A little over a year ago, we brought you a roundup of great Science Fiction & Fantasy classics available on the web. The free collection included everything from Aldous Huxley reading a dramatized version of Brave New World, to a BBC radio broadcast of Isaac Asimov’s influential Foundation Trilogy, to an audiobook version of C.S.

How’s that New Year’s resolution going? You know, the one where you promised to make better use of your free time and learn new things? If you’re off track, fear not. It’s only April. It’s not too late to make good on your promise. And we can help.

It’s in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, right in the midst of the Berkshires. Needless to say, not a drop of water in sight.
Now that I’ve got your attention, let me give you an update on The Moby Dick Big Read project.

Woody Guthrie may have written as many as 3,000 folk songs, but he didn’t limit himself there. He also managed to write a novel called House of Earth, which only last month saw the light of day.

In an article originally published in book collector’s journal Firsts Magazine, bookseller James M. Dourgarian includes a set of records called “The Columbia Literary Series” (1953) as an essential part of the “completist’s Steinbeck collection.

The English logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was convinced that the religions of the world are not merely untrue, but that they do grievous harm to people. That conviction is very much in evidence in his 1927 speech, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” read here in its complete form by the British actor Terrence Hardiman.

Having not seen the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, I am required to withhold judgment. As a Tolkien reader from the first time I could struggle through the prose, I’ll admit, I’ve been on tenterhooks (and not all reviews fill me with hope).

Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not.

Today is the birthday of the writer Joseph Conrad. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzniowski on December 3, 1857 in Berdichev, in the Polish Ukraine.

We’ve previously featured the free, downloadable stories and novels by author Neil Gaiman available online in video, audio, and text format.