In my travels across the Internet I came across this wonderful site, Project Gutenberg, which offers free downloads of eBooks. The 20,000 books are all classic titles that aren’t copyrighted in the U.S.

The titles range from The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (text only, unfortunately, so we miss Leonardo’s fascinating sketches) to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I tried a few titles and I found that when you first click on the download link, it doesn’t download to your computer. Instead, you see the complete text in your browser. Then, I’m assuming (I didn’t try it) you can do a “Save As” to bring the text to your hard drive, if you’d like to load it on to your portable.

Or, you can skip downloading it and just print out the text and read it on good old fashioned paper.

I clicked on Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, with its classic first sentence. I love the sense of rhythm in his long and windy open:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”