Hello, thank you for asking!
I think it probably was My Broken Language: A Memoir, by Quiara Alegría Hudes. She’s the playwright from the musical In the Heights, and her memoir was honestly a delight. I’ve been in a memoir spree lately and hers really stood out!
What about you?
Ok, I've seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I've been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-
Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.
Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.
Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.
The Library Is
a Magical Place and You
Should Fucking Go There
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again
To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.
They are literally cutting off library access to minors.
If you are affected by this or other bans and restrictions in the United States, be aware that the Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to anyone age 13-21 nationwide as part of their Books UnBanned initiative:
BOOOOOST
btw archive dot org is SUCH a treasury when it comes to out-of-print poetry anthologies… i am having the time of my life, truly ❣️
some of my bookmarks:
a little late, but March 2nd is global shutdown day for Palestine (info here). So if you wanna spend it reading and educating yourself here are free zines and books:
and more literature here:
Hi tumblr, I know I have not been here for very long but I have something important to share,
My university has anounced it's intention to shut down their department for modern languages. As a language student at the Univerity of Aberdeen, this is something very dear to me.
The school of languages at aberdeen includes 8 modern languages, including the minority language that is Scottish Gaelic. In cutting out language and culture education, the university is making a statement of disregard not only to the world around them, but also to one of Scotland's native tongues.
These are language programs that have existed for more than a century, with French and German being taught since 1898, Spanish since 1924 and Gaelic has been part of the University since 1495.
I would like to word all off this well, but I am stressed about about exams at the moment, as well as stressed out if I will be able to pursue the accademic carreer I wanted after I finish my undergrad....
could you please take a look at the petition? maybe sign it, maybe share it? it'd mean a lot. It is going to be presented to the board of directors.
https://chng.it/pfL7RDqfMh
[Plain Text: (loudspeaker emoji) And we are live! (loudspeaker emoji)]
As we steamroll into 2024, I'd like to kick off the year by announcing that The Disability Book Archive is now officially live and open for public browsing!
It hasn't all gone as smoothly as I wanted it to, and I haven't been able to put every book I wanted to on (yet, I'm working on it!) but I'm happy with how it's turned out and I hope you all like it it to!
I would like to thank everyone for your continued support over this project, it means a great deal to me. I hope we will only continue to grow as the year goes on!
Happy browsing, and happy new year!!
ALT[ID: A red circle with the text “The Disability Archive” curved along the bottom, in black. In the centre, an open book with green cover, with a yellow bookmark in the middle. The bookmark has a blue flower on it. White flowers surround the book. The entire logo has a thin black border of dots. /end]
[ID: A poster. The logo for The Disability Book Archive is at the top. It is a large red circle with a green book in the centre. The book has a yellow book mark in the middle. The book mark has a blue flower. Around the book, white leaves. Text at the bottom of the logo reads "The Disability Archive". The logo is bordered by a thin layer of red dots.
A column of grey text below this reads:
"A collection of disabled literature"
"Searchable"
"Tag System"
"LGBTQ+"
"Fiction & Non-Fiction"
And "Submit Your Own" in a slightly transparent red box.
At the bottom of the cover, next to the tumblr icon, white text reads "@thedisabilitybookarchive" and "www.thedisabilityarchive.com".
The background of the poster is the straight diagonal version of the disability pride flag. /end]
TBR | January 2024
2024 is here, Happy New Year!
To celebrate, let’s set some goals: I want to read 50 books in 2024, and get to at least 60% of my current TBR (this means 43 books). These are both suuuuuuper lowkey goals that I think will be easily accomplishable, but I think it’s about time I don’t stress myself out with plans. 2024 is shaping up to be a very full year in terms of professional and personal matters, so I want my reading to be relaxing.
However, in the spirit of tackling my TBR, I’m going to try and set a list of books I want to get to this month in the hopes of actually sticking to it…
I think this is a good mix of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, with radically different topics, genres, and even languages, so I don’t get bored. There’s something for every mood and I’m really looking forward to all of them.
What are you reading this year?
One more year has gone by, I almost can’t believe it and yet it’s already time to review how the year was.
[Jan-March] [April-June] [July-Sept]
I have been working on this list in the series all year 😂 it just took me that long to read a decent amount of underrated YA - but I got there in the end and I'm pretty happy with the recs on this list 🥰
there are rainbow flags next to LGBT+ rep, wheelchair symbols next to disability rep and koalas next to Australia YA simply because there's a lot of that on this particular list
so take a gander and maybe consider picking up a title or two (or ten) in 2024 to support lesser-known authors and books 😊
people should also have a look for:
- I’ll Let Myself In by Hannah Diviney
- Say Hello by Carly Findlay
- Growing Up Disabled in Australia
they’re all memoirs and essays by disabled writers from Australia 😊
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Also don’t think a
book is old because it’s in
the public domain
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Want audiobooks instead?
LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.
Public domain works in the US are:
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
Inspired by David Tennant's "Leave Trans Kids Alone You Absolute Freaks" shirt, here are some amazing trans middle grade and picture books you should read:
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public libraries in the usa offering free digital library cards to people not in their areas (as of october 2023):
these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library's complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.
ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!
i've used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!
i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.
spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you're already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.
