Free Literary Books for the Kindle (US & UK): December 2013

Monday, December 23, 2013

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

Sunday, December 22, 2013

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.

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

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!

Monday, December 16, 2013

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.

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

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!

Thursday, December 12, 2013

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.

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

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!