Today marks the first day of Ramadan. I gather that since Ramadan is a time to worship Allah and since part of that worship includes reciting passages from The Koran, I thought I’d feature The Koran today on DailyLit.

So if you’d like to read The Koran in daily installments delivered directly to your email inbox you can sign up 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As kids start to let out from school, I thought I’d highlight certain classic books for kids available (for free) on DailyLit. These books are recommended summer reads by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Note that this is the first of a three-part series. In this post, I’ll cover books appropriate for kids in Kindergarten through the 6th grade. In the next post, I’ll cover books for kids in the 7th and 8th grades, and in the third post, I’ll focus on books appropriate for kids in high school.

Kindergarten to 3rd Grade
Note that these books can be read by the kids themselves or read aloud to them.

-Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
-Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit — you can find this and other stories by Beatrix Potter here

Grades 4 through 6

-Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales
-Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
-Frances Hodgson’s Burnett’s The Secret Garden
-Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows
-Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Hänsel and Gretel, Rapunzel, etc.)
-Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book
-L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
-Charles Perrault’s The Tales of Mother Goose (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc.)
-Johann David Wyss’ Swiss Family Robinson

Stay tuned for posts on DailyLit classic books recommended for kids in the 7th and 8th grades as well as books for kids in high school.

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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.