Christmas Carol - by Charles Dickens

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

This is a reprise of a previous blog.  I can't bear not to suggest this book! It is not too late to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens for Christmas. (US Edition)  (UK Edition)  The book is novella length. So, it is not even too late to launch your own Christmas tradition - where family members takes a turn reading out loud each night, on the run up to Christmas, until you close the book on that happiest of endings with the biggest goose in creation!

But before you get to the ending, you have to meet a few ghosts . . .

I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

The inimitable "hero"

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s-book, went home to bed.

And of course I would not leave you without a glimpse of this young man!

Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!

I read this book every year for a glimpse into my own past Christmases spent reading this book in so many locations and circumstances.  It is the quintessential Christmas book, but it is about, in part, the very universal theme of the road not taken.   You don't have to celebrate Christmas to enjoy this wonderful book.

One caveat, don't look for the amazing illustrations in these free Kindle editions . . .

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle! (She is now 98 and appreciates how the large print helps her read despite macular degeneration.)

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

Greyfriar's Bobby - by Eleanor Atkinson

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

For Christmas, I want to present one of Scotland's most beloved classics, Greyfriar's Bobby. This version is by Eleanor Atkinson, who is a Hoosier from my home state of Indiana.  (US Edition)  (UK Edition)   The novel is from 1912 and has a Christmas tie:

Next Christmas she means to tell the story of Greyfriars Bobby, and how all his little Scotch friends are better-behaving and cleaner and happier because they have that wee dog to love."

Warning, dialect alert!  But the dialect is placed in such a way, that the meaning is explained.  You can always use your dictionary.  Because I am American and I read many books from England, Scotland, and Ireland, I bought the Oxford  Dictionary of English and made it my default Kindle dictionary.  It is very handy for slang whether I am reading a classic or Maeve Binchy!  British readers might want to make the New Oxford American Dictionary their default dictionary.

"The sonsie, wee—why, he's all but starved!"

Pale with pity, Mr. Traill snatched a plate of broth from the hands of a gaping waiter laddie, set it under Bobby's nose, and watched him begin to lap the warm liquid eagerly.

Both dictionaries define "sonsie"  as having an "attractive and healthy appearance."  The narrator goes on to explain that the dog's appearance is deceptive and his coat hides his true condition.

I want to wish all my faithful readers very happy holidays!  I am spending Christmas in Indiana.  It is about 30 degrees different from my home in San Antonio, Texas.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi - by American George H. Devol

(US Edition)  (UK Edition)

There are few things as endlessly fascinating as life on the Mississippi.  I have read many books of life on the river and Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi by American George H. Devol looks like a good one! (US Edition)  (UK Edition)

The 1887 memoir is about a gambler who ran away at an early age:

The next boat I shipped on was the Walnut Hills, at $7 per month. You could hear her "scape" (whistle) for a distance of twenty miles on a clear day or night. I would get up early in the morning and make some "five-cent pieces" (there were no nickels in those days) by blacking boots.

Funny to think of a time before there was a five cent coin . . .

I sent and got another keno set, and opened a bar room, and was making money like dirt, when one day a man walked in with a bucket of water, and commenced pouring it on one of my billiard tables that I got in Chicago, and which cost me $500. I walked up to him and asked him what he was doing? He told me to go to h—l. I let fly, caught him on the neck, and down he went, and he lay there for some time. Finally they took him to where he and his wife were stopping, and that night he died. Then I commenced to think about getting out of that hot box. I got together what money I could, and carried a canoe to the river, and started for Dubuque. There were no telegraph lines at that time. I had been there but a few days before the news came to me that the doctors had held a post mortem examination, and decided the man had had delirium tremens, and could only have lived a short time. They sawed open his skull, and found his brain a jelly in the center. So I went back and found his wife, gave her one of the houses which I had built and $700 in money.

Chapter titles have words like "blowing up" and "sinking" and "gun."  You know you are in for a good read.  The book covers the period before and after the Civil War.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

Through Russian Snows A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow - by G.A. Henty

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

Everywhere the winter is hard.  Great Britain and the States are having a miserable winter.  But however "frightful" it is outside your window, you can always console yourself.  You are not with Napoleon's Army retreating from Moscow!  So stop feeling sorry for yourself and curl up with "Through Russian Snows A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow" by English novelist, G.A. Henty.  (US Edition)  (UK Edition) This is a historical novel, not nonfiction.

BORODINO: Barbarously as the French army behaved on its advance to Smolensk, things were even worse as they left the ruined town behind them and resumed their journey towards Moscow. It seemed that the hatred with which they were regarded by the Russian peasantry was now even more than reciprocated. The destruction they committed was wanton and wholesale; the villages, and even the towns, were burnt down, and the whole country made desolate. It was nothing to them that by so doing they added enormously to the difficulties of their own commissariat; nothing that they were destroying the places where they might otherwise have found shelter on their return. They seemed to destroy simply for the sake of destruction, and to be animated by a burning feeling of hatred for the country they had invaded.

Since the days of the thirty years' war in Germany, never had war been carried on in Europe so mercilessly and so destructively.

Tolstoy, he is not.  Henty is, what we would call now, a Young Adult writer.  That is a very popular now as it was then. 

The book is a story about two brothers:

Julian had, since their retreat began, again recovered his spirits. He was now not fighting to conquer a country against which he had no animosity, but for his own life and that of the thousands of sick and wounded.

 "I am glad that we are in the rear-guard," he said to a number of non-commissioned officers who were one evening, when they were fortunate enough to be camped in a wood, gathered round a huge fire.

"Why so, Jules? It seems to me that we have the hardest work, and, besides, there is not a day that we have not to fight."

 "That is the thing that does us good," Julian replied. "The columns ahead have nothing to do but to think of the cold, and hunger, and misery. They straggle along; they no longer march. With us it is otherwise. We are still soldiers; we keep our order. We are proud to know that the safety of the army depends on us; and, if we do get knocked over with a bullet, surely that is a better fate than dropping from exhaustion, and falling into the hands of the peasants."

The retreat from Moscow is endlessly fascinating.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

The English Governess at the Siamese Court by Anna Harriette Leonowens

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

"The English Governess at the Siamese Court: Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok" is an 1870 memoir by Anna Harriette Leonowens. (US Edition)  (UK Edition)  Leonowens was a British woman born in India, who taught the wives and children of the King of Siam.  The memoir was the basis for a 1940's bestseller, which in turn was the basis for the musical, "The King and I."  So this memoir is twice removed from the film musical with Yul Brynner.

The book talks about Buddhism (quoting another book.)  "It is difficult to comprehend how men, not aided by revelation, could have soared so high and approached so near the truth. Beside the five great commandments,—not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, not to get drunk,—every shade of vice, hypocrisy, anger, pride, suspicion, greed, gossip, cruelty to animals, is guarded against by special precepts. Among the virtues commended we find, not only reverence for parents, care for children, submission to authority, gratitude, moderation in time of prosperity, resignation and fortitude in time of trial, equanimity at all times, but virtues unknown to any heathen system of morality, such as the duty of forgiving insults, and of rewarding evil with good."

But she also talks about her students in the harem:

"I was often alone in the school-room, long after my other charges had departed, with a pale, dejected woman, whose name translated was "Hidden-Perfume." As a pupil she was remarkably diligent and attentive, and in reading and translating English, her progress was extraordinary. Only in her eager, inquisitive glances was she child-like; otherwise, her expression and demeanor were anxious and aged. She had long been out of favor with her "lord"; and now, without hope from him, surrendered herself wholly to her fondness for a son she had borne him in her more youthful and attractive days. In this young prince, who was about ten years old, the same air of timidity and restraint was apparent as in his mother, whom he strikingly resembled, only lacking that cast of pensive sadness which rendered her so attractive, and her pride, which closed her lips upon the past, though the story of her wrongs was a moving one."

This book is controversial in Thailand for the picture it presents of a court with slaves and harsh punishments that appear arbitrary to our sensibilities.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

The Raven - by Edgar Allen Poe

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

This is the time of year we turn to contemplative spooky literature and what better warm up than Edgar Allen Poe's epic poem of tortured lost love, The Raven? (US Edition)  (UK Edition)

The American author had an unhappy life.  He was orphaned early, later disinherited by the family who took him in, and had mixed success in making a living as a writer.  The Raven was very popular, but he had sold the rights for $9.00.  The poem is probably inspired by the early death of his young wife.  Poe didn't live a long life himself.  Per Wikipedia: " On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents."  Whew . . . 

His grave is a rendezvous for the romantic, the despondent and students from the nearby University of Maryland.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -

Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore -

Nameless here for evermore.

May all your ghosts rest easy this Halloween!

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

The Fortune of the Rougons - by Emile Zola

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

I wanted to write about Emile Zola's novel, The Paradise, because I am really enjoying the TV adaptation.  But I was shocked, shocked to discover no free copies on Kindle!  There is a feature on Amazon which readers can use to alert Amazon to a Kindle edition that violates copyright.  It should not apply to the public domain books that I review.  However, I notice that many of the books I reviewed over a year ago are no longer available.  I suspect that publishers of inexpensive editions report the "free" editions, knowing that they can knock out the competition.  As Amazon makes no money on the free editions and even loses a small amount on the download, there is no incentive to hurry up and vet these free editions which are incorrectly reported as violating copyright. So, no Zola . . .  (US Edition)  (UK Edition) 

So we will go with the next best thing, which is the French writer Zola's 1871 novel, The Fortune of the Rougons.  It is the first in a series of twenty, but stands on its own!

Once again, I will depend heavily on the intrepid Amazon reviewers.

"In his introduction to the 20th and final novel (DOCTOR PASCAL), Zola specified the order he intended the series to be read, and it differs greatly from the order in which the books were written. So, now that you're on the first of twenty, make a note of the LOGICAL order of the books, and you will enjoy them much more:

1). THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS); 2) HIS EXCELLENCY or CLORINDA [and so on up to twenty, but we will stop with two.]

And in case you were wondering, if this were a single novel, it would be 6,680 pages long. C'est pas possible!"

This series of novels is a very rewarding reading experience, the type of endeavor like reading Proust that will stay with you your entire life.

Let's take a look:

First there is a long introduction to a cemetery and then we meet a young man carrying a gun. 

The young man was still gazing anxiously in that direction when, suddenly, one of the town clocks slowly and solemnly struck seven. He counted the strokes, and then jumped down, apparently surprised and relieved.

He seated himself on the tombstone, like one who is prepared to wait some considerable time. And for about half an hour he remained motionless and deep in thought, apparently quite unconscious of the cold, while his eyes gazed fixedly at a mass of shadow. He had placed himself in a dark corner, but the beams of the rising moon had gradually reached him, and at last his head was in the full light.

Please let me know when you finish the series.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

Journal of William Brazear - edited by Margaret Brazear

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

Unusual for this blog, I am featuring a newly published book.  It is a WWI memoir,  "Journal of William Brazear,"  edited by Margaret Brazear.  (US Edition)  (UK Edition) This is the edited diary of a British soldier.   The diary begins in 1895 and is unusual in that the soldier was a prisoner of war. 

William grew up in London and was in an orphanage and then apprenticed. 

At the age of fourteen, I was sent from the home to take a position apprenticed at a cycle works.   .  .  .  Well, this job nearly broke my heart.   I started there on the 9th May 1899 and managed to stay there until July 1st 1900.   During that period my regular routine was filing brazings in the morning, after doing the housework, and running with young ladies, learning them to ride in the afternoons.   The result was that I was handsore from the rasp, footsore from running, and heartsore from the whole thing.   Of course I was a bound apprentice and could not leave easy, so I made up my mind to run away from there.

You can imagine the service would be more attractive and Brazear was regular Army for awhile and in the reserves at the time the war began.

Now I was comfortable and thought I was safe.   But wait and see.   There was a church about 100 yards in front of my position.   The bells were ringing, and the people were walking towards the church just as if nothing was happening.   Suddenly a shell, either from us or from the Germans, struck the bottom corner of the church and the whole thing collapsed.   Naturally it would when the foundation had gone.   After seeing this, I knew that I was not so safe as I previously thought.

Later he is captured:

We entrained at Lauvain Station.   Although we expected to have to walk all the way into Germany, it appears that by now they had organised a system.   While we were waiting on the platform, I stood against some packages.   I had also organised a system, so with my jack knife I opened one of the cases and I was not disappointed for I found dog biscuits.   I filled my pockets and my pals emptied the box.   They were very acceptable at this time.  

War is hell.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

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For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel - by George Meredith

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is an 1859 novel by English author George Meredith.  (US Edition)  (UK Edition)  One of several candidates for "the first novelist," this is Meredith's best known book.  I think you have to say he has been forgotten when the Amazon UK site has no reviews of the free Kindle edition of this book!

The foreword of the book has a rather different take on Meredith's posterity:

Among the Victorian novelists, George Meredith occupies a place apart. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, he appeals to a select few. Those who appreciate him are folk of his own temper—cultivated, intellectual, urbane. They are persons of taste and discernment. They are generally the middle-aged rather than the young. They are those who, aloof and contemplative, relish the comedy of life, rather than those who throw themselves whole-heartedly into the game. It is not to be marvelled at, therefore, that Meredith should have won his way slowly, or that recognition, when it came, should have rendered his position unique and secure.

I would say painting George Eliot's "Middlemarch" as middlebrow or pop culture is kind of a hard sell.

However, you don't have to read these sour grapes - just dive into the novel and immediately encounter:

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for him.

As with any candidate for first novel, you can expect some oddities in the structure.

A comrade of some description was necessary, for Richard was neither to go to school nor to college. Sir Austin considered that the schools were corrupt, and maintained that young lads might by parental vigilance be kept pretty secure from the Serpent until Eve sided with him: a period that might be deferred, he said. He had a system of education for his son. How it worked we shall see.

So it seems this is a book about education . . .

Enjoy!

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

Out of Mulberry Street Stories of Tenement life in New York City - by Jacob Riis

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

Out of Mulberry Street Stories of Tenement life in New York City, is non-fiction by American Jacob Riis. (US Edition)  (UK Edition)   I might have said he was Danish as he was born and grew up in Denmark before emigrating; but the famous social reformer was American through and through.  The account of his many failures, ill-advised decisions and near starvation before he achieved spectacular success as a journalist make his Wikipedia biography enthralling reading.  Yes, those are words seldom paired - but someone did a good job there on Riis.

But turning to the book on offer:

It purports to be a series of journalism pieces, but seems to have been put together as one piece on Christmas in the Bowery.  I don't want to mislead you that this is a Christmas story.  In fact he describes a Jewish wedding.  It is just that Riis is writing at that time of year when so many get the only time they will have off work.

Farthest down-town, where the island narrows toward the Battery, and warehouses crowd the few remaining tenements, the somber-hued colony of Syrians is astir with preparation for the holiday. How comes it that in the only settlement of the real Christmas people in New York the corner saloon appropriates to itself all the outward signs of it? Even the floral cross that is nailed over the door of the Orthodox church is long withered and dead: it has been there since Easter, and it is yet twelve days to Christmas by the belated reckoning of the Greek Church. 

But if the houses show no sign of the holiday, within there is nothing lacking. The whole colony is gone a-visiting. There are enough of the unorthodox to set the fashion, and the rest follow the custom of the country. The men go from house to house, laugh, shake hands, and kiss one another on both cheeks, with the salutation, “Kol am va antom Salimoon.” “Every year and you are safe,” the Syrian guide renders it into English; and a non-professional interpreter amends it: “May you grow happier year by year.”

The moral of this brief review might be, "expect the unexpected."  On the eve of September 11, my attention turned to New York City in 2001, but this book written in 1898 has just brought me back to the present day.

This blog is a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try. 

Join me on Twitter, FaceBook, or Pinterest.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK readers may go to this Amazon link to subscribe.  (Slightly more than half my readers are from the UK)

US readers may go to this Amazon link

Here is a video of my mother, at 97, a new convert to the Kindle!

Thank to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it online.  I love to get good reviews!  Who wouldn't?  Should you care to leave a review, follow these links for UK readers or US readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

Ragged Lady - by American writer William Dean Howells

Free US/UK Kindle Classic
Howells on the left . . .

Ragged Lady is a 1898 novel by American writer William Dean Howells. . (US Edition)  (UK Edition) 

  

Or is it 1998?

It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know the roads. When they came to a place where they had a choice of two, she said that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house standing a little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they ought to take for South Middlemount. She alleged many cases in which they had met trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where they were before he pushed rashly forward in their drives. Whilst she urged the facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat, and held her hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse, which was impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then the blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track. She declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of her, and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and seemed about to overset it.

"Oh, what are you doing, Albe't?" Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless against the back of her seat. "Haven't I always told you to speak to the hoss fust?"

"He wouldn't have minded my speakin'," said her husband. "I'm goin' to take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin' out."

Well, not 1998 because they are in a carriage, but certainly a modern debate as to which gender will or will not ask directions!


You can see the novel is not for those who abhor dialect.


Here is a young college student working his way through school at a hotel.  He says he is not interested in girls.

Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with. He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused with anger much of the time. He was not only good-looking but he was a college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him for the hurts he did them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was too cross for anything. They were mostly young school-mistresses, and whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper, they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose thoughts were not running upon girls all the time. Women, even in their spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all, the silliest of them, as if they had souls.

I think it is safe to say this is a romantic novel.

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