A Word about Project Gutenberg

The books I am recommending from Project Gutenberg are all “Public Domain.” This means that their copyright has expired and anyone can download them or print them out legally. It also means that they are fairly old (because copyright extends for the author’s life plus seventy years).

I was reading The War of the Worlds last night and realized a couple of things. For one, all those place names flew over my head because I never lived in rural England, and for another the author occasionally dropped a word on me that I just did not know. (Yes, even English teachers have limits on their vocabulary.)

What to do?

As for the place names, I let them sort of flow over me. Wells knows where things are, and it doesn’t matter much to me what was the name of the place where the Martians landed. Looking all that up would interrupt the flow of the story. Vocabulary is a somewhat different matter. The book was published in England 129 years ago. That is a lot of time and a lot of distance, so I am not surprised that the language has changed a bit. Most of it I can blast through (same as I do with those place names), but if a word seems really important (or weird), I have a great option. I am reading with a computer, so all I need to do is right-click the unfamiliar word and let the Internet give me a definition. The trick is not to get too bogged down. After all, the Martians are trying to conquer the Earth! I want to find out if they succeed!

Some more recent recommendations

These are not public domain, but should be available in your public library or any decent book store:

• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
• The Hobbit or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie