Category: books

God Is an Astronaut: Biblical Descriptions of God, Angels, and Divine Chariots

By Gayla Groom. Free to read as a web page. A couple of decades ago, I had a UFO experience that shifted my reality. Since I thereafter knew that (at least some) UFOs were real, I looked at ancient stories from a different perspective/reality. I became fascinated by the descriptions in the Torah/Bible that, from my new point of view, clearly described Yahweh as an “ancient astronaut.” I collected together all the relevant Bible verses and stories, along with lots of great art illustrating them, and shared that in this book.

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More Great Books to Read for Free

All of these books can be borrowed from the Internet Archive by anybody anywhere. All it takes is an email address to open an account. Depending on the book: 1. you can borrow by the hour (and read online) or 2. you can borrow for 14 days (in which case you can also download if you want) or 3. you can read and download at any time without borrowing (as the book has no copyright).

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The Brother Cadfael Medieval Mystery Series, by Ellis Peters

I’ve read the entire 21-volume Brother Cadfael series twice. Set in a 12th-century monastery and surrounding towns, it’s never too violent or horrible, and is well-written and entertaining. The Internet Archive has multiple copies of most of these books. Whenever possible, I’ve linked to a copy that’s available for 14-day borrow.

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Books About Sleep That You Can Borrow

I’m yawning, writing this article. (Has anyone put together a montage of yawns to show to insomniacs?) These books about sleep (and many more) are available to borrow for free from the Internet Archive.

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Unusual Beatles Resources

Sure it was a million years ago, but the Beatles are still interesting. Some of the Beatles resources in the Internet Archive are outside the mainstream and pretty worthwhile.

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Sex in Elizabethan England • by Alan Haynes

Borrow for free. Highlights of sex in Elizabeth I’s England: shenanigans in the royal household, courtesans, the selling of virginity, the horror of being a cuckold, serial seducers, homosexuality, pornography, licentious poetry, plays, and literature, cross-dressing, impotence, fashion, and syphilis.

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The Holographic Universe • by Michael Talbot

Borrow for free. “There is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it — from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons — are [like Princess Leia’s hologram] only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time. The main architects of this astonishing idea are two of the world’s most eminent thinkers: University of London physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein’s and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists; and Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University.”

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Zanies: The World’s Greatest Eccentrics • by Jay Robert Nash

Borrow for free. The dozens of profiles of great eccentrics include many well-known people such as W.C. Fields, Henry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover, Nikola Tesla, and Edgar Allen Poe, along with people you’ve never heard of who have done zany things, such as Matthew (Lord Rokeby) Robinson, who spent every day, from dawn to dusk, immersed in the sea.

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Scandals

As you might expect, there is no shortage of books about scandals. Here are some that are less tawdry yet still compelling.

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Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds • by Jacques Vallée

Borrow for free. Jacques Vallée is the French scientist that the character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is based on. For decades, he has been looking at the UFO phenomenon from a radically different perspective from the mainstream, and this book is a collection of accounts of incidents involving extra-terrestrial visitations throughout history.

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Cartoon Collections

While a few are brilliant, most single-panel cartoons don’t strike me as being funny or clever, and judging from the cartoon collection books I’ve found on the Internet Archive, they were even less so in olden days. Still, I could be wrong. And also I did have fun browsing through these books.

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I, Fellini • by Charlotte Chandler

Borrow for free. “Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that,” says film director Federico Fellini. “No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision.”

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The Sun Also Rises • by Ernest Hemingway

You can borrow and read The Sun Also Rises free. Ernest Hemingway can write, no doubt about it. The Sun Also Rises was his first novel, and by all accounts it was a huge struggle for him, requiring lots of drafts and rewriting, but he does seem to have gotten it right.

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Mandala Books You Can Borrow

Mandalas are widely known as symbols that assist with meditation and concentration, but there are complexities and profundities of meaning, if you want to dig a little deeper.

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How to Love Yourself

World-changing advice: Be your own best friend. Love yourself unconditionally. All of these books about how to love yourself are good, in different ways. They take varying approaches. You might like to browse through and see if anything calls to you.

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A Morbid Taste for Bones • by Ellis Peters

Borrow for free. The first volume in the 20-book Brother Cadfael medieval murder mystery series. The Prior of Shrewsbury Abbey in 12th-century Shropshire, England, wants the abbey to acquire a saint’s bones for the chapel there, so as to encourage pilgrimages and thus increase glory and earnings. When he can’t find a saint available locally, he travels to Wales to disinter Saint Winifred….

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Maximize Your Self-Esteem

The Internet Archive offers lots of self-esteem books to borrow. Here are some of my favorites. They offer a variety of ways of looking at, and achieving, a healthy relationship with yourself.

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