Project page: Mormon Digitization Project

Brief recap: the goal is to find pre-1923 Mormon books (out of copyright), scan them, OCR them, clean up the OCRed text, and release the plain text files on Project Gutenberg (along with ePub editions, possibly PDFs, and possibly Lulu editions as well).

I’m starting with John A. Widtsoe’s book Joseph Smith As Scientist and will go from there. If you have any suggestions/requests, leave them in the comments (or email them to me). If I get enough people helping out, we’ll be able to tackle a few books at a time.

Process-wise, I’m thinking about trying Bite-Size Edits for at least part of the cleanup. There’s also a remote possibility I’ll use PGDP, but I really, really don’t like their interface. Right now I’m planning to track things using email and a Google Spreadsheet. (If I had more time I’d write a web app to manage it all for me, but Beyond is getting the bulk of my coding time.)

Yes, this will be kind of similar to the Mormon Documentation Project, but they don’t seem to be doing the types of books we’ll be doing. (I did use their text for the Standard Works web app and for this D&C reader’s edition I’m still working on, though. Good stuff.)

Want to help out? Email me (ben dot crowder at gmail) and I’ll add you to the list.

This time around the realization came via Cal Newport’s article on fixed-schedule productivity. Read it. Great stuff. I’m also digging the Zen Habits blog.

A while ago I realized that my life’s work is in books, and more recently I found that that’s in writing them and designing them. That’s what I’m made for. But is that what I spend most of my free time doing?

No. And that’s the problem.

From now on I’m not letting myself work on any side projects unless they have to do with books. I’m axing Donne (the to do list web app I had just started building), Beyond (my genealogy web app), the chord chart I was designing, and all other non-book projects. Instead, I’ll make do with existing tools.

For example, I was going to typeset a nice PDF of our Mormon Artist volunteer handbook, but I can just put the information up on the website. Much faster. Similarly, I was going to extend my Glider wiki for multiple users so we could use it for the magazine style guide, but I realized I could just use Google Sites and have it up immediately. Check.

Also, to keep myself from getting distracted too often, I’m going to do my best to limit my time on email, Twitter, and Google Reader. We’ll see how it goes.

My new plan is to have no more than one writing project and two book design projects going at any given time. Here’s what I’m working on:

Current writing project: Tanglewood. It’s coming along really well, too — I’ve woken up fifteen minutes early each morning to write and have managed to hit my 500-word quota every single day so far.

Current book design project #1: the D&C reader’s edition. I’m still reparagraphing it and have been dragging my heels, but I’m going to focus now and make it happen.

Current book design project #2: a short illustrated edition of Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Rainbow” (which is actually part of a longer poem). More on this soon.

Will I still be thinking and writing about web stuff? Sure. That’s my job, after all. But in my free time I’m focusing strictly on books. That’s the only way to get really, really good at making them.

Here, then, are some of my favorite quotes from them. (I thought about tracking down sources for all of them but decided to take the lazy route instead, sacrificing the joy of the hunt to you, dear reader, should you so desire to do source checking. :))

Oh, and they’re in no particular order. (Well, generally short to long, but that’s about it.)

C.S. Lewis

“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

“Nothing is yet in its true form.”

“The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

“You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.”

“Hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity.”

“You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.”

“The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.”

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time — waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God — it changes me.”

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

“No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.”

“It is a good rule…to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”

“It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.”

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding.”

“The neat sorting-out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.”

“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”

“But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are ‘on’ concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.”

“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

“The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”

“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

“[The fairy tale] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be more like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations.”

“In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale? — really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: this reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.”

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story…. This canon seems to me most obviously true of that particular type of children’s story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale. Now the modern critical world uses ‘adult’ as a term of approval. It is hostile to what it calls ‘nostalgia’ and contemptuous of what it calls ‘Peter Pantheism’. Hence a man who admits dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development…. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? … I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I have grown but only that I had changed.”

George MacDonald

“No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.”

“All that is not God is death.”

“Afflictions are but the shadows of God’s wings.”

“Philosophy is really homesickness.”

“Attitudes are more important than facts.”

“Fear is faithlessness.”

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.”

“Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”

“Brothers, sisters, have you found our King? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God.”

“Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”

“I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.”

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”

“There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.”

“God is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself.”

“Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”

“A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”

“It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.”

“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.”

“God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven.”

“No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it — no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

“The world is full of resurrections. Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it — the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.

G.K. Chesterton

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

“In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends.”

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”

“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be defeated.”

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

“Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.”

“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

“‘Free verse’? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’.”

“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”

“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

“The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.”

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”

“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”

“The only defensible war is a war of defense.”

“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”

“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”

“The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.”

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

“[To an atheist] the universe is the most exquisite masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.”

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”

“Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord James is dead’ to people who never knew Lord James was alive.”

“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”

“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front–”

“The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”

“We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.”

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

“There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel.”

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”

I’m currently about a fourth of the way through reparagraphing the text and hope to have everything done by the end of the year.

The book will be available as a free PDF, and you’ll also be able to order a hardcover or paperback edition through Lulu if you want a hard copy.

The Lulu edition is 5.5×8.5″ and uses publisher-grade paper (it’s white, pretty much like standard printer paper, and happens to be a bit cheaper). Eventually I’ll do a 6×9″ edition using Lulu’s standard cream-colored paper, but for now this will have to do. :)

Mmm.

(Yes, yes, the black gaps are a little hideous, but I didn’t spend a whole lot of time throwing this together. And you’d be amazed at how slow your computer gets when you’re working on a file that large.)

If you’re bookish like me and want to see the titles, you can click on the image to see the full image (all 13,176×9,300 pixels of it). But be careful! It’s huge! (40 megs.) It’ll probably slow down your browser a ton, so I’d recommend right-clicking and saving to your desktop first, then viewing it there.

I should mention as well that my catalog is online at LibraryThing.

Let the psychoanalysis begin. ;)

My legend: * = I’ve read it, % = I’ve read part of it, + = I want to read it, # = I own it

1. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy *#
2. 1984, by George Orwell *
3. Ulysses, by James Joyce
4. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner +
6. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison +
7. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
8. The Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer +#
9. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen *#
10. Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri +#
11. Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer +#
12. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift *#
13. Middlemarch, by George Eliot +#
14. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
15. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind, Margaret by Mitchell +#
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez +#
18. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald *#
19. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
20. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
21. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck +
22. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie-
23. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley *
24. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf +
25. Native Son, by Richard Wright
26. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville +
27. On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin +#
28. The Histories, by Herodotus +#
29. The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau +#
30. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx +#
31. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli *#
32. Confessions, by St. Augustine +#
33. Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes +#
34. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides +#
35. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien *#
36. Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne +
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis *#
38. A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster *
39. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
40. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee +#
41. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version *#
42. A Clockwork Orange, by Antony Burgess
43. Light in August, by William Faulkner
44. The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. Du Bois
45. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys %
46. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert +#
47. Paradise Lost, by John Milton +#
48. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy *#
49. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare *#
50. King Lear, by William Shakespeare *#
51. Othello, by William Shakespeare +#
52. Sonnets, by William Shakespeare +#
53. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman +
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain *#
55. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling +
56. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley *#
57. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway +
60. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut +
61. Animal Farm, by George Orwell *#
62. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding *
63. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote +
64. The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
65. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust +
66. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
67. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner +
68. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway +
69. I, Claudius, by Robert Graves *#
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
71. Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence
72. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren +
73. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin +
74. Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White *#
75. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad +#
76. Night, by Elie Wiesel +
77. Rabbit Run, by John Updike +
78. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton %
79. Portney’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
80. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
81. The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West
82. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
83. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett +
84. His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman %#
85. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather *#
86. The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud
87. The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams +
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao, by Mao Zedong
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James +
90. Brideshead Revisted, by Evelyn Waugh +
91. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes +
93. Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad +#
94. Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves+
95. The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith
96. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame +#
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley & Malcom X +
98. Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey
99. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
100. The Second World War, by Winston Churchill +

Hmm, I don’t like this list very much. One of these days I’ll come up with my own…

I’ve tried most of the iPhone ebook readers (Eucalyptus, Stanza, Classics, BookZ, eReader, Kindle, Bookshelf, and Shortcovers, with Instapaper covering a slightly different niche). The ones I come back to? Eucalyptus and Instapaper. We’ll throw Stanza in for good measure, since it’s my fallback ePub reader and was my favorite until Eucalyptus showed up.

Eucalyptus

I love love love Eucalyptus. At first I didn’t think I would — I’d convinced myself that Stanza’s page-turning mechanism was best (tap on the right side to page forward, tap on the left side to page back). But it only took thirty seconds before I fell in love with Eucalyptus and pretty much everything about it. Sure, you can only read Project Gutenberg texts that are in English, but that covers most of what I wanted to read anyway — and it’s not like 20,000 books isn’t enough. ;)

Did I mention that Eucalyptus is beautiful?

And here we are turning a page (and this is now my favorite way to turn pages on the iPhone). A still shot doesn’t do it justice, so make sure you go over to the website and watch the video (under “Reads like a book”):

And I love the blue progress pie charts — brilliant:

I can’t think of any real complaints I have about Eucalyptus. It’s awesome. If you have an iPhone and you love books, go buy this app now. It’s worth every cent of the $10.

And what am I reading? Trollope’s autobiography, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, and I’m rereading both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre (both of which I adore).

Stanza

For a long time, Stanza was my shining star for iPhone reading. Now that Eucalyptus has come along and dethroned it, however, I find myself hardly ever opening it. I still keep it around to read any non-Project Gutenberg ePubs I come across, though. (Which hasn’t happened yet.)

I have to say, after using Eucalyptus for several weeks, Stanza feels almost sterile. I seriously love Eucalyptus.

Instapaper

Instapaper doesn’t really compete with Eucalyptus or Stanza because it’s not a fiction reader: it’s a way to read long-form blog posts and other web pages on your phone. (Or on the web.) You set up an account on Instapaper.com and then use a bookmarklet to save pages to your Instapaper account. The iPhone app automatically syncs with your account. It’s perfect at what it does as far as I’m concerned.

And it’s got the über-awesome auto-scroll feature — using the iPhone’s accelerometer, Instapaper can sense when you’re tipping the phone forward or backward and then scroll accordingly. It works really well.

Summary

Reading on the iPhone is great and so convenient it gives me goosebumps. I can read anywhere now, since I always have my phone with me. I’ve read the first third of Trollope’s autobiography on my walk home from work each day, for example. Dead time is dead no longer. (I also use WriteRoom to work on my novel — got a nice page or so written this morning on my way up to work.)

Will something else come along and unseat Eucalyptus? Maybe. It’s hard to imagine something better, but I’m quite open to that possibility. Competition is a very good thing here. :)

Caveat: Eucalyptus can only read books from Project Gutenberg. But that’s not really a problem for me, since most of what I wanted to read was on there anyway. (Well, most of what I wanted to read that already happened to be free.)

Fast forward to this morning. I’m Mormon, and I want to read more Mormon-related texts. I searched around on Project Gutenberg but only found six or seven books — the Book of Mormon (of course), James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and The Story of Mormonism, and then some outsider and/or anti works. Hardly anything.

I want to change that.

There are lots of public domain (pre-1923) texts related to the Church which would be valuable to make available for free, so my new goal is to start digitizing them and putting them into Project Gutenberg. (So I can read them in Eucalyptus. ;))

Yes, yes, I’m aware that there are already places like GospeLink with plenty of these texts. That’s great, but I want Mormon books in Project Gutenberg, and so far that hasn’t really happened. It’s been seven years since I submitted The Story of Mormonism to Project Gutenberg, and the number of Mormon-related texts added since then (if any) is paltry at best.

I’m going to start building a list of the books I think should be added, and if you have any additions, let me know. (The only real stipulation is that there has to be at least one edition of the book published before 1923, to ensure that it’s out of copyright.) First on my list is John A. Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith As Scientist. I also plan to add the D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and eventually the Journal of Discourses.

I’ll also be developing my Unbindery web app as part of this, and I’ll need volunteers to help with proofreading. When that part is ready, I’ll let you know, but if any of you do want to help out, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list.

Last but not least: I like naming things, mainly so I have a way to talk about them. To that end, then, I’m going to call this the Mormon Digitization Project. Here we go. :)

City of Bones is another of those books that gets rave reviews and actually deserves them. Within the first few pages I was completely sucked into the world of the story and rearranging my schedule to be able to finish the book. It was worth it, too.

The novel is a can’t-put-it-down urban fantasy set in New York, where demons (bad) and werewolves and vampires and the rest (not necessarily bad) are real, and people called Shadowhunters fight the demons. I have to admit that the premise had me thinking this book wasn’t for me (I guess I’ve developed an aversion to vampire tales), but it didn’t take long before I was won over. Everything just clicks in this milieu, from the magic system to the various societies and cultures. Nothing felt tacky or cliché or, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Have I mentioned the characters? Holy smokes, these people are awesome. Clary, Simon, and Jace are the three major characters, and they’re all drawn in ways that make them real and funny (Simon is hilarious!) and immensely endearing. These are characters you’ll want to spend lots of time with. (Which is why I’m glad there are two more books in the series. :))

Disclaimer: City of Bones is definitely for older teens. There’s a bit of language and some light innuendo. Nothing too hard, but more than your typical YA novel.