This site lets you type out entire novels to brush up on your skills

A website is taking the English saying about "killing two birds with one stone" to practice. Not literally, don't worry. TypeLit.io is a website that says it will help you improve your typing skills without charging anything and get you to read those classic titles you have been avoiding all your life. How? By typing them out.

What comes with TypeLit.io — While you're improving your typing skills, you will be working through some major literature thanks to TypeLit.io.

The website packs titles like 1984 by George Orwell, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, and a lot more. There are seven languages you can sharpen your typing skills in: English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Plus, you can track your progress and auto-save wherever you left off.

What a test run looks like — You're typing down chapters, that's all there is to it. But while it sounds super simple and maybe even boring, the website is tracking your speed and accuracy all at once while you're stepping inside a fictional world.

I ran 1984 to see how TypeLit.io works. The first chapter of Orwell's book takes off by by painting a rather frigid April morning at the Victory mansions while Winston Smith is trying to get some sleep. I was too busy reading the beginning to even notice that I was practicing some typing on the website. When you get it right, the cursor blinks green. When you get a spelling wrong or backtrack several times, the cursor turns red.

Little tools like TypeLit.io make the internet a bearable place. Sure, we have Nazis on Twitter and QAnon on Facebook openly theorizing about a Satanic cabal eating children for breakfast but sometimes people come up with pleasant and simple ideas that can make the day a little better and more useful.

So if you've ever wondered what the hell Marcus Aurelius was saying in Meditations (jokes aside, it is a beautiful and stoic rumination on life, governance, philosophy, people, war, and more) and you're trying to build up your typing speed, TypeLit.io is worth a shot. It's all about killing two birds with one stone. Again, not literally. Birds are cool. Sometimes they're so cool, people make virtual museums about them.