Adult Reading Club English

If you’re looking for free English stories to read online, Project Gutenberg is a great starting point – there are thousands of free classics here to choose from. For more contemporary stories, Wattpad is great to look around, and fanfiction is catered for on AO3. If you’re after some short science fiction or fantasy stories, then you should check out ‘Tor.com’ for free reads online, as well as libraries offering free digital loans from Open Library, and stories from Medium’s creative section, each story briefly told to read online. There are lots of choices online here, so look around to find out what type of stories online that you enjoy most.

The Poetry Foundation is an absolute dream for poetry enthusiasts, with a huge online archive of poems to read, search by poet, subject or even mood. Beautifully designed, the site encourages plenty of browsing and is likely to reveal many unexpected treasures. You can easily move from classic sonnets by established poets to brand new award-winning poems by contemporary writers, plus there’s scope for audio and critical essays as well as the poems themselves. A really deep, rich and entirely free resource, held solely for the love of poetry. I find it a calm, peaceful ‘reading space’ of a rather different sort to my normal reading habitat.

The setting can be a character too! I loved reading The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali, a heartbreakingly beautiful love story set in 1950s Tehran. The story is surrounded by a beautifully described shop, the city and food, and even if there are some cultural references that a reader is not familiar with, they are all explained throughout the story. What I found beautiful was the universal love story of a connection that is lost and found after decades. For a beginner in reading English, such rich sensory description of a story makes the language come alive in a new way. You are not just reading words on pages, you are smelling the saffron and feeling the heat. It transports you to another world.

The academia lit lover may find academic and literary novels released as open access by the publisher, including works supported by public funds. These are often released as PDFs directly off a publisher or author’s website. Unlike typical fiction released as open access, these titles are not promoted in the same way and thus are hidden from the general public. Yet, dense, award-winning literary fiction of the highest academic status is released for free. Unlike the numerous free titles on Amazon, these are released slowly and of high prestige.

Within the romance novels field I currently specialize in translated novels originally published in other languages (Korean webnovels, Japanese light novels, Chinese danmei novels). Getting hold of a free legal copy of such a novel is not as easy as it is with English language novels.

Most webnovels are serialized, and even completed ones are rarely translated and made available for free, especially when they are official translations. (Exceptions are made when there is an anime adaptation for example.) Once more, your best bet for accessing free translated romance would be your local library, as some systems have started adding titles from platforms such as OverDrive’s Global Chinese collection, or even partner with comic and app services that offer translated webnovels.

Demand for translated novels is up in recent years, but as of now there is still not as much access as there is to English-language romance novels. Free samples of novels from official aggregator sites for translated novels are typically how you can look at free samples of a specific sub-genre before you buy it.

I have had no success with joining regular book clubs, but recently I joined a silent book club chapter. It’s a really cool concept. The group meets at a cafe or bar and briefly discusses what everyone is reading, then proceeds to silently read their own book for an hour. After that hour they may return to discuss what they read, but it’s really up to everyone individually. Because there is no set book for the group, there’s no pressure to finish a book that you’re not enjoying. The purpose is more to allow people who love to read to come together and have others around to discuss and share their love of reading. The Salt Lake City chapter has been adding members recently. I think it would be a great fit for introverted book lovers who want to meet up with other book lovers who do not feel the need to “perform” for the group. You just bring your current read and enjoy the company of other book lovers in a quiet setting.

Otaku no Video is an older OVA that is sort of a documentary on the rise of the “otaku king.” Of course it would be all celebratory towards the end, but the “interviews” with live-action, 80s-shaded “real” otaku in the thing have that same cringeworthy, uncompromising authenticity that was the hallmark of Dorkin’s comic. The stories that make up the main body of the thing are sort of triumphant in hindsight, but the general take is that the main character’s an obsessive outcast, and the thing looks like a sort of time capsule of Eltingville-style intense fandom viewed by outsiders with revulsion and disgust.

Follow the metadata. So the book was free and you liked it? Look up the publisher (e.g. Aethon Books for sci-fi, Moonflower Books for romance) and check out their other books, including those that are currently free or even cheaper than that. The publisher’s name as displayed on the Amazon book page links to the publisher’s webpage, displaying a complete list of published books by that publisher. Such a list will typically contain not only other free books by your favorite author but also other titles by other good writers, all of whom have been vetted by an editor you seem to like. That makes for a nice cluster of good reads, more so than just a list of books by a single author.

Club 22 has really wowed me with their art style, and I’m really interested to check out their free options, even though they are mostly pretty fragmented. I would want official samples to be able to see if it is worth me buying the rest of the series. As long as it blows me away I’ll save up to buy it, Treat yo’ self!

There are also a number of digital resources where one can search for upcoming story hour events held by affiliates of Drag Story Hour. The official website for Drag Story Hour (dragstoryhour.org) includes a chapter locator and event calendar for upcoming events held by affiliates of Drag Story Hour held nationwide.

An additional angle would be to search for “All-Ages Drag Brunch” in your city and look for restaurants or community spaces that are hosting such events on weekend mornings. While it may not be exactly the type of event you’re looking for, many all-ages Drag Brunches include a storytime segment as part of the event and are a fun, festival-like occasion complete with pancakes.