Free Literary Books for the Kindle (US & UK): March 2014

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

After London or Wild England by Richard Jefferies

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

Dystopian books about a post-apocalyptic future also are a part of our past. Follow that? English writer, Richard Jefferies, wrote his entry in this genre, After London or Wild England, in 1885. (US Edition) (UK Edition)

He was primarily a nature writer and this is apparent in his story:

"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike."

The book's form will not be particularly familiar to the readers of Young Adult trilogies. It takes the form of a journal or history by someone living after the apocalypse and trying to explain the present and relate it to the past.

"Indeed, we have fuller knowledge of those extremely ancient times than of the people who immediately preceded us, and the Romans and the Greeks are more familiar to us than the men who rode in the iron chariots and mounted to the skies. The reason why so many arts and sciences were lost was because, as I have previously said, the most of those who were left in the country were ignorant, rude, and unlettered. They had seen the iron chariots, but did not understand the method of their construction, and could not hand down the knowledge they did not themselves possess."

Apparently this history is to serve as background for the adventure tale that comprises the second part of the book:

"What was there behind the immense and untraversed belt of forest which extended to the south, to the east, and west? Where did the great Lake end? Were the stories of the gold and silver mines of Devon and Cornwall true? And where were the iron mines, from which the ancients drew their stores of metal?"

Come along and find out!

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! (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

Monday, March 3, 2014

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

I like my history undistilled and that is hard to find. But in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by English writer Isabella L. Bird comes close. (US Edition) (UK Edition) This is a book of edited letters by a world-class traveler. In 1892, she became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society. These letters were written 20 years before that honor.

The forest was thick, and had an undergrowth of dwarf spruce and brambles, but as the horse had become fidgety and "scary" on the track, I turned off in the idea of taking a short cut, and was sitting carelessly, shortening my stirrup, when a great, dark, hairy beast rose, crashing and snorting, out of the tangle just in front of me. I had only a glimpse of him, and thought that my imagination had magnified a wild boar, but it was a bear. The horse snorted and plunged violently, as if he would go down to the river, and then turned, still plunging, up a steep bank, when, finding that I must come off, I threw myself off on the right side, where the ground rose considerably, so that I had not far to fall. I got up covered with dust, but neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating. The bear ran in one direction, and the horse in another.

She sounds like the perfect traveling companion, game for anything and not too full of herself.

At one point she is staying in a cabin with an unexpected and unwanted companion who does no work, causes catastrophes and eats more than his share. Worse, he fancies himself a writer:

In one there are twenty lines copied (as Mr. Kavan has shown me) without alteration from Paradise Lost; in another there are two stanzas from Resignation, with only the alteration of "stray" for "dead"; and he has passed the whole of Bonar's Meeting-place off as his own.

She gets some small satisfaction after he starts raiding the pantry and stealing food.

Before the boy came I had mistaken some faded cayenne pepper for ginger, and had made a cake with it. Last evening I put half of it into the cupboard and left the door open. During the night we heard a commotion in the kitchen and much choking, coughing, and groaning, and at breakfast the boy was unable to swallow food with his usual ravenousness.

The "boy" is a former theological student.

We wish we could visit this wilderness she loved. It is past recovery. At one point she writes of the "slightly musical ring of the lumberer's axe." If she could visit today, she might recall the sound as something less lyrical.