fairyland and free reading

Books have been running my life lately. Could you tell? It’s not like I blog about them every day or anything (nope...only a couple of times a week!). The thing is, I have a lot of non-recreational reading in my life too, and it needs to start happening faster. Non-recreational, grad-school-type writing, too. I won't go into the gory details, but I have deadlines (oh, the dreaded word!). So I offer, in lieu of a cool story from my past or a sparkling review of book/film, free online reading.

This link takes you to one short story a week, all year long. Many of the works are classics, and the authors range from Mark Twain to Dostoyevsky to Oscar Wilde. They add a new one (you guessed it!) every week. This means they have about half of the titles up now. Good ones. Check it.

On the other end of the spectrum, author Catherynne M. Valente has been facing some tough economic times and needed to find a way to keep her family afloat. She’s started writing a serialized young adult fantasy novel, chapter by chapter. It’s free to read (donations are optional but definitely accepted), and she updates with a new chapter every Monday. Go check out The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, because it’s good as well as for a good cause.

This is a book about a little girl named September who gets herself a ticket to Fairyland on the back of The Green Wind and a somewhat cranky Leopard. There she discovers the realm of the capricious Marquess and the dangers of the Perverse and Perilous Sea. It is going to be something else.

And if that’s not exciting enough for you, tomorrow is ZOMBIE MAYHEM (because what says fun like zombies?)! Well, a post or three on the subject, anyway…