About 14 minutes
Essays on God and Freud — Reading Notes
Science Fiction Utopias
3,172 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #30154
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Start with a reading choice
Three of the shortest recorded reading commitments in this catalog. Times are estimates, not quality ratings.
About 35 minutes
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences — Story, Setting & Ideas
Historical Psychological Social Fiction
7,999 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #3172About 37 minutes
National Apostasy Considered in a Sermon Preached in St. Mary's Church, Oxford Before His Majesty's Judges of Assize on Sunday July 14th 1833 — Reading Companion
Adventure Picaresque Fiction
8,377 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #49112Search the excerpts stored with this catalog
94 of 94 catalog books have a stored excerpt with a Gutenberg source record. Search covers these excerpts only, up to 6,000 characters per book. A missing match does not mean the phrase is absent from the full work.
Read a catalog excerpt example: Intentions — Reading Companion
Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis. ‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the langua…
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Compare two books and their available excerpts
| Book | Recorded words | Estimated minutes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essays on God and Freud — Reading Notes | 3,172 | 14 | Gutenberg #30154 |
| Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences — Story, Setting & Ideas | 7,999 | 35 | Gutenberg #3172 |
| National Apostasy Considered in a Sermon Preached in St. Mary's Church, Oxford Before His Majesty's Judges of Assize on Sunday July 14th 1833 — Reading Companion | 8,377 | 37 | Gutenberg #49112 |
How these choices and excerpts are prepared
Choices use stored catalog measurements. Estimates vary with reading speed. A shared category is a catalog label, not a claim that two books have the same argument or literary quality.
Search reads excerpt text stored with this catalog and links to its associated Gutenberg record. The connection is stored in the site database; this tool does not recheck that every excerpt is word-for-word identical to that external record. Excerpt search does not cover every chapter and does not verify historical publication dates.
Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-25. Coverage: 94 public books, 94 available source excerpts.
Do more with this book catalog
This library brings together 94 public-domain works across four categories, from adventure tales to speculative utopias. Use the tools below to find a book that fits your interests, compare titles side by side, or estimate how long a read will take. Every page is built to help you explore the collection with confidence.
The collection is organized into Adventure Picaresque Fiction, Fantasy Juvenile Worlds, Science Fiction Utopias, and Historical Psychological Social Fiction. Beyond categories, you can filter by subject headings, length, or reading time. Start with the Finder to match a book to your mood, or browse the catalog directly.
94
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
94
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Book Finder
Answer a few questions about your preferred category, length, and reading time. The Finder will suggest titles from the catalog that suit your tastes.
Compare Books
Select multiple works to see word count, reading time, and sentence complexity side by side. A practical way to weigh your options.
Reading Time Calculator
Estimate how long a specific book will take to read based on its word count and your pace. Adjust the pace to see how it changes.
Choosing a Path Through the Library
The TIFDE Public Domain Literature Library holds 94 works, and the catalog tools are built to help you find a book, compare a few, and plan your reading. None of them rate literary quality; they are practical instruments for navigating a collection that spans everything from 19th-century political speeches to philosophical letters.
A book like "Slavery: letters and speeches — Inside the Classic" (id 304) shows why the tools work best together. It is a long work, estimated at 857 minutes, with 35 text sections and an average sentence length of 26.3 words. The Finder can surface it, the Compare tool can set it beside a shorter text, and the Tracker can help you pace it. The tools are not separate; they are three views of the same decision.
Start with the Finder
The Finder is your first stop when you have a vague sense of what you want. You can filter by category, word-count length, estimated reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, subjects, or a preference for popular or hidden gems. If you have no preference on a criterion, that is fine; it will not penalize any book. The Finder is designed to narrow, not to dictate.
For example, if you are interested in 19th-century American politics, you might select the subject "United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865" and see what appears. The catalog has six books with that subject, including the speeches of Horace Mann. The Finder can bring such works to the surface, but it does not tell you which one to read; that is where comparison comes in.
Refine with Compare
Once you have two or three candidates, the Compare tool lays them side by side. It shows word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, subjects, and page information when available. These are descriptive metrics, not quality judgments. A high average sentence length does not mean a book is better or worse; it simply suggests a certain rhythm.
Consider comparing a long work like "Slavery: letters and speeches" with a much shorter one, such as "Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America" (id 216), which is about 18,000 words and 81 minutes. The difference in commitment is obvious, but the Compare tool also reveals differences in structure: the former has 35 text sections, the latter only 2. That can affect how you pace yourself.
The Compare tool is most useful when you are torn between two books that seem similar on the surface. It can expose differences in sentence flow or chapter rhythm that you might not notice until you are halfway through.
Plan with the Tracker
The Reading Tracker is for after you have chosen. It records your progress in pages, with a current page, total pages, and a daily page goal. If the catalog does not have a fixed page count, it estimates one using 250 words per page. You can override that with the page count from your own edition.
The Tracker also estimates remaining time and finish days based on your daily goal. It stores your history in the browser, so no account is needed. For a book like "Slavery: letters and speeches," which has an estimated 857 minutes, you can set a daily page goal and see when you might finish. The tools together form a workflow: find, compare, then track.