Finally I have a hobby besides snorting cockatiel dust and tearing at my cuticles: proofing texts for Project Gutenberg. I started with a beginner's text, a brilliant piece of fiction circa 1912, melding the best of Nancy Drew and Tom Swift, by Margaret Burnham, entitled The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly. (Merriam-Webster dates "aviatrix" to 1910.)
(The title reminds me of a one-sentence movie summary that CLH called to tell me about, approximately, "An Amazon princess dances the lambada to combat evil forces." CLH said, "Now of course that I have to watch.")
I tore through one hundred pages of the book because the story propelled me along (planes, futuristic enough to be Tom Swiftian in 1912; yet a motor car--with a "tonneau"--that still needed to be cranked; lads and lasses with a chaperone and tonnes of unwritten yet throbbing sexual tension; barnstorming as in Illusions; dreadful storms; fires; gypsies; moonshining; adventures galore). Malheureusement the proofreading is set up for, of all things, proofreading, not reading cheesy books, so I can't find out how it ends until it's posted (you can sign up to be notified).
It's about time I gave something back, though. Besides those on-the-fly Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll quotes Gutenberg affords me, it's also allowed me to read The Blue Lagoon (surprisingly, just as bad as the movie) and Enchanted April (book and movie each good in their individual ways) and Ben-Hur (I'm only a quarter through; Lew Wallace writes like Charlton Heston acts: ponderously).