All Reviews by Wikipedia

The Man Who Was Thursday

by G.K. Chesterton

In a surreal turn-of-the-century London, Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited to a secret counter-terrorist taskforce at Scotland Yard. Syme persuades Lucian Gregory, an anarchist, to lead him to the local terrorist cell, where he is elected as the cell's representative to the worldwide council of anarchists — the Central Anarchist Council — seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a code name. His efforts to thwart the council's intentions and oppose all anarchic acts reveal a comical number of unlikely allies. Ultimately, Syme and his fellow champions of order confront the head anarchist, only to find their perception of order and chaos turned completely upside down. The novel's subtitle, "A Nightmare," is a summation of the frightening and increasingly surreal world in which Syme finds himself enmeshed.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

A lawyer, Charles Utterson, investigates the strange link that the misanthropic man Edward Hyde has to his friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll.

The investigation begins as a matter of curiosity, despite Jekyll's assurances that Hyde is nothing to worry about. That changes when Hyde is seen murdering Member of Parliament. As Utterson assists in the investigation of the crime, Jekyll becomes more and more reclusive and Utterson comes to believe that the doctor is abetting Mr. Hyde...

Fanny Hill

by John Cleland

Written in 1749 while Cleland was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered the first "erotic" novel and its publication caused a furor. Immediately upon its release, the Church of England asked the British Secretary of State to "stop the progress of this vile Book, which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners." As a result, Cleland was arrested and charged with "corrupting the King's subjects."

Nonetheless, copies of the book were sold "underground," and the book eventually made its way to the United States where, in 1821, it was banned for obscenity.

In 1963, G. B. Putnam published the book under the title John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure which also was immediately banned for obscenity. The publisher challenged the ban in court.

In a landmark decision in 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Memoirs v. Massachusetts that the banned novel did not meet the Roth standard for obscenity.

The Vampyre, a Tale

by John Polidori

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer," the world was locked in in a long cold volcanic winter responsible for the deaths of million, caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. In this terrible year, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron in Switzerland. After reading an anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori to each compose a story of their own. Of the four, only Polidori completed a story, though Mary conceived an idea, and this was the germ of Frankenstein.


It is worth noting that Byron managed to write a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while traveling the Balkans. Polidori used this fragment to create the novel The Vampyre (1819), which is the origin of all subsequent vampire literature. Thus, the Frankenstein and vampire themes were created from that single circumstance.

A Monk of Fife

by Andrew Lang

Published in 1896, A Monk of Fife is a fictitious narrative purporting to be written by a young Scot in France from 1429 to 1431.

Dracula

by Bram Stoker

The novel is narrated very effectively by multiple voices — Jonathan's journal of his trip to Transylvania, Mina's diary, and Seward's recorded journal, as well as letters and newspaper items. Although somewhat crude and certainly sensational, the novel also does have psychological power, and the sexual longings underlying the vampire attacks are manifest. The pace is relaxed and atmospheric and the characters richer than one might expect.

(read more at Wikipedia)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

This collection of twelve Sherlock Holmes stories were originally published in the Strand Magazine.

On the Origin of Species

by Charles Darwin

Darwin presents a theory of evolution that is, except concerning the inheritance of traits acquired by education in which he still believes, almost identical to the theories now accepted by scientists. He carefully argues this theory of evolution of species by natural selection by presenting the accumulated scientific evidence of his voyage on the HMS Beagle in the 1830s. His theories were opposed to the then-accepted viewpoint of creationism. It is arguably one of the pivotal works in scientific history. Moreover, it was (and still is) eminently readable, even by the non-specialist.

Siddhartha

by Herman Hesse

An allegorical novel which deals with the spiritual journey of an Indian man called Siddhartha during the time of the Buddha.

The book was originally written in German, using simple, powerful and lyrical language. First published in 1922 after Hesse had spent some time in India, it became quite influential during the 1960s.

"Siddhartha" means "he who has attained his goals". The full name of the Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama.

The Golden Ass

by Lucius Apuleius

Written in the second century CE, The Golden Ass is a precursor to the literary genre of the episodic picaresque novel, in which Rabelais, Boccaccio, Voltaire, Defoe, and many others have followed. It is an imaginative, irreverent and amusing work that relates the ludicrous adventures of one Lucius, a virile young man who is obsessed with magic. Finding himself in Thessaly, the "birthplace of magic", Lucius eagerly seeks an opportunity to see magic being performed. His over-enthusiasm leads to his accidental transformation into an ass. In this guise, Lucius, a member of the Roman country aristocracy, is forced to witness and share the misery of slaves and destitute freemen who are reduced, to little more than beasts of burden by their exploitation at the hands of wealthy landowners.

The Golden Ass is the only surviving work of literature from the ancient Greco-Roman world to examine, from a first-hand perspective, the abhorrent condition of the lower classes. Yet despite its serious subject matter, the novel remains imaginative, witty, and often sexually explicit. Numerous amusing stories, many of which seem to be based on actual folk tales with their ordinary themes of simple-minded husbands, adulterous wives, and clever lovers, as well as the magical transformations that characterize the entire novel, are included within the main narrative. The longest of these inclusions is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, encountered here for the first but not the last time in Western literature. Apuleius' style is as amusing as his stories, for though he was not a Roman by birth, Apuleius was a master of Latin prose.