My ever-expanding eBook library has reached 1500 volumes and continues to grow. Fictionwise, my secondary source to purchase eBooks has had a 50% rebate special, so I’ve bought several new books about publishing. In addition I’ve added quite a few public domain offerings from Manybooks, Feedbooks, Munsey’s, and MobileRead Forums.
Some of my most recent titles are: An Egyptian Princess by Georg Ebers, The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy, and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The History of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding.
Unless you had advanced placement, you probably were not assigned this book in high school. You might have read it in college, or you might have tried getting away with watching the movie. Great movie. But my college professor had a question about the female lead character’s hair color– brown in the book, blond in the movie. It’s well worth reading– baudy, funny, and fun. You can get it FREE at manybooks.net by clicking HERE. You can also find it at Feedbooks.com and other free ebook web sites.
I’ve tried my hand at a few tentative reviews, but I’m not yet ready. If I’m going to post reviews, I want them to be good. With that in mind, I’ve purchased The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing, in ebook format of course. Once I’ve read it, I’ll be ready to post a review of 1901 by Robert Conroy, which I just finished. In the meantime, I have a guest reviewer lined up. Happy Reading!
I have always loved books. In our house, we have a bookshelf (at least one) in every room, including most of the closets. Though I’ve given away most of the paperback books that I’ve read over the years, I love keeping my books, rereading them, looking at them, and smelling them. This may sound weird to you non-bibliophiles, but true book-lovers know of which I speak.
Now that I’m into eBooks, I’m trying to build an impressive eBook library. I’ve added a few books almost every single day. I try to download at least one book a day from Manybooks, Munsey’s, and Feedbooks; and download several from Mobile Read Forums. I check the Finding Free Ebooks blog and the Ebooks Just Published blog every day. Plus I buy books from various eBook sellers– notably the Sony eBook Store and Fictionwise. As yet, I’ve spent less than $100.00.
My goal is to have a library to rival the fabled library of ancient Alexandria. It is supposed to have had up to a million scrolls, representing tens of thousands of books. Call it 50,000 for a nice round number. I’ve got a way to go. I just passed the 1250 mark.
Regular readers of this blog will recall that I have a deep fondness for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Mars (or Barsoom) series is fantastic in both senses of that word. The beginning of the series and Burrough’s first novel, is A Princess of Mars. First published in 1911, it truly is a classic of science-fiction/fantasy adventure. You can pick it up at Feedbooks.com (Click Here) in a variety of eBook formats. It is also available at Manybooks.net and other perveyors of free eBooks. Read it, you’ll be glad you did.
Always on the lookout for sources of free eBooks, I never the less somehow overlooked Munsey’s. Here you can find 20,000 unusual and hard to get titles in a variety of formats. This is an especially good place to find the “racy” detective stories of the fifties and sixties, such as the title pictured above. And they add on average, eleven titles a day. You can find Munsey’s Here.
“Royal Harlot” by Susan Holloway Scott was not a book I would have chosen to read on my own. I picked it up specifically for the Historical Fiction Book Challenge. On the whole, I enjoyed it. I had not read much on Barbara Palmer, or this time period, so learning something about a new part of history is always fun.
I found the characters and her point of view believable, and the author approached it in a realistic way without apologies. The Duchess was mostly interested in having fun and feathering her own nest, and in that way, she wasn’t too different from most people I know today.
The sex was graphic enough to be interesting, though I would have liked a bit more description of the places and things around the people (the clothes were well described). Mostly I felt it dragged on a bit, because not much really happened. While I’m sure that is realistic, it makes for slow reading.
If you enjoy historical fiction, “Royal Harlot” will be for you. If you are a fan of history, give it a try. Otherwise, maybe not.
City of Amathar 