Books Worth Remembering
There are times when nothing will give you a good Kindle book like doing it in HTML. It’s a formatting language. It’s what KDP understands. You can get in there and tell it to do anything within its powers. And it’s not difficult. Back in 2015, I wrote up the instructions for how to use HTML to format Kindle books in Control Your Kindle Book Formatting: Simple Step-by-Step Instructions. You can read it here for free.
All of these books can be borrowed from the Internet Archive by anybody anywhere. All it takes is an email address to open an account. Depending on the book: 1. you can borrow by the hour (and read online) or 2. you can borrow for 14 days (in which case you can also download if you want) or 3. you can read and download at any time without borrowing (as the book has no copyright).
I’ve read the entire 21-volume Brother Cadfael series twice. Set in a 12th-century monastery and surrounding towns, it’s never too violent or horrible, and is well-written and entertaining. The Internet Archive has multiple copies of most of these books. Whenever possible, I’ve linked to a copy that’s available for 14-day borrow.
A list, in no particular order, of 64 notable books you can borrow free from the Internet Archive. Fiction titles are in brown. The books on this list are in addition to the individual books featured in our Books to Read Free posts and in our Gallery of More Notable Books You Can Read for Free and in our List of 158 More Good Books You Can Read for Free.
Borrow for free. Sex Tips for Girls, although fairly relentlessly humorous, really is full of good tips when it comes to sex and relationships.
I’m yawning, writing this article. (Has anyone put together a montage of yawns to show to insomniacs?) These books about sleep (and many more) are available to borrow for free from the Internet Archive.
Borrow for free. There’s nothing like reading funny stories of travel mishaps to make you feel happy and snug in your armchair.
The books in this gallery of notable books you can borrow for free are in addition to the individual books featured in our Books to Read Free posts and on our List of 158 More Good Books You Can Read Free and our List of 63 More Great Books You Can Read For Free. It is super-easy for anyone to borrow from the Internet Archive.
A list, in no particular order, of 158 notable books you can borrow free from the Internet Archive. Fiction titles are in brown. The books on this list are in addition to the individual books featured in our Books to Read Free posts and in our Gallery of 19 More Notable Books You Can Read for Free and in our List of 63 More Great Books You Can Read for Free.
Sure it was a million years ago, but the Beatles are still interesting. Some of the Beatles resources in the Internet Archive are outside the mainstream and pretty worthwhile.
Borrow for free. Highlights of sex in Elizabeth I’s England: shenanigans in the royal household, courtesans, the selling of virginity, the horror of being a cuckold, serial seducers, homosexuality, pornography, licentious poetry, plays, and literature, cross-dressing, impotence, fashion, and syphilis.
Borrow for free. “Tasty” describes this colorful vegetarian cookbook with appealing recipes and beautiful photos from Mary McCartney, Paul and Linda’s daughter.
Borrow for free. As a child, acclaimed biographer Peter Ackroyd actually knew the young F. Scott Fitzgerald, who rented a house on Ackroyd’s family estate.
Borrow for free. From Gregorian chants to John Cage, this funny ebook about music history shares mindblowing, rarely seen information about the lives of musicians who helped shape music.
Borrow for free. An investigation of the history and ideas of a multitude of experiences that are denied by conventional reality.
Borrow for free. A fascinating look at the life of an extraordinarily gifted Frenchwoman who earned her living painting portraits of the aristocracy, fleeing the French Revolution to work her way through the courts of Italy, Austria, Russia, and England.
Creative Dreaming, by clinical psychologist Patricia Garfield, is a really useful, classic guide to creating a dream world that serves and is in harmony with your waking life. You can borrow it from the Internet Archive for up to 14 days.
Borrow for free. Ranging from “Make a Bomb in a Bag” to “Kiss Hello Like the French”, from “Cook Something in the Dishwasher” to “Construct Your Own Flying Machine”, there is truly something here to strike fear into any parent’s heart.
☀ You can borrow and read Off the Map free below. ☀ “Narrative historian” Fergus Fleming makes these adventure tales come alive. Reaching from the 13th century when Marco Polo traveled into the heart of the Mongol Empire, to 1928 when Umberto Nobile flew his airship (blimp) over the North Pole, Off the…
Read More “Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration • by Fergus Fleming” »
Borrow for free. “There is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it — from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons — are [like Princess Leia’s hologram] only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time. The main architects of this astonishing idea are two of the world’s most eminent thinkers: University of London physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein’s and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists; and Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University.”
Borrow for free. Kevin Callan shares dozens of intriguing and often very funny tales in this ebook of wilderness camping stories.
Borrow for free. The dozens of profiles of great eccentrics include many well-known people such as W.C. Fields, Henry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover, Nikola Tesla, and Edgar Allen Poe, along with people you’ve never heard of who have done zany things, such as Matthew (Lord Rokeby) Robinson, who spent every day, from dawn to dusk, immersed in the sea.
Borrow for free. A collection of interviews with wives of celebrities, focused on the challenges of being in a marriage with someone who’s much more celebrated than you are, but covering a lot of interesting territory.
As you might expect, there is no shortage of books about scandals. Here are some that are less tawdry yet still compelling.
Borrow for free. Jacques Vallée is the French scientist that the character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is based on. For decades, he has been looking at the UFO phenomenon from a radically different perspective from the mainstream, and this book is a collection of accounts of incidents involving extra-terrestrial visitations throughout history.
Borrow for free. This collection of two dozen articles and stories is made up of finalists and award-winners of the National Magazine Awards, including pieces by Paul Theroux, Barbara Kingsolver, and Christopher Hitchens.
While a few are brilliant, most single-panel cartoons don’t strike me as being funny or clever, and judging from the cartoon collection books I’ve found on the Internet Archive, they were even less so in olden days. Still, I could be wrong. And also I did have fun browsing through these books.
Borrow for free. “The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. It also means defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking, but it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.”
Borrow for free. “Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that,” says film director Federico Fellini. “No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision.”
Borrow for free. Lisa Law is a skillful interviewer who brings out the shining personalities and wild reminiscences of these counterculture trailblazers, as she talks to them about the 60s.
Borrow for free. Dorothy Parker is famous for her wit, and her poems are thoroughly enjoyable despite her tendencies towards doomed love affairs, depression, and cynicism.
You can borrow and read The Sun Also Rises free. Ernest Hemingway can write, no doubt about it. The Sun Also Rises was his first novel, and by all accounts it was a huge struggle for him, requiring lots of drafts and rewriting, but he does seem to have gotten it right.
First, here’s a summary of Freya Stark’s life, so you can see if you want to read about her adventures in detail.
Mandalas are widely known as symbols that assist with meditation and concentration, but there are complexities and profundities of meaning, if you want to dig a little deeper.
World-changing advice: Be your own best friend. Love yourself unconditionally. All of these books about how to love yourself are good, in different ways. They take varying approaches. You might like to browse through and see if anything calls to you.
Borrow for free. The first volume in the 20-book Brother Cadfael medieval murder mystery series. The Prior of Shrewsbury Abbey in 12th-century Shropshire, England, wants the abbey to acquire a saint’s bones for the chapel there, so as to encourage pilgrimages and thus increase glory and earnings. When he can’t find a saint available locally, he travels to Wales to disinter Saint Winifred….
The Internet Archive offers lots of self-esteem books to borrow. Here are some of my favorites. They offer a variety of ways of looking at, and achieving, a healthy relationship with yourself.
Borrow for free. Over 80 interviews with people prominent in fairly recent history: Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Mao Tse-Tung, William Burroughs, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Groucho Marx….