Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Daily Lit is cool.

Daily Lit was something suggested to me by a good ol' codger named Tom. Basically you pick a book and dailylit.com will send you pieces of the book everyday to your email address (or M-F, or M W F) . Small little snippets that take about 5 minutes (if that) to read. If you want to read further, there is a link in the email so you can have the next piece sent to you immediately. And if you're gonna be out of town, you can also temporarily suspend the emails until you get back. It's quite nice. You don't even have to register to use it, which is cool. But, if you do register, you can add a nice little thingy to your blog like I have in my sidebar.

I just finished reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I saw the movie with Christina Ricci (or as my wife likes to call her, Pumpkinhead). So I guess I was expecting a little bit more or something. It was only 13 parts. I'm a slow reader so I figured I'd better start out with a smaller book. I managed to rip through it in practically two sittings. I was on part 10 before anything I thought of any significance ever happened. I'll give Washington Irving this; the imagery was good. I like that. I could imagine what was going on and what things looked like and maybe even sounded like. But it was more of a tale to tell around a campfire with a really long personal history before it. I'm not saying that's good or bad. It's just my view on it. I enjoyed it, so it's more good than bad. But I'm just saying that it resembles little to the movie. This only proves that I am not very literate in the book reading sense. Other than this, and the Gift of the Magi (which is a mere two parts and is more short story than book), I have not read any of the classics as they are called.

In fact, it wasn't until after I had graduated college that I could say I had ever read more than a handful of books (and by handful, I mean, like no more than 10). Through college I can practically name the books I had read and hence I shall, approximately in the order of which they were read, since I am in a babbling mood:
Yeah... that's it. How is that possible? I have no idea. Since then I've read some books, but not that many in comparison to others. Most of them have been books about music or things of the sci-fi / horror genre.

But anyways, I think that DailyLit is a nice format. It doesn't overwhelm me since I am am a slow reader. I like that. Thank you DailyLit (and Tom).

2 comments:

Amelia said...

Gotta toot my own horn.. I introduced the site to Tom :) Glad you the site- give The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes a try- a collection of short stories and an easy read.

Bald Man Tom said...

I second Amelia's recommendation. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes looks long at 131 segments, but there are 11 short stories, so about every ten installments, you get a feeling of accomplishment. Plus, it's a lot of fun :)