If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.
-- unknown author
The following is a short list of sites that have great literature or just interesting reading.Interesting or Fun Reading
Fourmilab is the Home Page of John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. I came across his site when I downloaded the "demoroniser" (He has lots of neat utilities for Linux/UNIX users). John Walker has written some excellent short science fiction stories and has some on-line copies of some great sci-fi classics. See the link on his page to "Science Fiction" / "Original Stories" and "Some Classics".Start with Free Electrons by John Walker September 13th, 1987
Oscar Wilde wrote some great novels, short stories and plays such as "The Importance of Being Earnest", "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Dozens of links to the text of these and others can be found at: Oscar Wilde Resources on the World-Wide Web. This site also has a link to the text of the `classic' Monty Python's Oscar Wilde Sketch. (Warning: this later link is a Geocities.com site that uses web bugs, small invisible 1x1 gif's)
Classic Literature
The following is a short list of some excellent books or authors that I have read over the years follows, in no particular order. You can probably obtain them from the Project Gutenberg Web Site, the Classics Archive or Alibris (slow site) but browsing your second hand book store is more fun. You are also more likely to find something interesting that you were never looking for in the first place.
| Aldous Huxley | |||
| Brave New World | Huxley's classic dehumanised world of the future. | ||
| Island | The antithesis to "Brave New World". | ||
| The Doors of Perception | Huxley's description and ravings about his experience with the drug Mescalin. | ||
| Sir Thomas Moore | |||
| Utopia | One of the earliest stories of a Utopia, written in 1516 and a vehicle for Moore's ideas on society. | ||
| Darcy Wentworth Thompson | |||
| On Growth and Form | A marvellous tour of Natures use of mathematics and mechanics. | ||
| Samuel Butler | |||
| Erewhon | A mythical land where not just animals but vegetables have rights too. A satire on many social ideas. | ||
| Jules Verne | |||
| Journey to the Centre of the Earth | Whenever I go caving I am always on the lookout for the signature "A.S." | ||
| Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea | One of Verne's best stories. The adventures of Ned Land, Professor Aronnax and Conseil as reluctant guests on board Capt. Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus. Subtly nestled within the story is the theme of slavery, liberty and "Mans inhumanity to man". | ||
| Olaf Stapelton | |||
| First and Last Men and Last Men in London | Written in 1930 and 1932 respectively these two books chronical the next 4 billion years of mans history. An epic science fiction story, a little long but very moving. | ||
| Mary Shelley | |||
| Frankenstein | Forget the films; read the book! A sensitive and intelligent creation, rejected by humanity, turns and begins a relentless torment of its creator. | ||
| G. Viereck | |||
| My First Two Thousand Years | A story of the wandering Jew and his companion. | ||
| C.S. Lewis | |||
| Out of the Silent Planet Voyage to Perelandra That Hideous Strength |
A series of three books; the last is a strange tale being a mixture of science fiction and religion. | ||
| E.A. Abbott | |||
| Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions | A classic short satire on English society. You will be able to find, via any good search engine, "The Internet Wiretap Electronic Edition of Flatland". It's a Public Domain Text. | ||
| George Orwell | |||
| 1984 | In some ways our society has indeed arrived. | ||
| William Golding | |||
| The Inheritors | A tale of the coming together of Neanderthal and Cro Magnon man and the inevitable outcome. | ||
| H.G. Wells | |||
| There are so many great books by Wells. They range from his seven great science fiction novels to social novels, numerous short stories and essays. All of them are his vehicle for his ideal world socialism. | |||
| Edgar Allan Poe | |||
| The master of suspenseful horror tales. His poems are superb. | |||
| Charles Darwin | |||
| The Voyage of the Beagle | |||
| On the Origin of Species | |||
| Winwood Reade | |||
| The Martydom of Man | |||
| Horace Walpole | |||
| Stanislaw Lem (see the site here: Lem's Web Site) | |||
| The Cyberiad | |||
| Jacques Ozanam | |||
| Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy | |||
| Plato | |||
| The Republic | |||
| The Last Days of Socrates | |||
| John Taine | |||
| The Time Steam | |||
| Neville Shute | |||
| J.W. Dunne | |||
| Experiment with Time | |||
| Ernest Hemmingway | |||
| Daniel Defoe | |||