booknotes side notes

[eub]

I've been reading public-domain books on my phone since it's portable and can be operated one-handed or set down zero-handed. This Fisher book I found while looking up a children's book she wrote, Understood Betsy, which turned up in a Metafilter recommendations thread. I'd rate it "eh", readable but as "orphan girl goes to live at a farm" books go it's no Anne of Green Gables, tone rather too supercilious. I am curious whether there are a lot of books in that genre, or if L.M.M. had read this one.

Speaking of which, Dorothy Dunnett's Crawford is surely a descendent of Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae, is he not? If Dunnett liked the Master's character, found him just too antiheroic to write, and decided to leaven him a bit, I would not be a bit surprised.

Protip! Particularly for older texts (or older printings?), Google often describes their scan of a particular book as "page images" and not "flowing text". Often this is false modesty. For most books described that way, there actually *is* "flowing text", with some recognition errors, but perfectly readable, and much easier than the page images. Just a few books so far really are page images only, sadly including the Century Dictionary and Hardwicke's Science-Gossip.

What are your favorite pre-Mickey-Mouse books?

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing, there were more orphans in those days, and more farms. But I'd put _Understood Betsy_ (which I thought manipulative and almost abusive) in a category of 'child gets "reformed" by a different culture", along with _Captains Courageous_.

As for other public domain books, yummy! All of Montgomery, all the Oz books, Tarzan, Anthony Hope, E. Nesbit, Chesterton....

[chaoticgoodnik.livejournal.com]

Let's see ... I know I've read a bunch of stuff from Project Gutenberg but Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay is the only thing that immediately springs to mind. (More about it and Macaulay here.) A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery is on there too.

I have a Project Gutenberg tag, though I didn't use it much. Some stuff I read at one point:

The Garden of the Plynck by Karle Wilson Baker

The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories by Lord Dunsany

Mike Fletcher by George Augustus Moore

Four Weird Tales by Algernon Blackwood

I wrote a rambling post about what I thought of them (with other things mixed in) here.

[blk]

I recently enjoyed catching up on the Sherlock Holmes collection.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

You should be reading rushthatspeaks, who is reviewing a book a day for a year. Several have been public domain, and the reviews are highly entertaining in themselves.

I think all clew posts about any more is public domain stuff.

[mh75.livejournal.com]

You're looking for public domain stuff, not kid stuff? I'm bad at the former, but if you want the latter i'm getting steadily better.