The Internet Archive has suspended waitlists for all books in its collection to create a National Emergency Library.
The duration of the NEL is tied to the duration of the pandemic in the United States, but the books are available to readers everywhere.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
A National Emergency Library
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comments: 10
Thanks, I shared this on my workplace's Facebook page.
--Fresca
I was gonna write “Pass it on” in the post, but you already did.
I signed up and tried to download a book but no joy. Maybe an overwhelmed system. And it's not like I'm short of them. For some reason, I had a sudden hankering to read My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which is buried in a box here somewhere.
Yeah, they might be overwhelmed. I haven’t tried myself, though I did get a Jane Eyre (for keeps) so that Elaine and I have the same pagination when we read it who-knows-when.
Jane Eyre!
Hey--that's a perfect book for plague times---she suffers through an epidemic of---is it typhoid? at her school and loses her best friend to it.
Have you seen (can you compile?) a books about people living through plague times?
Besides the obvious ("The Plague")
I can think of
"Doomsday Book", by Connie Willis--sci-fi-Lite about a woman in the future who time travels (accidentally) to 1348 England.
Oh---I just stopped and googled (not really as fun...) and here's a New Yorker article--you've probably seen it:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/30/what-our-contagion-fables-are-really-about
Yes, at the beginning. Elaine and I figured that if we’re going to read Wide Sargasso Sea, we’d better go back to Jane Eyre.
I would think first of The Plague, but I have to admit, I don’t want to revisit it now. But we are reading Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, which seems to be a good fit.
I appreciated Wide Sargasso Sea.
Possibly weird thing: When I was much younger I'd never heard of the Sargasso Sea (to my conscious knowledge), then had a very powerful dream about the "cold Saragasso Sea."
That wouId be some exceptionally precognitive dreaming. :)
Tuberculosis affected the Bronte sisters, and even into the early 1900's was a highly contagious plague. My father's eldest brother died of it at age 18.
One of my great-grandfathers, twenty-seven, in 1896.
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