These are a Few of My Favorite (online) Things (prompted by a request from Corin Goodwin)
Booklists:
1. 51 Must Read Chapter Books for Kids (Not Your Typical Book List) - http://www.whatdowedoallday.com/must-read-chapter-books-for-kids/
2. Top 100 Picture Books Poll Results — @fuseeight A Fuse #8 Production - http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2012/07/06/top-100-picture-books-poll-results/
3. Top 100 Chapter Book Poll Results — @fuseeight A Fuse #8 Production - http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2012/07/07/top-100-chapter-book-poll-results/
4. 50 Essential Science Fiction Books - http://www.abebooks.com/books/features/50-essential-science-fiction-books.shtml?fb_action_ids=10204286708155522&fb_action_types=og.comments
5. http://time.com/100-best-childrens-books/
6. http://time.com/100-best-young-adult-books/
7. New York Public Library's top 100 Children's Books - http://www.nypl.org/childrens100
8. Josh Shaine's response to the NYPL list - http://joshwriting.livejournal.com/230068.html - Not everybody will agree that these are all children's books. Nu?
9. 20 New Classics Every Child Should Own - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-b-nielsen/20-new-classics-every-chi_b_6512072.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063
10. 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors - http://bookriot.com/2016/05/02/100-must-read-sci-fi-fantasy-novels-by-female-authors/
Free Books!
1. http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/index.html
2. http://sacred-texts.com/index.htm - the first two have a lot of overlap, but also a lot of distinct materials.
3. Encyclopedia Mythica - https://pantheon.org/ - "Encyclopedia Mythica is an internet encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, and religion," with more than 10,000 articles about peoples from all over the globe.
4. Perseus Digital Library - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ - English and Latin or Greek versions of texts, art images, and links to many other such resources.
5. Gnostic Society Library: Sources on Gnosticism and Gnosis - http://gnosis.org/library.html
6. http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=startseite&l=en&projekt= - Munich DigitiZation Center, 900,000 books, 3D images, maps, and much more
7. ICDL - International Children's Digital Library - http://en.childrenslibrary.org/ - This includes children's books in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mongolian, Arabic, Farsi, and more. They also have instructions in many languages, including Korean and Russian.
8. LibriVox - https://librivox.org/ - Public Domain Audio Books
Speculative Fiction Resources (incl. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Alternate Histories, Future Histories, Utopias, and Dystopias):
1. http://dailysciencefiction.com - A new SF & F short story every weekday, with the past stories archived online. Very variable quality, from the purely amateurish to the multiply-published professional.
2. https://www.baen.com/allbooks/category/index/id/2012 - The Baen Free Library currently has 70 free books, including novels, short story collections, and non-fiction articles. The titles in the library vary over time, but as they are downloadable, one need not miss out on any that one wishes to read.
3. Free Speculative Fiction Online: Links to Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories Online - https://www.freesfonline.de/ - A collection of links on other sites, including a couple already listed but also many magazines and other internet locations.
4. http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/category/fiction/science-fiction/ - Lightspeed Magazine is an online journal. This link is to the archived short stories from both SF (more than 400) and Fantasy (more than 300).
5. http://ebooks.thefifthimperium.com/Gutenberg%20SF%20200703%20CD/Gutenberg%20SF%20200703/ - This is a curated collection from Project Gutenberg's Science Fiction Bookshelf, winnowing out some of the dross. 165 books (currently) have made the cut. There are some good books excluded, but not many, I would say. (It was originally set up for one to download the entire set onto a CD and it even provides the CD label!). They can be downloaded in a single chunk, if one wishes to.
6. http://www.shortstoryguide.com/science-fiction-short-stories-fantasy/ - This is provided separately, but the master site is the true gem! It also has dystopian and steampunk short story categories. See below for an explanation.
7. https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/54esx9/science_fiction_novels_that_focus_on_racism/ - just like it says.
8. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/ - Formerly a print book, subsequently moved to the internet and then somewhat updated from time to time.
9. http://youngpeoplereadoldsff.com/ - Young People Read Old SFF has some relatively young readers given some old, ostensibly good, Science Fiction and Fantasy to read. This has their reactions to it.8a. http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php - The Encyclopedia of Fantasy never got the extensive revisions that SFE did. It has been recreated online, but is far less comprehensive, more's the pity.
Other free literary sites of merit:
Short Stories Online | Examples, Database, Directory, and Lists - http://www.shortstoryguide.com/ - Just what it sounds like. "Short Story Guide is designed to help middle school / high school teachers, students, and reading lovers find the right story and allow them to easily read online short stories free, where possible. Short stories are categorized by subject, theme, place, author and type." There are divisions for middle school, high school, and college students, as well. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of short stories are linked in a few dozen genres and sub-genres. There are stories mentioned without links, as well, when a particular story deserves mention even though the author had no resource for it.
Decameron Web | The Project - http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/the_project/ - This is a brilliant website that examines Boccaccio's Decameron: "Boccaccio's collection of 100 tales told by ten young Florentines over ten days as a game and pass time while in flight from the devastating plague of 1348. The Decameron defined the standard of Italian prose narrative for four centuries and deeply influenced Renaissance drama. It is also a goldmine for information about everyday life in the late Middle Ages." Beyond "just" the stories themselves, website looks at the literature, history, religion, arts, and society of the time, as well as the plague itself.
Parody and Satire - F07 - https://1drv.ms/f/s!AjHB5DoRYLJEixrEk9N-lR59zJcw - This is my personalcollection of parody and satire material from various sources on the web and off. It's far faster to share this way than to pick through it, but I would note within it, in particular, A Parody Anthology and A Satire Anthology, both collected/edited by Carolyn Wells, a prolific and diverse author and poet from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries.
OWL // Purdue Writing Lab - https://owl.purdue.edu - very useful for some writers, including those trying to follow a specific style guide or those struggling with grammar.
UW-Madison Writing Center Writer's Handbook: index - https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/index.html - very useful for doing literary analysis and other kinds of writing. Different strengths than OWL.
Random Reference Sites:
Online Etymology Dictionary - http://www.etymonline.com - This is one of the best online etymology resources I have found online. The maintainer has also been responsive to updates when I have provided them.
OneLook Reverse Dictionary and Thesaurus - http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml - "This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words."
Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145,000 words that you explore using an interactive map. - https://www.visualthesaurus.com/ - A fascinating look at words through a 3 dimensional representation of the relationships between them.
TIED Projects - https://tied.verbix.com/project/index.html - The Indo-European Database (TIED) is an inelegant, but enormously information-dense collection about languages, words, cultures, and history. Word of the Day, Language of the Day, Phonetics, Migrations, Scripts, and more.
Alan Lomax Archive - http://research.culturalequity.org/audio-guide.jsp - "Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker." (Wikipedia) This site has thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded, ready to be shared as he envisioned (before the internet was close to being a reaility).
Going up a level to CulturealEquity.org will give you other interesting items, but it wasn't my favorite, so you get this link. :-)
1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. - http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline - No secrets. Just what it says.
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives - http://nlvm.usu.edu/ - Just what it sounds like, amazingly enough. PreK through 12th grade, except Calculus, really.
http://www.keithcom.com/atoms/index.php - Build an Atom - No, really!
WHKMLA : Historical Atlas, ToC - http://www.zum.de/whkmla/histatlas/haindex.html - One of many wonderful historical atlases on the web. Do a search on the term in Google Books and you will find more.
Civic Mirror: Simulated Nation Building for Middle Schoolers | Edutopia - https://www.edutopia.org/blog/civic-mirror-simulated-nation-building-aaron-kaio?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow - "In the Civic Mirror, students become citizens of a new country that they set up and create for themselves. The simulated country runs through a website managed by Reagan Ross, the project's creator. Once in the country (represented by a 36-hexagon map), students are able buy property, run businesses, participate in a government, develop resources and industries, and really anything else they can imagine." It's akin conceptually to a LARP crossed with a Model UN, I guess.