Stefy Reads

Welcome to my book blog! Click the menu for links to what I'm currently reading, my other blogs, and more! Note: This blog is named after Maxon and America, King and Queen of Illea, from the book series The Selection by Kiera Cass

[kingandqueenofillea]

From my current read Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian:

“The series maybe isn’t what Simon would call good, or maybe his definition of good is useless. It’s fun, the way novelty fringe is fun, the way Eurovision is fun, the way peculiar flavors of Oreos are fun. Simon is having fun, despite being a bit of a wreck, and it’s because he’s given his entire flawed brain over to another universe. He feels like he’s nurturing some freaky little part of his soul that he’s neglected since high school.”

[fawnpalmer]

quarterly reminder that if i reblog something ai-generated it is 110% and always an accident and for the love of god please tell me so i can delete it from my blog

[my-love-all-mine]

The fanfiction I write might be a little bad but at least it’s not ai and I stand by that

[midnight-sunnydale]

Edward Cullen text posts part 2

[1000-life-hacks]

[archeologist-prophet]

Lovely to see we have spaces where you can gain access to so much literature!

[jackthebard]

Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.

[sourcedumal]

[shuttersmiley]

Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.

[foxsan-deactivated20140515]

Isaac Asimov.

[sim0nbaz-deactivated20170205]

yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point

[fancyeliza-deactivated20200804]

If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels

Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it

even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?

PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame

[cryptovalid]

And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.

[gunthatshootsennui]

Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:

Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.

[deathcomes4u]

Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.

[velocigrey-deactivated20160825]

You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.

[geekinlibrariansclothing]

Got that?

[bettieleetwo]

Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it

[la-knight]

I have literally been telling people this for over a year.

[athenadark]

the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman

[thepsychicclam]

The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).

[ladynorbert]

The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.

[kingandqueenofillea]

I read a lot of smut and my biggest pet peeve is when they refer to a body part as sex like just say clitoris or vulva or whatever like it just feels weird to me

[linguisticparadox]

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

[ri-writing]

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

[linguisticparadox]

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

[wanderingchaos]

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

[athenadark]

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

[the-haiku-bot]

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[elfwreck]

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

[noswordinourlake]

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

[stevespookington]

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

[rostekhorn]

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

[trambrosia]

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

[anarchistmemedistro]

[do-you-have-a-flag]

[criminalizegolf]

> read library book

> it's good

Thank you library

[fiercestpurpose]

> read library book

> it's bad

Thank you library for saving me from buying it :)

[official-library-posts]

official library post

[kingandqueenofillea]

Working on my reading journal 🩷

Here are my 2026 reads page and favorite narrators page

[ocean-glint]

i love reading, i love thinking about what i am currently reading, i love thinking about what i am going to read next, i love being privileged enough to be able to read, read, read, and read so much that i never tire of it

[kingandqueenofillea]

When one of the people in my book says “we’ll take MY plane” and reminds me they’re all billionaires

[kingandqueenofillea]

I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life listening to Aiden Snow read me billionaire romances

[rheanaryas]

female awesome meme; [4/5] female characters who are unfairly hated: bella swan (twilight saga)

what did you expect? coffins and dungeons and moats? no, not the moats.

[kingandqueenofillea]

Please send me book recs of things that will make me feel like the game changers series makes me feel