Worthwhile Procrastination

Sometimes as a means of procrastinating I go to certain sites and look at free ebooks. I've downloaded a heap of books and short stories in the process many of which I'll never read but when the only cost is a click of the mouse and they take up no physical room and very little room in terms of file space I don't see the harm and those I do read are a bonus in many more ways than one.

I started off getting things by authors I knew or knew of and wanted to know - Wells, Verne, Lovecraft, Howard etc. But I found it took more time and was therefore a better form of procrastination to look into authors I'd never heard of before. As such I downloaded books that 'might be interesting'. Since doing that I've forgotten what most of them were and who the authors were too.

I have made some great discoveries this way though. Through a link I followed and a snippet someone had written about it I discovered Thomas Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, for instance. It's not what you might think, in fact it's open satire and quite droll at that. It's not even satirising Gothic fiction so much as society in Victorian England.

Currently I'm discovering The Lancashire Witches by Ainsworth. I'd forgotten this download entirely aside from the title being in my e-library. I didn't even know if it was a novel or some treatise on witchcraft in Lancashire. It's the former. A historical romance not unlike a Gothic romance, in fact very much like one.

So if you're going to procrastinate, make it worthwhile and get some books you never knew you wanted - or write a blog about doing it.

Keep dreaming.

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