Friday, December 10, 2010

Free (and semi-free) Literary Books for the KIndle


REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Free (and semi-free) Literary Books for the Kindle, by Marilyn Knapp Litt

WEB ADDRESS: http://kindleclassics.blogspot.com/

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Your guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. Because some conversions are sloppily done, a free download can be a waste of time. These are books that are out of copyright, but never out of style! Many are from before 1923, but some were published between 1923 and 1963.

MY REVIEW: A lot of these "free books on Kindle" blogs just give the name of the book. This blog gives a bit of a review of the book itself, and since classic literature is getting lost in the shuffle with the outpouring of books today, I recommend this blog to learn about the real classics!

Sample post
Mark Twain has a Bestseller Again!
I wrote about Huckleberry Finn in my first blog, so I promise this is not going to be the Mark Twain blog. But I am fascinated that Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain is on the bestseller list. His complete autobiography had a literary embargo so that it could not be published until one hundred years after his death. He is now dishing the dirt from beyond the grave.

But if you want the expurgated version which was published and popular in his lifetime, you can get it for semi-free.

It is not the book titled Mark Twain's Burlesque Autobiography which is free for the Kindle, but which you may not want to read. Twain hated the book so much, he bought up the plates and destroyed them. He anticipated much, but apparently not scanners.

You are looking for "Chapters from My Autobiography" by Samuel Clemens and it is 95 cents. But I think this is one of those times where you will want to pay full price. Samuel Clemens was a very frank writer and wrote very bleakly about life and death in a way not designed to endear him to Tom Sawyer's many fans. If he thought something was too incendiary to publish for a hundred years - well maybe that is what you want to read. In which case you want the new bestseller "Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1" It is 700 plus pages, making it a good choice to downsize on to Kindle or maybe the size will make you reach for the shorter 95 cent version listed above. Either way, how wonderful to have his wider works read once again.

RECENT POSTS:
--A Tempest! Prospero/Prospera
--Bah! Charles Dickens Creates Christmas
--Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
--Mark Twain has a Bestseller Again!
--War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
--A Beginner's Guide to Ordering
--The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes


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Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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