Chris Blattman

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My summer reading just got lighter

Add to my list of favorite things Eucalyptus, the app that lets you read free ebooks on your iPhone.  On it you’ll find much of the content from Project Gutenberg–the online repository of texts in the public domain.

I found several of my favorite authors: Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Phillip Dick. In spare moments touring around China I’ve gotten through two Sherlock Holmes adventures and Ben Franklin’s autobiography. (I hoped to read Chinese texts, but only found Sun Tzu.)

My aspirational reading list (read: will find time when retired) includes The River War (Winston Churchill’s account of Sudan in 1902) and accounts by early explorers (Mungo Park, Richard Burton, Mary Kingsley, Henry Morton Stanley, and the like).

If you don’t have an iPhone, fear not: you can still access all the texts at Project Gutenberg. See the project’s curious history here.

One Response

  1. If you ever want to read a book about Richard Burton, check out Edward Rice’s Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West. Fabulous.

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