drawn to places that feel older than memory.
12 castles of Scotland you’ve probably never heard of 🏴
> Caerlaverock Castle
> Duntrune Castle
> Midhope Castle
> Castle Sinclair Girnigoe
> Eilean Donan Castle
> Dunrobin Castle
> Old Keiss Castle
> Dunnottar Castle
> Doune Castle
> Findlater Castle
> Castle Stalker
> Tolquhon Castle
Save this for your next Scotland trip 🔖
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Honestly, the tagline isn't wrong here. Of course, Jane Austen was not a feminist, at least not in any modern sense of the word. That being said, many female writers of this period were critical of women prioritizing their roles as "agreeable" and "accomplished" "playthings." In fact, doing so was frequently portrayed as superficial, even vain. What female writers were interested in communicating, however, was the importance of virtue and of a woman both cultivating and defending that virtue, regardless of social expectations and even at great personal cost.
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