Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Stately, Plump Buck Mulligan

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" is the opening phrase of James Joyce's Ulysses. Project Gutenberg, which has been offering copyright-free full-text books online for free since 1971, reports that this week their etext of Ulysses was downloaded 1011 times, and was their fourth most popular book. See Project Gutenberg's Top 100 page for this week's list.
      It's not all that easy to read an entire (very long) novel on a PC screen, but it's out there, it's free, and Project Gutenberg's one-long-text-file format makes a wonderful way to hunt for a quote you remember and can't pin down! They have a total of 13,000 titles available at the moment, all prepared for online accessibility by volunteers over the past more than 30 years. Try the Project Gutenberg catalog to see what they have.
      Thanks to Waterboro Public Library's blog for pointing out the Top 100 list.

No comments: