Daily Literature  

It can be hard sometimes to finish a novel, or even start one, when you're in college, and I assume beyond. It seems like there's always something else to do, whether it's spend time with friends and family, study and/or work, tidy up, whatever it is that takes up your free time. Take naps...

I still managed to get through a reasonable amount of literature, between class assignments and textbooks, books I would grab along with my textbooks from the book store, checkouts from the public or school library. It's always haphazard, but it's something.

And now there's a new something, something that appeals deeply to my Internet-indebted soul. It's called Daily Lit, and the premise is that you can receive snippets of literary works on the daily. There are two options: a feed reader, or email. Either way is easy enough; I use Google Reader and get an updated chapter/poem/lengthy paragraph every day at 3 am. The other way to do it is have an email sent at a designated time.

It's still a bit haphazard, as the works they have available are a somewhat short list, when compared to, say, the downtown Phoenix library. But the price and convenience can't be beaten.

Two key features: you can read as many works as you like, and you can refresh feeds as often as you finish them. The former refers to the fact that Daily Lit has reference works, foreign language novels, and poetry in addition to English language non-fiction and novels. These days, I receive a poem from William Blake, a random quotation from a work called "Many Thoughts of Many Minds", and a chapter or two of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman each day. The latter feature means that as soon as I read the sentence or two that is a random quote, I can click a link to send the next quote to my reader.

Whether you just want to re-read Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" in four installments, or care to spend two years slogging through "War and Peace" or "Les Mis", Daily Lit is probably worth your time if you check your email every day or if you already are invested enough in the Internet to use a feed reader.

Here's what the Daily Lit interface looks like for my profile: