A list of highlights is below and you can find the full list of new books in Serial Reader in the "New to the Public Domain" collection. For more on works entering the public domain, check out Duke Law's excellent article.
]]>A list of highlights is below and you can find the full list of new books in Serial Reader in the "New to the Public Domain" collection. For more on works entering the public domain, check out Duke Law's excellent article.
]]>
Back then it was hardly more than a polished version of a prototype I had used to read My Antonia on iPhone 6 during my train commutes into Chicago in late 2015. A few weeks later, Apple promoted it on the home page of the App Store -- which was so much simpler back then -- and suddenly a personal hobby became, well, a more serious hobby that a lot of people seemed to enjoy. (A few days after that, I learned one the earliest adopters was actor Debra Messing 😳 life is wild.)
Since then I've changed jobs, changed homes, got married, had a daughter, and long since stopped commuting into work -- but I'm still reading some great classic literature (and some not so classic literature) in daily bite-sized bits on my phone (now an iPhone 13 Mini). I hope you are, too.
By the way, seven years is 2,555 days. If you had set aside 20 minutes a day for each of those days, you could have:
I've got some fun plans for Serial Reader including a new major version update that I hope to release this year. Hopefully the next seven years are even better than the first. Thanks for reading! -Michael
]]>Many are now available to read in Serial Reader! A list of highlights is below and you can find the full list of new books in Serial Reader in the "New to the Public Domain" collection. For more on works entering the public domain, check out Duke Law's excellent article.
]]>If you're looking to read more in 2023 but feel a little daunted, I've got some simple advice that will help you read more books than you'd expect: set aside 15-20 minutes a day to read.
That's it! Doesn't sound like much, but that time adds up.
Don't believe me? I've built an interactive reading list builder you can use to schedule out your 2023 reading plan to see for yourself. It uses Serial Reader's library of classic books, which are divided into daily issues designed to be read in 15-20 minutes. You can even save and share your list!
Here's an example list I created with 17 of the most popular classic books including The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and more! Or here's another focused on sleuths & mysteries (12 titles). Or sci-fi & utopian fiction by women (18 titles). Or philosophical titles (19 titles). Or gothic romances (12 titles). And finally, my own personal reading schedule for 2023 (10 titles including Middlemarch which has also intimidated me). There's an option in each to duplicate & edit the list, or create your own from scratch!
Oh and that reputation for classic books being daunting and dull? Here's a list with titles that can all be finished in under 10 days, and another list of banned & erotic books 🍆.
If you create a list, please share it with me! I'm so excited to see what folks want to read in 2023. Send me a link or screenshot on Mastodon, Twitter, or Instagram 💙
Serial Reader for iOS and Android could be a great way to start building this habit. It delivers a 15-20 minute segment of classic books (or your own books if you have an EPUB handy!) every day. But you need not use a special app for this goal! All you need is a book and the timer and reminder apps on your phone. Standard Ebooks and Libby are excellent resources for finding free books, in addition to the venerable Project Gutenberg.
I'd also highly recommend keeping track of how many days you read 15-20 minutes, both to keep yourself on track and to have a record to look back on. Just jotting an entry in a notebook or notes app is all you need. Seeing your past success can really help motivate you!
Hope everyone has a wonderful 2023 - happy reading! - Michael
]]>First up, you can now link Serial Reader to your Readwise account! Simply paste in your Readwise account details and all the highlights and notes you create in Serial Reader will be automatically synced over to Readwise. Readwise is an excellent resource for not only collecting quotes from everything you read but also learning from those passages. Check it out! (Support for adding your Readwise account to Serial Reader on Android is coming shortly.)
Serial Reader also now offers new options when viewing "All Issues" - previously you could only sort issues first to last or last to first. Now you can also jump to the latest unread issue (useful for those exceedingly long tomes) as well as search all available issues.
The update includes a bunch of other minor design improvements, as well as new options for disabling your Goodreads integration and deleting your Serial Reader cloud sync account.
Hope you enjoy it! As always, please consider leaving a review of Serial Reader in the App Store - it really helps others discover the app. Thanks and happy reading!
]]>Many are now available to read in Serial Reader with more to come in the weeks ahead! A list of highlights is below and you can find the full list of new books in Serial Reader in the "New to the Public Domain" collection.
]]>Previously I tried to highlight new books on a weekly basis but that cadence got away from me, so going forward I'm going to try a monthly blog post that I'll update as new books arrive. The latest titles from June 2021 are listed below, including Rabindranath Tagore's autobiography, an eerie prediction of the Titantic's sinking, Helen Keller's autobiography, P.T. Barnum's exploration of "humbugs," and more.
Happy reading!
]]>It was an impressive year for literature -- an article from the BBC even suggests "1925 may well be literature’s greatest year" -- with famous titles like The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, The New Negro, and An American Tragedy, as well as works from Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, P.G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, and more.
The themes and focal points from 1925's literature certainly resonate in 2021: conflict brought on by differences in race, social, and economic classes, questions on the attainability of the American dream, the complexity of medical care and new technology. "The literature reflected both a booming economy, whose fruits were unevenly distributed, and the lingering upheaval and tragedy of World War I," writes Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. "The culture of the time reflected all of those contradictory tendencies."
"These books weren’t just original, even revolutionary, creations," wrote Jane Ciabattari for the BBC. "They were helping to establish the very idea of modernity, to make sense of the times."
The Jazz Age story of lavish Long Island parties, a young mysterious millionaire, and the woman he loved. Arguably one of the greatest novels ever written, exploring themes of decadence, idealism, and the American dream.
"It has almost the status of a holy work, and it’s seen as embodying all kinds of things about American values and society... one of those remarkable literary works that seems to adapt to its times." - James L. W. West III
Over the course of a single day, Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a high-society party and is struck with memories of the past. Considered Woolf's greatest novel.
"A remarkably expansive and an irreducibly strange book. Nothing you might read in a plot summary prepares you for the multitudes it contains" - Jenny Offill in The New Yorker
An anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature, including W.E.B. du Bois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Considered to be the definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance.
"Locke became a 'mid-wife to a generation of young writers,' as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it." - Jeffrey C. Stewart
Ambitious Clyde Griffiths stumbles through romance and tragedy, struggling with taking responsibility. Based on an actual criminal case, it stands as a harsh commentary on the dark side of the American dream.
"Dreiser builds an extraordinarily detailed portrait of early twentieth-century America, its religious and sexual hypocrisies, its economic pressures, its political corruption and journalistic exploitation... Dreiser elevates the most mundane aspects of what he observes into emotionally charged, often harrowing symbols." - Thomas P. Riggio
Painting an "expressionistic picture of New York" from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, Dos Passos examines the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants. Described as "the best modern book about New York."
"The rapid-transit, discontinuous narrative brilliantly captures the pace of the city, the sense of brief, promiscuous contact with other lives. The metallically impersonal narrative voice carries the hard-edged din of the city at the same time that it keeps us at a distance from the residents... an intriguing narrative experiment, and a fascinating portrait of the great American city in the early years of the century" - Jay McInerney
Described as the first "scientific" novel, Lewis follows the life of Martin Arrowsmith through the turbulence of his professional and romantic lives, satirizing those who pursue science for fortune at the expense of truth.
"From medical practice to public health and scientific discovery, from the unbridled ambitions of medical students and doctors to the complexities of delivering medical care in a diverse nation like the United States, 'Arrowsmith' delivers with humor and brio a slate of important lessons for everyone concerned about 21st century health care." - Dr. Howard Markel
Here are some of the best Christmas stories available from Serial Reader, including classics from Charles Dickens, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Washington Irving, Louisa May Alcott, and more:
Find more great Christmas books in the Christmas collection in Serial Reader.
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Happy Halloween and happy reading! 🎃
]]>With version 4.0 of Serial Reader, you can now serialize and read your own books in addition to the 750+ classic books available in the app. Simply add any EPUB file in the app and Serial Reader will automatically divide the book into bite-sized issues, each able to be read in 20 minutes or less. It's a great way to tackle more challenging books or just fit more reading into your busy day.
I've been reading a couple of my own books in Serial Reader this way. It's been especially helpful for reading a sometimes less-than-thrilling book for my day job on working remotely (hi, 2020) as well as some fiction. You can see below just started rereading the Star Wars Thrawn trilogy and The Great Gatsby. If you own some EPUB books and have had trouble getting through them, or want to read them a bit more slowly, reading them in small bits once a day is a great way to progress through a book and retain more info.
If you've upgraded to Serial Premium you can add as many of your books as you'd like! Other users can add one of their own books to try out the new feature.
Also new in version 4.0 for iOS users are handy new homescreen widgets that help you keep track of your current books. Each one is super customizable with a range of colors and fonts to help the widgets fit in to any screen layout.
Not only that, but with version 4.0 of Serial Reader you can also now set custom delivery days for specific books. This lets you configure which days and which hour you want to receive new issues for particular books. Want to only receive new issues on weekends? Every other day? Now you can! Select which hour and days you want new issues for each subscribed book with Serial Reader's iOS version.
Download Serial Reader today from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store!
I've been working on Serial Reader for just about 5 years now, which is honestly hard to wrap my mind around. What started as a personal project with a couple books, focused on improving my own reading habits, has grown into a multiplatform project with more than 750 books and thousands of readers.
Thank you all for your support! Please keep the great ideas, feedback, and questions coming. You've helped make Serial Reader what it is and I'll absolutely need your help keeping it improving over the next 5 years. I hope your next great read is right around the corner!
- Michael
]]>New selections now available in Serial Reader include a fascinating history of Hawaii from its last monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, as well as a more leisurely travelogue from Henry David Thoreau in "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." As for fiction, journey to the midst of the Jacobite Rising with Walter Scott's "Waverley," or the depths of WWI with "Three Soldiers" by John Dos Passos, or into outer space with John W. Campbell's sci-fi adventures.
]]>Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley describes in The Last Man a deadly plague that threatens to destroy society. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt - a sequel of sorts to The Lost World - Professor Challenger and associates try to survive a planet-wide wave of death. Finally, Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year vividly chronicles the Great Plague which ravaged London in 1665.
It's more than ok to look to escape and what better option than the adventures of Rat, Toad, and Mole in The Wind in the Willows? Or perhaps the hilarious idiocy of Wooster and his friends in My Man Jeeves? Or take a more relaxing approach with The Book of Tea: an essay aimed at explaining the connection between teaism, Taoism, and the aesthetics of Japanese culture to a western audience.
Explore how the world may be made better with ruminations on utopias, from Thomas More's Utopia, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision of a peaceful world absent of men in Herland, to the utopian adventure that awaits in Anna Adoplh's Arqtiq.
If reading in short bursts really isn't working for you these days, I highly recommend Standard Ebooks for high quality public domain books, or Libby for checking digital books out from your local library.
Hope everyone stays safe and sane! We can do this 💪
]]>Additionally, you can now select different reading themes to use for light and dark modes! By default the reading screen will shift to a black theme automatically when Dark Mode is enabled. However, you can customize which particualr reading theme should be used by tapping the Settings icon in the top right while reading, then selecting the "Theme" option.
Maybe you'd prefer a light reading theme in Dark Mode, or you'd like a parchment-style theme regardless of what mode is enabled - whatever your preference, you can now customize Serial Reader to look just the way you want!
There are also a new selection of alternate app icons to choose from in iOS for Serial Premium folks, including a fun new Halloween option!
Speaking of Halloween, starting today you'll find some spooky story suggestions while browsing for new books in Serial Reader. And come October, don't miss the Halloween collection of scary stories!
]]>The wrong has been righted this week with the addition of several Shakespearean comedies, joining others already available like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Jumping forward a few hundred years, we come to an unsettling short story of an eerie doppelgänger from Edgar Allan Poe, which may have been an inspiration for Jordan Peele's horror film "Us"
From fictional horrors to those all too real: read Nellie Bly's undercover investigation of the brutality and neglect in late 19th century insane asylums with Ten Days in a Mad-House. Her work "pioneered a path for women in newspapers and launched what morphed into serious investigative journalism," writes The Washington Post. Bly's work is being recognized at long last with a monument in her honor in New York.
Other new additions this week include a philosophical monument in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, treasured children stories from Beatrix Potter, and a sci-fi short story from Mack Reynolds.
Until next week, happy reading!
]]>Also new this week is a fascinating book called "The Book of the Damned" by Charles Fort. It's an investigation of various scientific anomalies: strange things falling from the sky, strange disappearances, sightings of supposedly mythological animals, and yes - UFOs. (It's worth noting some claim Fort viewed the whole endeavor as a bit of a joke.)
Rounding out the new selections are a collection of short stories by H.G. Wells, a romance from Victoria Cross, and a novel mixing Irish mythology and philosophy from James Stephens:
Until next week, happy reading!
]]>Liza Daly writes of the 1899 book, in her excellent exploration of Adolph's novel, "it's the writing style that makes the book truly unique. The prose feels modernist—staccato, ungrammatical, weirdly punctuated—but with a hypnotic rhythm that lends the whole work a kind of dreamlike intelligibility... At times it reads like the output of a neural net—it resembles the contours of human prose, but is thoroughly alien."
Also new in Serial Reader this week are two new collection of poetry from William Blake and -- returning to the cold weather theme -- Robert W. Service with his "ballads of the Yukon."
And finally take a dive into myths, sagas, and legends with Bulfinch's Mythology and James Stephens' Irish Fairy Tales. The former is one of the most popular collections of classical mythology, while the latter was described as "a work of true genius" by The Millions' Austin Ratner.
If you'd like to keep up with new book additions, check out the RSS feed and email newsletter. Until next week, happy reading!
]]>Starting in the far past, Albert T. Clay's 1920 translation of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is now available. Fast forward two thousand years or so and join Julius Caesar as he strives against the peoples in Gaul, the Rhine, and Britain in "Commentaries on the Gallic War" from 58 BC.
Speaking of Britain, the other three new titles come from lauded authors of the British isles. Virginia Woolf's "Night and Day" and Catherine Carswell's "Open the Door!" both follow the romances, struggles, and lessons of women in early 20th century Britain. Finally, J.S. Fletcher's "Scarhaven Keep" travels to mysterious Scarhaven on the coast of England to untangle an actor's disappearance.
Until next week, happy reading!
]]>These three titles are just the start - I have several more Hawaiian books I'm working through adding at the moment!
Rounding out the rest of the new additions are some often-requested titles I'm happy to finally offer in Serial Reader:
Until next week, happy reading!
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