Messing around with books, as I always do.

I found a book by John Ball, who wrote "In the Heat of the Night" and other Virgil Tibbs novels. This one is called "The First Team", and it's not related to the VIrgil Tibbs series at all. So far it's about a man who works in the White House as a Russian translator. But Russia has conquered the USA thanks to the hippies and liberal politicians.

John Ball was a bit of a right-winger. And a white one, if you were wondering. Sydney Poitier did Ball a HUGE favor by not playing Virgil Tibbs the way he was written in the book, i.e. as basically a white guy dyed brown (metaphorically).

I'm not sure how far I'll get with "The First Team". The Russians are comically evil, so far.

I also took a look at the first few pages of "The Impossibles" by Mark Phillips. It features mind-crime (apparently) in the far-flung, exotic future of 1972! So far the writing seems above par, so that's good. I'll see where it goes.

Hold on! Turns out that "Mark Phillips" was a pseudonym used by Lawrence Jannifer (a good science fiction writer) and Randall Garrett (the author of the "Lord Darcy" stories, which is basically Sherlock Holmes in a magic-based universe). They wrote a series of three books under that pseudonym, and all three are available for download from Project Gutenberg—along with quite a few others!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/25267

#Books #Bookstodon #FreeEbooks #ProjectGutenberg #ScienceFiction #QuasitBookRecs

Quasit's Book Recommendations: "A Shropshire Lad" by A. E. Housman (1896)

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

Meet A.E. Housman, if you haven't met him before. His poetry may not be fashionable any more (he rhymed, which is apparently a cardinal sin among poets these days), but it was brilliant, addictive, and powerfully moving.

I memorized many of his poems for years, just for the fun of it. There are lessons in them that I treasure.

That's why, when I came across a TERRIBLY mangled Barnes & Noble ebook of "A Shropshire Lad", I couldn't resist writing a review in the style of Housman:

The verses get five stars from me;
The presentation, one.
A pity 'tis that OCR's
So ruined poor Housman's fun!

The headers cleave each verse in twain
The lines lie torn and wrent,
How cruel to make him die again!
Needlessly violent.

But hope lives on, for pristine text
of "Shropshire Lad" is free
On Project Gutenberg, the home
of Housman fans like me.

And here's the link, available on Project Gutenberg in all the major ebook formats. Enjoy!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5720

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#QuasitBookRecs #Books #Classics #Bookstodon #Poetry #FreeEbooks

Anybody know of an ebook reader that actually works?

https://sh.itjust.works/post/59075313

Here's something I've been looking forward to: the first free ebook recommendation.

H.G. Wells was not only a founding figure in the creation of the genre of science fiction; he created plots which have continued to define the genre to this day. "The War of the Worlds", "The Time Machine", "The Invisible Man", "The Island of Doctor Moreau" are just a •few• of Wells' genre-defining novels.

Which makes it easy to overlook the many brilliant short stories he produced during his career, covering horror, humor, fantasy, science fiction, and more.

My introduction to Wells was a purple hardcover book that I found among the family books when I was a child: "Thirty Strange Stories". It mesmerized me. Although the stories are more than 100 years old now, they felt remarkably modern and relevant.

Sadly that book is long out of print, but Standard Ebooks has created a free eBook that has virtually all the same stories. It's called "Short Fiction, by H. G. Wells" and it's available in all the major eBook formats. It includes 55 of his classic short stories, and they're incredibly readable!

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-wells/short-fiction

There are stories here which will stay with you forever. "The Stolen Bacillus", "The Treasure In the Forest", "The Lord of the Dynamos", "The Cone", "Under the Knife", "The Truth About Pyecraft"...there are just too many amazing, gripping stories to list them all. The sheer •flexibility• that Wells demonstrates is astounding. He'll have you terrified one moment, laughing the next, and crying the moment after that.

And it's free. What more could you ask for?

Happy reading! 🤓📖

"A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out a disloyal partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to leave her means to join the unemployed in some strange part of the Earth. The luxuries of divorce are beyond him altogether. So that the good old tradition of marriage for better or worse holds inexorably for him, and things work up to tragic culminations. Bricklayers kick their wives to death, and dukes betray theirs; but it is among the small clerks and shopkeepers nowadays that it comes most often to a cutting of throats."

- "The Purple Pileus"

#Books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #Horror #Humor #English #FreeEbooks #QuasitBookRecs

Should I try to recommend a book once a day here? If so, should it be a free ebook?

#Bookstodon #Books #FreeEbooks