Give us this day our DailyLit: read the classics you've always meant to get around to--by email

October 18, 4:36 AMBook ExaminerMichelle Kerns

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Mark Twain's pithy definition of a classic--"A book people praise and don't read"--is all too true for even the most devoted of modern bibliophiles.

If you're like me, you've always meant to get around to reading Tom Jones or The Last of the Mohicans or The Count of Monte Cristo, but, what with mountains of new releases beckoning from the bookstore shelves, re-reading old favorites like Pride and Prejudice or Harry Potter, and wallowing in the delights of modern genre-literature (personally, I'm a sucker for British murder mysteries, of which there are mounds) those great books of the past keep getting relegated to the bottom of the stack.

Yet, regardless of how much time it takes (Seconds? Minutes? Hours?) we all read our email. Show me a man who can delete an unread email and I'll show you a soul of steel. This modern obsession with email coupled with an alarming decrease in the number of people reading classic literature is what prompted the birth of DailyLit, a website that breaks unabridged novels up into bite-sized portions and emails them to subscribers. Simply choose a book from their list, decide how you would like the segments emailed to you (daily; only on weekdays; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only), provide your email address and ta-da! You're plowing through James Joyce's Ulysses like nobody's business.

So, what's the catch? None really. O.K., so some of the more modern titles (Skinny Bitch in the Kitch; How to Lose Friends and Alienate People;  The Three-Martini Play Date) do require payment (generally within the $10.95 to $4.95 range). However, books considered free domain--and that includes an astonishingly large number of those classic books that the nagging little voice in your head harps on you for not reading--are, well, free. In other words, you can finally conquer Plato's Republic, War and Peace, or Heart of Darkness, by doing nothing other than reading your email.

This may sound ridiculously lazy; and if it does, you are 100% correct. Yet, it takes advantage of one of those unspoken laws of human existence: that if a person can manage to avoid effort, they will.

Case in point: I have vowed for more years than I care to recall to read through all of Emily Dickinson's poems. I want to read the poems; I own her complete works; in fact, if I turn my head slightly to the left at this very moment (I won't because guilt will instantly set in) I can even see the big, fat green volume on my shelf. However, I still haven't read them, and even if I made some sort of pact with myself to read just one poem every day, I know I would fail abysmally.

It's no surprise then that the first book I subscribed to when I discovered DailyLit was The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Each day, a different poem is emailed to me and--wonder of wonders--I read it! I relish the thought that without a smidgen of effort on my part, I will finally read all of Ms. Dickinson's poetry. In fact, I plan on subscribing to several other DailyLit offerings just for the pure joy of getting through books I never thought I'd read.

Take a look at DailyLit's substantial catalog  HERE. And if you do sign up, let me know what you're reading by leaving a comment here or emailing me at michellekerns@surewest.net. And no, to all of you cynics out there (of whom I am chief), I am not affiliated with DailyLit in any way. I am simply a lit geek enthusing over a great way to get more people reading.