Merlin, This is so frigging awesome, THANK YOU

Merlin…great idea.

Like you, I read a lot of books, including a lot of challenging work, in college. I stopped reading such challenging, canonical texts after school, becuase I just can’t keep concentrating on Lit-uh-ruh-ture when there are easier good reads out there. I need the structure of a class, and deadlines, to slog through anything older than 1950 or so. What’s really interesting about this to me, then, is that this is a bit of a Great Books Gateway Drug. Thanks!

It works! It works! I’m about seven chapters through Crime and Punishment over the last month and a half.

This is a great addition for my life because I am currently juggling 5-8 books right now and it’s almost a struggle when you don’t have a reading schedule yet want to read all of them. Let me rephrase, “I am attempting reading 5-8 books right now.” The point being, when my browser opens up “netvibes” every morning, I will always be reminded to finish a chunk of a book and will also already have my progress in front of me based on the part# I am on. Moreover, I decided to start on a book with a small number of parts, numerically 24 because they say it takes 21 days to get into a habit. Oh, and speaking of habits Merlin, a great way to track new habits among a lot of others things is this software I discovered called Sciral Consistency. It works absolutely great for me with auto startup and I am able to monitor the habits that I want and have a checklist on whether I accomplished that or not.

I’d really like an RSS of the talking book version so I can listen to it everyday on the bus…

This is a cool idea. I can see book groups forming around this - everyone signs up for the same book, then discusses each segment as it comes in.

If you are looking for a similar experience but like horror novels, David Wellington has published a series of books online, which have subsequently been published as books. I especially recommend “Monster Island” and “13 Bullets.” This is classic pulpy serialized fiction. His new book, “Plague Zone” has a new installment posted every Mon-Wed-Fri. The site is www.brokentype.com

Something similar is at www.dearreader.com where you get the first chapter of a new book each week over the course of five days.. you sign up for the categories that interest you, business, romance, etc.. you won’t get the whole book, but enough to determine if it’s something you’d want to continue reading by buying the book or visiting the library.. I use it to keep abreast of business titles— new and recent that I might have missed.