Lookin' for words in all the wrong places

November 25, 2009 12:53 PM

Between my iPhone's Stanza app and the loooooong quiet days ahead of me in the office during the holiday season, I'd like to read some stuff online. Any suggestions?

I'm basically looking for good stories: things with a bit of a narrative that will keep me wondering what happens next. They should be easy to get into and not particularly deep (I will likely be interrupted a lot).

Nonfiction: longer articles with a bit of a twist, like New Yorker or Vanity Fair pieces about interesting people or events. Not commentary (unless it has some sort of unique backstory).

Fiction I've already enjoyed on Project Gutenberg: anything by the Brontes and L.M. Montgomery. I've also read pretty much everything that appeals to me (thus far) in the Harlequin online reads library, although I don't generally read paper romance novels.

I've seen this thread and this one too.

Thanks!

posted by Madamina to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Finding good fiction (for all our various deeply personal and individualistic versions of good) online can be a challenge; celestial jukebox, the long tail of Sturgeon's Law, what we need is a goddamn curator up in this joint, etc. --The Webfiction Guide isn't up to this Herculean task by any means, but at least it's a start.

(I should maybe admit I have a serial listed there? Maybe I should. But if I don't tell you which one it's hardly self-linking, right?)
posted by kipmanley at 1:29 PM on November 25, 2009

manybooks.net has some, including the Charles Willeford "Wild Wives" pulp I just linked to.
posted by chairface at 2:22 PM on November 25, 2009

Discover Magazine is interesting.
posted by lhude sing cuccu at 2:41 PM on November 25, 2009

If you like short stories, I've been enjoying the Fifty-two Stories Blog from Harper publishing. They have one newly published or older story every week. They're almost done, but they have archives for the past year.
posted by bluefly at 5:16 PM on November 25, 2009

Everybody likes P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen of course. I've also recently discovered Giles Lytton Strachey, who wrote amusingly arch biographies (and I'm not normally a big biography reader).
posted by paulg at 6:19 PM on November 25, 2009

Surprised no one has mentioned Give Me Something To Read. Non-fiction. Not all of it will meet your criteria, but hopefully some of it will.

Affiliated with Instapaper.
posted by backwards guitar at 6:27 AM on November 26, 2009 [1 favorite]