Help up choose a book as the May 2010 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on May 20th. Select from the following books.
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
During the American civil war, five men escape from captivity in the Confederacy by hot air balloon. A storm blows up, and they are swept out to sea, eventually finishing up on a seemingly uninhabited island, with no resources other than a few odds and ends they have in their pockets. The book tells the story of how they manage to survive on the island using only their skills and knowledge.
The island, however, has a deeper mystery. The men are helped by a mysterious unseen agent from time to time, and the sub-plot of the novel is their attempt to discover the truth behind this mystery. The book has a real "sting in the tale" ending; I'd strongly recommend that you DON'T read any detailed summary of it prior to reading it, or it'll spoil the ending for you.
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother’s seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy’s father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr. Pancks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens’s maturity.
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe
The Baron was a real man in the british army who was posted in various places throughout the British empire in the 1700's. When he came home he apparently used to regale all his friends and neighbors with tall tales based on his travels. They seemed to become wilder and and wilder flights of fancy and lies until he becasme legend. ...
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Kim is an orphan boy in India in the late 1800s. He becomes involved in an old Lama's search for a sacred river, and in a British spy ring, playing the "Great Game".
"The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road."
..........— The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism. Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final work, a novel titled Island (1962), both still in copyright.
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
(from the art of manliness):
Robinson Crusoe deals with mastery and morality. It addresses the ability of mankind to master his surroundings through hard work, and patience and faith, which eventually enable him to survive on an unknown island and able to cope with the difficult terrain, less-than-friendly natives and basically every wicked trial that comes his way. The morality addressed in this book is the eponymous protagonist’s rejection of his father’s advice to accept the happiness of the middle class life from which he was born. Against the wishes of his family, he runs off to sea to find adventure. It is not until Crusoe literally recreates a primitive approximation of that middle class life for himself on his island that he is freed.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley:
Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises profound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.
The Odyssey by Homer
In a way or another every western literary work comes from it.