From My Sickbed

(John Singer Sargent, Woman Reading in a Cashmere Shawl.)

It's my vacation, and I've been sick for two weeks. It's a virus, so I just have to wait it out here at my in-laws' house. Books are getting me through it, the way books always get me through everything.

Especially free ebooks. Free ebooks, I love you! You are the best thing about the internet. I'm 600 miles away from my own bookshelves and beloved public library, but I'm still reading all the books I want, and they are amazingly good.

(This blog is about free books, but I'm still kind of tempted to buy this.)

Of course it helps if you love the kind of books that end up in the public domain. Fortunately I am obsessed with novels from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, especially novels for girls or for children in general. Currently at the top of my Kindle library are: E. Nesbit, Jean Webster, Gene Stratton-Porter, L.M. Montgomery, Maud Hart Lovelace, Louisa May Alcott. I read those authors when I was little, and I’m reading them again now that I’m in my 30s. They never seem to get old.

 Here I am, four years old, lost in a book. I’ve loved reading all my life. I was probably eight or nine when I discovered the treasure trove of books in my grandmother’s attic. I had never seen any of the titles before. Some were classics: An Old Fashioned Girl, Understood Betsy, David Copperfield. And then there were Prudence of the Parsonage, A Sweet Girl Graduate, A Girl in Ten Thousand, The Lilac Lady, and most of the Ruth Fielding series, in which Ruth Fielding solves mysteries with her friends while also being a girl pilot, movie director, cattle rancher, and so forth.

No one bothered me when I was up in the attic. I stayed up there alone for hours reading those books. Now most of them are in my parents’ house, on this bamboo bookcase. And they are also on my laptop, because almost all of them are now free ebooks. Any time I want entertainment, nostalgia, comfort, or amusement, I have them at my fingertips.

 Free ebooks, this is my love letter to you.

(If you are really into school stories from 1891, you can even buy this image as a poster.)