DailyLit.com

I’ve emphasized here the importance (and the joy!) of discovering and reading great literature of the past that influenced J.K. Rowling as a writer.  Sounds like a daunting task, though, to begin up Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and plugging through them.  Even though they’re great books, they’re not what many of us are used to, and it’s slow going at first.

I learned today of an excellent resource to get you started: DailyLit.com! (HT to Joe Thorn)  You can sign up for a book and have it delivered to you daily via email in small chunks, pieces that take about 5 minutes to read at a time (a standard blog entry, really).  There is a long list of classics there that can be delivered straight to your inbox.  It’ll take just a few minutes a day, and over a number of weeks, you can have a classic completed.  Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example: 149 parts; so if you had it delivered only on workdays (5 days a week), you’d be finished in less than 30 weeks.  Sounds like a long time, but many of us keep schedules that make reading a book in a couple weeks too daunting a task to even begin.  Better to read Austen in 30 weeks than to not read her at all.

I’ve started with a simple three part work: Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, just to see if I like the process and if I’ll keep up with it.  I think I will.

Update:  Meep was having problems with the comment form (anyone else getting errors when trying to comment?), so sent me an E-owl with this helpful addition to this post:

For Dickens, I think Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend give a flavor of Rowling’s influences there. For Austen, I see Emma for how to fill up a social world with gossip, details at all different levels, the idea of social classes (more prominent here than elsewhere), and so forth.

Thanks, meep!