I recently got this email about my project The Whale:

I am not a web developer or anything like that, but I am a person who has struggled with OCD and dyslexia for decades. A work like Moby Dick is normally not accessible to me because of the way I read. Your way of organizing it into small bitesize, all caps chunks has allowed me to enjoy this great literary work.

I know this is probably not what you had in mind when you wrote the code, but I wanted to thank you all the same.

I was floored. This is the most rewarding kind of feedback to get about a project.

And while that’s certainly not what I had in mind when I wrote the code, there is a part of me that enjoys the constant fidgeting with the text. All the clicking (or tapping) eases some part of my brain that might otherwise have me go impulsively check for new social media notifications.

I asked if there were any other texts that he might enjoy in this format, and then decided to generalize my project to show additional novels beyond Moby Dick. And so was born the project I’m now calling Linky. The current selection includes:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
• A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Update: Added three more titles to the list.

If you have any ideas for other titles that might benefit from the Linky treatment, please let me know.