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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
In this children's classic, a girl named Alice follows falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy realm full of talking creatures. She attends a never-ending tea party and plays croquet at the court of the anthropomorphic playing cards.
Persuasion (version 5)
Persuasion is a regency Cinderella-esque tale of a young woman, the beautiful Anne Elliot, who is persuaded from marrying the Naval officer of her heart. It is now almost nine years since she rejected him. Bonaparte has abdicated and England's sailors return home covered in glory. Fredrick Wentworth is now a rich and highly eligible sea captain and the two are curiously thrown together. Will their forgotten affection blossom anew? Or has the captain found another?
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (version 2)
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates an entertaining adventure of Middle America in the 1800's - afloat on a raft on the Mississippi River. Huck escapes his civilized life when he arranges his own "murder" and turns back into the backwoods, downriver yokel he started as, and in the process springing a slave, Jim, from bondage.
Huck and Jim experience life as a series of tableaus as the river sweeps them through small towns on their way South. At each stop, Huck engages his talent for mixing fact with bald-faced lies to endlessly get himself out of situations... and of course, putting him into others!
Much has been written about the statement Twain is making about slavery in this book, but it's really secondary to the story. The facts of how black people were treated in this period give Huck and Jim their license for life on the run. Modern listeners will be intrigued by the unencumbered life of the pair; they make do with coffee, fish from the river, and little else (but of course, when they do need something extra, they don't mind helping themselves to it without recourse to money!)
Huck and Jim have run-ins with desperados and family feuds and even manage to get run down by a steamboat. The adventures ratchet up when they are joined on the raft by a self-proclaimed "duke" and a "king" - shysters both, who spend their time in figuring how to fleece the public in the little river towns. And when Jim is captured and threatened with being sent back into slavery, Huck enlists his old buddy Tom Sawyer in a frenzied, desperate, and terribly funny rescue.
I had to clip a lot of laughing from this recording at Twain's sly, catch-'em-when-they're-not-looking humor, but you can feel free to enjoy some good belly laughs at this crew of lovable rapscallions!
Importance of Being Earnest, The (version 2)
Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff discover the perils of love, assumed identities, and telling the truth in Oscar Wilde's classic play.
Christmas Carol, A (version 2)
A Christmas Carol (full title: A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas) is A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one evening.
David Copperfield (version 2)
The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to be written as such a narration.The story deals with the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity.David's father had died six months before he was born, and seven years later, his mother remarries but David and his step-father don’t get on and he is sent to boarding school.As Divid settles into life we are taken along with him and meet a dazzling array of characters,some of whom we will never forget and some of whom we won't want to remember!
David Copperfield
"David Copperfield" or "The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery" was first published in 1850. Like all except five of his works, it originally appeared in serial form. Many elements within the novel follow events in Dickens' own life, and it is probably the most autobiographical of all of his novels. It is also Dickens' "favorite child."
Jungle Book, The
This classic children's book by Rudyard Kipling tells the story of Mowgli, a young boy raised by wolves: his escapades and adventures with his dear friends Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear, his capture by the Monkey-People, his attempt at reintegration into human society, and his ultimate triumph over the lame tiger Shere Khan. The account of Mowgli's adventures is followed by several short stories, including the tales of the brave white seal, Kotick, and the tenacious mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Packed with adventure and Jungle Law wisdom, this book has pervaded popular culture as the basis of many film and stage adaptations, including the popular Disney movie, and through its adoption as a motivational book by the Cub Scouts.
Essays book 2
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne is one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre. He is also known as the father of Modern Skepticism. His pieces became famous for his apparent effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography. His main work, Essais (translated literally as "Attempts" but traditionally as "Essays"), contains some of the still most widely influential essays ever written. This is the second volume of that important work.
Notes From The Underground (version 2)
Notes from Underground is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow," and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator.
Aesop's Fables, Volume 07 (Fables 151-175)
Dating back to the 6th century BC, Aesop's Fables tell universal truths through the use of simple allegories that are easily understood. Though almost nothing is known of Aesop himself, and some scholars question whether he existed at all, these stories stand as timeless classics known in almost every culture in the world. This is volume 7 of 12.
Memoirs of Jacques Casanova, The - Vol. 1
This is the first of five volumes. - Giacomo Casanova (1725 in Venice – 1798 in Dux, Bohemia, now Duchcov, Czech Republic) was a famous Venetian adventurer, writer, and womanizer. He used charm, guile, threats, intimidation, and aggression, when necessary, to conquer women, sometimes leaving behind children or debt. In his autobiography Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century, he mentions 122 women with whom he had sex.
Although he is often associated with Don Juan because both seduced many women, Casanova is in fact very different from his fictitious counterpart. While Don Juan is a legend, Casanova is a historical character.
Poems Every Child Should Know
This anthology of poetry, published in 1904, contains such favorites as The Raven, My Shadow, and The Village Blacksmith, as well as many lovely poems that may be unfamiliar. Most of the poems in this collection are short enough for children to memorize.
New Arrival, A
Volunteers bring you 12 recordings of A New Arrival by George W. Cable. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for May 17th, 2010.
"The New Arrival" is a valuable poem because it expresses the joy of a young father over his new baby. If girls should be educated to be good mothers, so should boys be taught that fatherhood is the highest and holiest joy and right of man. The child is educator to the man. He teaches him how to take responsibility, how to give unbiased judgments, and how to be fatherly like "Our Father who is in Heaven." (1844-.)
Secret Agent, The
The Secret Agent is Conrad's dark, and darkly comic story of a band of spies, anarchists, agents-provocateurs plotting and counter-plotting in the back streets of London in the early 20th Century. The novel centers on Verloc, a shop-owner, phony-anarchist and double-agent, who becomes embroiled in an ambitious terrorist plan to bomb the Greenwich Observatory.