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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.
Picture of Dorian Gray, The
Dorian Gray, a young man of wealth and stature in late 1800's London, meets Lord Henry Wotton while posing for a portrait by his friend Basil Hallward. Once the painting is complete, Dorian realizes that it will always be young and attractive, while he will be forced to age and wither with the years. Carelessly, he wishes the opposite were true. What happens is a treatise on morals, self-indulgence and how crucial personal responsibility is towards one's self.
War and Peace, Book 03: 1805
War and Peace is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels.
War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense.
Anne of Green Gables (dramatic reading)
Red-haired Anne Shirley, the orphan girl mistakenly sent to live with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, has been one of the world's most beloved characters since the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908. In this dramatic reading, readers tell the story of Anne's adventures as she grows up on Prince Edward Island.
Little Women (dramatic reading)
Louisa May Alcott's beloved 1868 novel is about the four March girls - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - who are growing up in Massachusetts during the Civil War. As the novel opens, their father is away at war, and the girls are struggling to be good and to reconcile themselves to their relative poverty. Each has her trials to deal with, and they are encouraged by their loving mother, and by their friendship with their neighbor, Theodore "Laurie" Laurence.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A
This is James Joyce's first novel, the semi-autobiographical story of a young Irish boy who struggles with family, country, and religion to become an artist and a man.
Idiot, The (Part 01 and 02)
The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society.
The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from receptive to an innocent like himself, despite some early successes and relentless pursuit by grotesque fortune-hunters. His naive gaucheries give rise to extreme reactions among his new acquaintance, ranging from anguished protectiveness to mockery and contempt.
But even before reaching the city, during the memorable train journey that opens the novel, he has encountered the demonic Rogozhin, the son of a wealthy merchant who is in thrall to the equally doomed Natasha Filippovna: beautiful, capricious and destructively neurotic, she joins with the two weirdly contrasted men in a spiralling dance of death...
Little Princess, A
The novel tells of the troubles of a wealthy young girl, Sara Crewe, who is sent to an oppressive London boarding school during her father’s campaign in India. Thanks to Capt. Crewe’s money, Sara is treated as a little princess until, one day, word comes of her father’s tragic death. Miss Minchin, the school’s greedy headmistress, wastes no time in putting the now-penniless Sara to work for her room and board. It is only through the friendship of two other girls, her own resolute nature, and some astonishing luck that Sara eventually finds her way back to happiness.
Life: Poem XXI A Book
Poem XXI: "A Book", read by the wonderful podcasters at the Podcasters Across Borders 2006 conference, in Kingston, Ontario, June 23-24, 2006.
Consolation of Philosophy, The
Consolation of Philosophy (Latin: Consolatio Philosophiae) is a philosophical work by Boethius written in about the year 524 AD. It has been described as the single most important and influential work in the West in medieval and early Renaissance Christianity, and is also the last great work that can be called Classical. - Consolation of Philosophy was written during Boethius' one year imprisonment while awaiting trial, and eventual horrific execution, for the crime of treason by Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. Boethius was at the very heights of power in Rome and was brought down by treachery. It was from this experience he was inspired to write a philosophical book from prison reflecting on how a lord's favor could change so quickly and why friends would turn against him. It has been described as “by far the most interesting example of prison literature the world has ever seen.” - The Consolation of Philosophy stands, by its note of fatalism and its affinities with the Christian doctrine of humility, midway between the heathen philosophy of Seneca the Younger and the later Christian philosophy of consolation represented by Thomas Aquinas. - The book is heavily influenced by Plato and his dialogues (as was Boethius himself).
Aesop's Fables, Volume 11 (Fables 251-275)
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 11 of 12.
Art of Public Speaking, The
The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and Joseph B. Esenwein is a manual for people who have to speak in public, and it is still in use today. Whether the occasion in question is sharing travel experiences with friends, a toast for newly-weds, or a public debate, the tips and tricks collected in this book will come handy anywhere.
The book describes how to make effective use of one's voice and gestures, how to gain and convey confidence in front of a large audience, and which methods to use to convert the listeners to one's own cause. Each chapter contains examples and a list of practice exercises. The last 15 sections are real speeches by famous men to function as a study aid.
Twenty Years After
Let's continue the D'Artagnan Romances that we've already started with The Three Musketeers.
Fisherman and his Soul, The
”The Fisherman and his Soul” is a fairy tale first published in November of 1891 in Wilde’s “A House of Pomegranates”. It tells of a fisherman who nets and falls in love with a mermaid. But to be with her he must shed his soul, which goes off to have adventures of its own. Will forbidden love endure? -- This reader has also recorded the three other tales in “A House of Pomegranates” which can be found in the LibriVox Short Story Collections, volumes 37, 38, and 39.
Repairman, The
This is a collection of 3 of Harry Harrison marvelous early stories that were published in Galaxy, Analog and Fantastic Universe. The Repairman (1958) is a straight fun SF story of a man getting a job done. It is most typical of his later style in series like the Stainless Steel Rat; Toy Shop (1962), a short piece exploring bureaucratic blindness and one ingenious way around it and The Velvet Glove (1956), my favorite for its writing style, fun perspective, sly social commentary on the scene in 1956 and just plain delightful imagination. And he manages to pack excitement and mystery in at the same time.