Apprentice of the Universe

FAMOUS AUTHORS

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

TEXTBOOKS

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

MATH AND SCIENCE

FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.

Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.

Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.

Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.

FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.

Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.

Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.

International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.

Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.

Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.

Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.

The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.

Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.

PLAYS

ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.

Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.

Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”

ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.

The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.

Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.

Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.

Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.

The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.

Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.

John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.

SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.

Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.

ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.

Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.

Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.

Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.

KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.

Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.

Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.

Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.

Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.

Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.

Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.

Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.

CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.

HISTORY AND CULTURE

LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.

The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.

Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.

Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.

Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.

RARE BOOKS

Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.

Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.

2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.

Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.

Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.

Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.

Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.

MYSTERY

MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.

TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.

Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.

POETRY

The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.

Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.

Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.

Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.

QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.

CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.

PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.

MISC

Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.

World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.

DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.

A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.

Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.

ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.

Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.

@jackironsides you delight me and I wish to give enough context for everyone to enjoy (though I have never been in your morris team or any archaeology department)

STARTING WITH THE ASIDE:

this is just a strigil for horses

A strigil is a curved metal scraper to remove dirt and oil from the body, used by some ancient Romans.

AND NOW FOR THE MAIN POINT, A TIMELINE, FILLED IN WITH CONJECTURE:

Carboniferous period (like 300 million years ago), formation of the Durham/ Northumberland/ what-would-become-northeast-England coalfields

End of the last ice age (like 13000 years ago), start of continuous human habitation in what-would-become-England

1069-70, the Harrying of the North: William the Conqueror basically destroys northern England. Like, 75% of the people living there are just gone - some killed directly, far more displaced because their farms were destroyed, land remains unused for many years afterwards because there's just nobody there. Northern England for the next millenium has low population density and increased poverty compared to southern England.

Late 1700s to early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution: steam engines get going and England needs a lot of coal to power them. A lot of that coal comes from the northeast. Massive increase in northern English economy, entire pit villages spring up, still poverty but there is work to be had. Winding engines raise and lower cages of miners at shift change, with levels communicated via knocking or rapping a piece of metal sharply some number of times. I can find exactly zero photos of it online, but the string-operated "rapper" in place at Beamish Museum has the exact shape of "rapper" swords that we will get to shortly.

1842, the Mines and Collieries Act: children under 10 banned from underground work in the pits. Pit ponies to haul coal become far more common as a result. (The children still likely work in coal, still likely 12hr shifts at a time, but it's above-ground work like sorting the mined coal not below-ground work like hauling coal and opening/closing ventilation shafts. Except for in the many, many pits which carried on employing them illegally, of course.) Your pit pony, very dirty after their long day hauling coal, may be scraped clean with a flexible bit of metal as shown in the video, also the exact shape of "rapper" swords.

19th century generally, you finish your 12hrs or whatever down the pit, you go to the pub, there's no space, no money, just whatever music and people you can rustle up. A particular type of close-knit formation dance emerges using these two-handled flexible pieces of metal and the style becomes known as "rapper" or "rapper sword dance". To some extent it is developed out of other (rigid) longsword dances and morris dances, idk details, a lot of it is unknowable anyway.

20th century, like many English folk dances rapper mostly dies out and is later revived, I'm not sure if it has a perfectly continuous tradition. Also Maggie Thatcher closing the mines destroys northern economy again (though not as badly as William the Conqueror managed) and the social landscape changes drastically in ways I cannot speak to. Modern rapper teams exist all over the country (not that there are many of them - it is very nerdy even by folk dance standards) and continue to develop the dance in their own ways. Nevertheless, here is a modern performance:

Having characters joke around with each other, even in tense moments, even in genres that are about tension, even in Very Serious Pieces of Media, gives your characters a sense of camaraderie. And the type of joking they do can get across to the audience how well they know each other and what their relationship is without saying it (or can back up what they say). If they're actively teasing each other and making in-jokes about shared experiences, it shows/reinforces that they're friends or partners who've known each other for a while, they feel comfortable lightheartedly ribbing each other, and they have a deep well of embarrassing/funny moments to draw from. If they're making more general jokes that aren't about the person, but still referencing shared experiences, they may have known each other for a while, but aren't necessarily friends, maybe they're coworkers or classmates or a regular at a restaurant and their preferred server. If they're making more general jokes without references, they probably only recently met and have had generally positive interactions, or they might be complete strangers who are just trying to break the ice.

Going back to the "friends who have known each other for a long time and are comfortable ribbing each other and have a lot of material" for a moment, specifically in the context of things like horror and dramatic epics like I understand Dune to be? When you have characters who joke around with each other like that, when one or both of those characters stop joking? It can also help prime the audience to understand, "Oh shit, shit's getting real now."

Like, think about Merry and Pippin in Lord of the Rings. Both of them spend a lot of time joking around with each other and the other characters, even when they're on their way to Mordor. Both of them lose the jokes the moment things get dangerous, but are back at it when the tension's released again. In Fellowship, the jokes pretty much stop the moment they get chased into Moria and don't come back until they've come to terms with Gandalf's death enough to move on from Lothlorien. They're back to it until they get attacked by the Uruk-hai, then back to their shared mischievousness again once they once they figure out how to convince Treebeard to rally the Ents and attack Isengard and are fully joking around again by the time Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli catch up with them in the aftermath of the battle.

Then, everything goes to shit. Pippin consistently shows himself to be the kind of person who doesn't quite grasp the potential danger of things and places that he hasn't experienced himself. The combination of that alongside his natural curiosity leads to things like him fiddling with the arrow in the dwarf skeleton that overbalances it into the well it was perched on, alerting the goblins and balrog to their presence. And to him sneaking a peak at the palantir. In the moments after, when Gandalf is readying things to take Pippin with him to Gondor, Merry, who's been able to, if not fully grasp the gravity of what they've been doing, at least trust their companions' assessments, listen to what their saying and read between the lines. And we finally see the seriousness and danger of the situation really sink in for Pippin.

He's seen Sauron, had him in his head, he's not just a vague concept of a Bad Guy off in a part of the world that may not exist for all that it's effected Pippin before leaving the Shire. He's seen how scared Frodo's been, seen the danger he's been in because of the ring, and now there's a possibility that Sauron thinks Pippin has the ring. Even when they left their home, Pippin still had Merry and Frodo and Sam. But then things got too dangerous for Frodo to stay so he left and Sam went with him. Now, things are so dangerous, that Pippin has to leave his very best friend and, after all they've been through, it's hitting him that he might not ever see any of them again.

This is the moment where all the jokes stop. Pippin has moments of joy and happiness and relief and satisfaction. But we never get to see being that mischievous little jokester again. I hesitate to call it character growth, because that phrase usually implies a positive change from immaturity and/or selfishness into a character with more empathy and a sense of responsibility towards other characters. Because I would argue that Pippin already had those traits. He saw that Frodo and Sam were in trouble literally moments after he and Merry ran into them leaving the Shire and he didn't hesitate to help them escape. He fought his best in every battle he found himself in, attempted to avenge Boromir against enemies he knew far overpowered him. The change from the beginning of Fellowship to the end of Return of the King wasn't character growth, it is, and was framed as, a young man forever changed by the horrors he witnessed and experiences, horrors he never could have even imagined before leaving his home, but now weigh in his memories for the rest of his life.

Because Schindler's List is not a movie that has humor in it, not really and not that I can remember, but it does have moments of big suspense that are then followed with by relief. Like will they pull of what they need to pull off and when they do you have your moments of relief.

I think that a certain kinds of films that due to the subject and way that the film is doing it, have humor in it would be not appropriate in way. I'm not saying that these movies should be a bore or whatever I'm just saying that it depends on how it handles the subject matter.

Like Jojo Rabbit when is very specific direction and humor is in much of the film for a reason while Schindler's list is in a very diffrent direction and having humor of that kind would do it a disservice and not be appropriate.

I think that when humor is used really needs to depend on many factors including context and subject matter.

Most of the LotR characters are not prone to jokes. There's a pair of nice "comic relief" guys, but they're not in every scene. And everyone else is working on Very Serious Stuff; fighting orcs and nazgul and crawling through caves in the dark does not make for fun-times jokes. But there are light moments, in the middle of all the battle and hardship:

(See also: "NOBODY TOSSES A DWARF!")

You don't need characters to stop searching for the evil overlord to play a quick game of charades. You don't need a random encounter with a traveling jester. You need some moments, here and there, that say "these people had a life before all this heavy stuff started happening, and they hope to have a life later, and they will need to remember this all as something other than two days/six months/ten years of solid misery and hardship."

They need to contextualize it as part of their lives. We the audience need a way to believe the story, believe this is how these people deal with hardship... and people do not deal with hardship without humor. Not if there's a whole lot of people involved.

Also, having those moments of levity lets you have That One Guy who never laughs, who never smiles, who is Serious All The Time. If everyone is serious all the time, you don't get Spock. You don't get Lan Wangji. You don't get Aizawa.

And you lose any chance of the emotional impact on the audience when That One Guy breaks character and smiles about something.

"Everyone is all serious and intense because this is a very serious situation" is just bad storytelling. Maybe it could make sense in a single episode of a tv series, covering an event that takes place in two hours. It makes no sense at all in a movie that spans years of in-character time.

“In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” — Bertolt Brecht

Adding humor to dark settings does not make them lighter; it makes the shadows deeper so you can see how dark they really are.

She was amazed to discover that when he was saying, 'As you wish,' what he meant was, 'I love you.' And… she truly loved him back.

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.