Archive for June, 2011

DailyLit News: Hurling Myself into a Gorge

In case you miss our latest news (arriving in inboxes today), here it is:

NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER
There I was at my college reunion, about to hurl myself into a deep gorge. Well, not exactly into the gorge. And OK I was tethered to a zip line. But the line looked pretty flimsy, and I still had to jump. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. With my husband and kids breezily zipping away, I was not going to let fear get the best of me. So I committed to taking the plunge (besides, who wants to be shown up by a nine year old!). It made me think about what else I haven’t tackled. And then I thought of those “should have but haven’t yet read” books on my list. (OK, I realize that was a tenuous segue but what the heck). In any case, I’ve decided to tackle at least one book I’ve been wanting to read. How about you? Any leaps you’d like to take this summer?
Cheers — to a summer of leaps!
-Susan

Susan Danziger
Founder and CEO, DailyLit
sdanziger@dailylit.com
Twitter:@susandanziger, @dailylit

GOING AWAY? SUSPEND YOUR BOOKS
Now that you’re finally able to take some time off, don’t forget to suspend delivery of your DailyLit installments so they don’t pile up while you’re away. You can even set your books to automatically resume for when you’re back. All you need to do is to click the “Suspend delivery of this book” link at the bottom of any email installment and go from there (or you can log in to DailyLit and go to Your Settings.) Make it a guilt-free vacation and a trouble-free return.

THAT ONE BOOK
What’s that one book you should have read but haven’t yet? For me, it’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Well, no more putting it off. I’ve committed to reading it this summer. How about you? Any of these books on your must-read list? They’re all ideal for summer.
-Huckleberry Finn
-Tom Sawyer
-Wonderful Wizard of Oz
-Anne of Green Gables
-Robinson Crusoe
-Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
-Call of the Wild
-Treasure Island
-War of the Worlds
-Jane Eyre
-Wuthering Heights
-Great Expectations
-Tess of the D’Urbervilles
-The Scarlet Letter
-Gulliver’s Travels

CLASSIC SUMMER READS FOR KIDS
Now that the kids are getting out of school, you might be thinking about which books they could read this summer. The National Endowment for the Humanities created a list of recommended classic summer reads for kids. I’ve highlighted on DailyLit’s blog the ones we carry; you can find recommended books for Kindergarteners through 6th graders (5-12 year olds) here; books for 7th and 8th graders (13-14 year olds) here; and books for high school kids (15-18 year olds) here. In fact, it might be fun to read a book together this summer (either out-loud or on the same schedule ).

JULY 4TH: BE THE SMARTEST ONE AT YOUR BBQ
Be the smartest one at your BBQ this 4th of July. In just 6 installments, you can read the Declaration of Independence; The Gettysburg Address; John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address; and other inspirational reads that define a nation. They’re part of America’s Greatest Hits.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE: DECLARING INDEPEDENCE
In the spirit of the upcoming 4th of July, I thought I’d make this creative challenge about independence. So, here goes: “In 50 words or fewer, describe a time in your life when you experienced independence.” You can declare your independent moment here.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Schools Out – Teachers Rock

I just picked up my kids from their last day of school which was just let out for the summer. Our 9 year old wistfully said: “I wish school were going on for three more weeks” (probably not a sentiment shared by most kids, but he loved his teacher and was sad to leave her). And our twins just “graduated” from elementary school (we went to a “Moving Up” ceremony earlier this week); you could see they were also sad to leave the school they’ve loved for the past 6 years.

In walking through the halls today of the same school I attended, well, shall we say many years ago, I still remember my 3rd grade teacher who taught me the stories of Odysseus, my music teacher who created wonderful musicals we performed, and my gym teacher who encouraged me to climb the rope in the gym all the way to the ceiling.

So given this last day of school, I wanted to thank teachers of the present, past and future for devoting your time and energies to inspiring and challenging kids everywhere.

This post was written by Susan Danziger, the founder and CEO of DailyLit.
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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Today marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. To celebrate, I thought I’d highlight the three longest books on DailyLit:
-The Arabian Nights (633 installments)
-War and Peace (663 installments)
-Les Miserables (679 installments)

So if you start The Arabian Nights today, you’ll be finished on March 13, 2013; if you start War and Peace today, you’ll be finished on April 14, 2013; and if you start Les Miserables today, you’ll be finished on April 30, 2013. Well, not quite. Thank goodness for the “send me the next installment immediately” feature. Oh, and you can also set your installments to 4 times the usual length.

In any case, happy, happy summer. Enjoy the longest day of the year. I’ll be going on my first all-women’s sailing race. Wish me luck!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit’s Classic Summer Reads to Whet Your Appetite

A few days ago I wrote a post about getting around to reading those “should have but haven’t yet read” books. Before the summer goes by, I thought I’d highlight some classic reads on DailyLit that might whet your appetite for summer reading:

-Huckleberry Finn
-Tom Sawyer
-Wonderful Wizard of Oz
-Anne of Green Gables
-Robinson Crusoe
-Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
-Call of the Wild
-Treasure Island
-War of the Worlds
-Jane Eyre
-Wuthering Heights
-Great Expectations
-Tess of the D’urbervilles
-The Scarlet Letter
-Gulliver’s Travels

I’ve started to read Tess of the D’urbervilles. How about you? What’s on your “should have but haven’t yet read” book list? You can shout it out here.

“Should Have but Haven’t Read” Books on DailyLit

Which books have you been meaning to read for ages but somehow never got around to them? For me, it’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles which I’ve wanted to read ever since high school. With the encouragement of DailyLit readers, I’ve decided to tackle it this summer. So here it is: my commitment to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles. There now, I’ve said it. I suppose there’s no going back. How about you? Any “Should Have But Haven’t Read” books on your list? You can shout them out here in DailyLit’s forum.

Oh, and in case you need some inspiration, this list of recommended summer reads for high school students might come in handy.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Happy Bloomsday from DailyLit!

Today is Bloomsday. June 16th marks the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses took place. In case you’re not familiar with Ulysses, here’s what it’s about:

Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through the course of an ordinary day in Dublin, Ireland, in 1904. While the novel is structured after Homer’s Odyssey, this is not a mythic journey of classical proportions. Bloom is a modern everyman, and Joyce’s Dublin is populated by a cast of average townspeople—rich and poor, scholars and drunks, priests and prostitutes. Joyce’s frank treatment of such themes as sexuality and religion is matched with plenty of word play, complex references, and stylistic tricks. By no means easy, this important novel is a literary black belt for any reader.

O.K., I admit it, I haven’t yet earned my literary black belt, but if want to, you can sign up to read Ulysses in installments here on DailyLit .

Happy Bloomsday!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit’s Featured Feature: Vacation Pauses

As you’re planning trips and packing your bags, I wanted to remind you that you can temporarily suspend your books while on vacation. No more installments piling up while you’re away — and you know your book will be back on schedule when you return.

Here’s how it works:
Every installment email you receive contains a link at the bottom that lets you suspend delivery of the book you’re reading. Just click on the link. You’ll see that you can set the installments to automatically resume for whenever you get back (in a few days, a week, or even a month’s time).

So while you’re suspending your newspapers, remember to pause your books as well. Make it a guilt-free vacation!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit’s Creative Challenge: Contribute to the Story

This month’s creative challenge is a collective challenge. I’m asking readers to contribute a sentence to a story so that it makes one long story chain. The first line in the chain is from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It goes: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” You can contribute to the chain here.

Many thanks to reader dvoizin for suggesting the idea of the story chain, to author Margaret Atwood for suggesting that we start off with a line from a classic novel and to reader dreamdust for suggesting the first line to kick it off.

Who knows where the story will take us?

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Kids’ Classic Summer Reading on DailyLit (Part 3: Grades 9 through12)

This is the third and last part of a three-part series of classic books for kids available (for free) on DailyLit. These books are recommended summer reads by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This third part focuses on books recommended for students in grades 9 through 12. Books recommended for students in Kindergarten through 6th grade can be found here, and books recommended for students in the 7th and 8th grades can be found here.

Grades 9 through 12

-Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
-Beowulf
-The Bible
-Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
-Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
-Willa Cather’s My Ántonia
-Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote
-Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
-Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone
-Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim
-Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
-Dante’s The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, The Purgatory, The Paradise)
-Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
-Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
-Emily Dickinson’s Poems
-Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
-George Eliot’s Silas Marner
-Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones
-Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
-Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
-John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga
-Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
-Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
-O. Henry Stories (e.g. “The Gift of the Magi“)
-Homer’s The Iliad
-Homer’s The Odyssey
-Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
-Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
-Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw
- James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-John Keats’ Poems
-D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
-Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt
-Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
-W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage
-Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
-Edgar Allan Poe’s Short stories
-Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac
-William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
-William Shakespeare’s King Lear
-William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing
-William Shakespeare’s Sonnets
-George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal
-Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
-Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex
-Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
-Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
-William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
-Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
-Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
-Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers
-Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Virgil’s The Aeneid.
-Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
-Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

In case you missed the previous post on recommended classic summer books for kids in Kindergarten through 6th grade, you can find it here; the post on books recommended for kids in 7th and 8th grades can be found here.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Kids’ Classic Summer Reading on DailyLit (Part 2: Grades 7 and 8)

This is the second in a three-part series of classic books for kids available (for free) on DailyLit. These books are recommended summer reads by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This second part focuses on books appropriate for kids in the 7th and 8th grades. The previous post, found here, focuses on books suitable for kids in Kindergarten through the 6th grade. The last post will focus on books for high school kids.

Grades 7 and 8

-Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
- John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
-James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans
-Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
-Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
-Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
-Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo
-Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
-Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
-Rudyard Kipling’s Kim
-Jack London’s Call of the Wild
-Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
-Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
-Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island
-Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer
-Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
-Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs
-H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

Stay tuned for the next post which will include DailyLit classic books recommended for your high school kids. In case you missed the previous post on books recommended for kids in Kindergarten through the 6th grade, you can find it here.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

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