Tag: public domain ebooks

The book is about the titular character, and is set in a town in 1840s Missouri. While I have been a Southerner, I have never have been a mischievous little boy. Therefore, I find Tom Sawyer’s daily life a little difficult to relate to. But that’s what books are for: they let you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Or bare feet, as the case may be.

Even if you’ve never read a word of the book, or watched a movie adaptation, you probably already know about Tom’s cleverness in getting his pals to paint a fence on his behalf. But did you know that Tom witnesses a murder? And goes on a holiday from civilization on an island in a river? And finds stolen treasure in a cave with miles of tunnels? There’s plenty of entertainment in the plot.

The themes relate to honor and honesty, about doing the right thing when it matters, and not worrying too much about phony social rules as long as you take care of the people you care about.

Meanwhile, throughout the novel, Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens, if you prefer), offers, in deadpan style, a number of sharp observations of human nature. See below for some examples.

Continue reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Gulliver’s Travels, originally published in 1727, is in the public domain. Using the Android Kindle app on my phone, I read the AmazonClassics ebook shown above, which I downloaded during the Covid lockdowns when Amazon made a bunch of classic ebooks available to download for free. However, this Amazon ebook does not include the illustration in Part 3, Chapter 5 of the automatic writing machine, which features in another blog post of mine. I therefore recommend the Standard Ebooks version of Gulliver’s Travels, which does include this illustration, and which, moreover, is free. (Standard Ebooks offers a growing selection of Gutenberg ebooks that have been noticeably improved in terms of proofreading, typesetting, cover design, etc. All free.)

Where does Gulliver go? Are his travels funny? What’s Jonathan Swift trying to say, anyway? (Do I even like satire at all?) Does the book resemble the 1939 animated film adaptation? Find the answers to these questions below.

Continue reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

How did I come to read this book?

I read Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne because it’s on a lot of lists of classic books, and I’ve read other top Verne books, but not this one.

Then, because I somehow thought Journey to the Center of the Earth had more dinosaurs in it, I read The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is possibly the one I was thinking of.

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle made me think of Michael Crichton’s novels The Lost World and also Congo, which I read in 2010.

Congo was (according to Wikipedia) inspired by King Solomon’s Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, which I’ve also repeatedly seen on lists of classic books, so I read King Solomon’s Mines.

Then, because the novel She is by the same author as King Solomon’s Mines, and I’ve seen it on lists of classics (some indicating that it was an early science-fiction or early feminist novel), I read it too.

Phew!

Overall impression? What a creepy story. Really not my style.

There were some interesting psychological/philosophical observations, and some poetic, if melancholy, descriptive passages, but mainly the atmosphere was, in general, unpleasantly macabre. The physical surroundings of the characters consisted almost entirely of caves and tombs, except when the characters were traveling on stormy seas or across mosquito-infested swamps. There is no joy in this book whatsoever; the survival of the narrator is a matter of narrow escape—of relief rather than victory. But maybe that’s the point? Reading the book is like passing through a haunted house: you frighten yourself thoroughly with impossibilities, and then return to the real world with a new appreciation for normalcy.

So yeah. Well done, H. Rider Haggard. Thanks, I hate it.

See below for some more specific observations on this unsettling book from 1886.

Continue reading She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard

Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne (1864), and The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912), initially seemed to be two versions of the same book. Verne apparently inspired Doyle (and others, including Edgar Rice Burroughs).

Lost World has a lot more overt action and adventure than Journey, which makes it quite different in the middle and end, but there are definitely some similarities between the two books in the beginning.

The setup for both is that a young man who wishes to gain the favor of a young woman goes with an irritable scientist on a quest to remote part of the world on the basis of a report that nobody believes except the irritable scientist.

Continue reading The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

This adventure is full of realistic true details about, say, strangely geometric basaltic columns, but at the same time, it’s full of absolute nonsense. That’s par for the course for science-fiction, but this is early science-fiction. Now, our science-fiction stories are typically out in space, or in the future. In the time of Jules Verne, there were still many mysteries much closer to home.

Therefore, to read and enjoy this book in spite of advances in geological knowledge, you have to ignore the voice in your head that says, “Of course there isn’t a cavity deep inside the earth that sustains plant and animal life similar to the plant and animal life of prehistoric times.” You have to think to yourself, “What if there were?”

What if your uncle and employer, a grumpy old scientist—and the godfather of your charming girlfriend—proposed to go down into the theoretically hollow earth (which you believe is unbearably hot) based on some explorer’s writings from centuries ago? You’d think he was crazy, and you certainly wouldn’t want to go with him.

But your charming girlfriend tells you it is needful for you to go out into the world boldly and make a name for yourself. So you go. But you’re expecting your uncle’s crazy quest to fail at every moment, and you’re looking forward to throwing in the towel, turning around, and going home.

Eventually, you concede that you were wrong; but by that time, you’re more than a bit worried about how you’ll make it back alive to tell of the marvels you’ve seen. You descended into the bowels of the earth in a volcanic crater in Iceland, but you’ll emerge from a different volcano… in Italy!