Learn English with the classics
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Pride and Prejudice (version 2)
Jane Austen’s classic novel chronicles the events in the lives of the Bennet family. Take a family with five unmarried daughters and a lack of wealth, throw in a new wealthy neighbor or two, plus a whole regiment of soldiers in town, and add a heaping spoonful of pride and a pinch of prejudice. Mix it all together and you get a story full of tears and laughter, embarrassment and pride, and, of course, love.
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.
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (version 3)
Dr. Watson chronicles here some of the more interesting detective cases that he and his good friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have encountered during their association. We see the cases unfold as he does, scratch our heads as does he while the evidence is collected, and then marvel at the impeccable observations, remarkable insight, and doggedness which Holmes displays as he teases apart the tangled clues.
Packaged as twelve distinct cases, by the end of this book your own senses of observation and deductive reasoning should be improved. It's easy to see why this book became a model for detective yarns!
Count of Monte Cristo, The
The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) is an adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. It is often considered, along with The Three Musketeers, as Dumas's most popular work. The writing of the work was completed in 1844. Like many of his novels, it is expanded from the plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter Auguste Maquet.
The story takes place in France, Italy, islands in the Mediterranean and the Levant during the historical events of 1815–1838 (from just before the Hundred Days through the reign of Louis-Philippe of France). The historical setting is a fundamental element of the book. It is primarily concerned with themes of justice, vengeance, mercy, and forgiveness, and is told in the style of an adventure story.
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.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (version 3)
The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.
The book has been popular with young readers since its publication, and taken as a sequel to the comparatively innocuous The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. Although the Southern society it satirized was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book immediately became controversial, and has remained so to this day.
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.
Through the Looking-Glass (version 4)
In this sequel to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", Alice is playing with her kittens — a black kitten and a white kitten, the offspring of Dinah, Alice's cat in the first book — when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection...
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is a hilarious parody of 18th century gothic novels. The heroine, 17-year old Catherine, has been reading far too many “horrid” gothic novels and would love to encounter some gothic-style terror — but the superficial world of Bath proves hazardous enough.
Art of War, The
"The Art of War is a Chinese military treatise written during the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it has long been praised as the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time. The Art of War is one of the oldest and most famous studies of strategy and has had a huge influence on both military planning and beyond. The Art of War has also been applied, with much success, to business and managerial strategies."
Venus in Furs
The framing story concerns a man who dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs. The unnamed narrator tells his dreams to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break him of his fascination with cruel women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Supersensual Man.
This manuscript tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he requests to be treated as her slave, and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At first Wanda does not understand or relate to the request, but after humouring Severin a bit she finds the advantages of the method to be interesting and enthusiastically embraces the idea; though at the same time, she disdains Severin for allowing her to do so.
Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King)
The play begins years after Oedipus has taken the throne of Thebes. The Theban chorus cries out to him for salvation from the plague sent by the gods in response to Laius's murder. Oedipus searches for the murderer, unaware that he himself is guilty of that crime.
The blind prophet Teiresias is called upon to aid the search, but, after his warning against following through with it, Oedipus oppugns him as the murderer, even though he is blind and aged. In response, an angry Tiresias tells Oedipus that he is looking for himself, causing the king to become enraged in incredulity. He then accuses the prophet of conspiring with Creon, Jocasta's brother, to overthrow him.
Oedipus calls for one of Laius's former servants, the only surviving witness of the murder, who fled the city when Oedipus became king in order to avoid being the one to reveal the truth. Soon a messenger from Corinth arrives to inform the king of the death of Polybus, whom Oedipus still believes to be his real father. At this point, the messenger informs him that he was in fact adopted and that his true parentage is unknown. In the subsequent discussions between Oedipus, Jocasta, the servant and the messenger, the second-mentioned surmises the truth and runs away in shame.
Martin Eden
Martin Eden (1909) is a novel by American author Jack London, about a struggling young writer. It was first serialized in the Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909, and subsequently published in book form by The Macmillan Company in September 1909.
This book is a favorite among writers, who relate to Martin Eden's speculation that when he mailed off a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' returning it automatically with a rejection slip.
While some readers believe there is some resemblance between them, an important difference between Jack London and Martin Eden is that Martin Eden rejects socialism (attacking it as 'slave morality'), and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. In a note to Upton Sinclair, Jack London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."
Dream Psychology
Not a few serious-minded students, [...], have been discouraged from attempting a study of Freud's dream psychology. The book in which he originally offered to the world his interpretation of dreams was as circumstantial as a legal record to be pondered over by scientists at their leisure, not to be assimilated in a few hours by the average alert reader. In those days, Freud could not leave out any detail likely to make his extremely novel thesis evidentially acceptable to those willing to sift data. - Freud himself, however, realized the magnitude of the task which the reading of his magnum opus imposed upon those who have not been prepared for it by long psychological and scientific training and he abstracted from that gigantic work the parts which constitute the essential of his discoveries.
The publishers of the present book deserve credit for presenting to the reading public the gist of Freud's psychology in the master's own words, and in a form which shall neither discourage beginners, nor appear too elementary to those who are more advanced in psychoanalytic study. - Dream psychology is the key to Freud's works and to all modern psychology. With a simple, compact manual such as Dream Psychology there shall be no longer any excuse for ignorance of the most revolutionary psychological system of modern times.
Right Ho, Jeeves
Bertram Wooster's manservant, Jeeves, is renown for his ability to apply his keen intellect to solve all problems domestic, and Bertie's friends and relatives flock to him for his counsel. But Wooster, jealous of Jeeves's fame, decides to step in and take over as the fixer of his pal's engagement, his aunt's gambling debts and old school-mate's desire to propose marriage. How far will Bertie sink them all in the soup? Will Jeeves come to the rescue? "Right Ho, Jeeves" features of course Bertie and Jeeves as well as Gussie Fink-Nottle, Tuppie Glossop, Aunt Dahlia and Anatole the high-strung French chef in this P.G. Wodehouse farce of England's upper crust.