A Year of Reading -- 100 Recommended Books on CD

Copyright © 2005 Richard Seltzer

This Web page shows the table of contents of our Hobbies CD. Internal links will take you to the various sections, but you cannot get to the books themselves here on the Web. For that you need the CD.

This CD, with 100 books, was compiled by Richard Seltzer. The books themselves are in the public domain and in plain text format. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original. But the collection and its indexes, created for your convenience, are under copyright. Please contact us first if you are interested in making copies of this CD for commercial purposes. seltzer@samizdat.com

In a good year, I read about 100 books. So here are 100 excellent books that I'd recommend. Most of these are relatively short. Many are collections of short stories and poetry. I've avoided plays and reference books, aiming for books that should work well for people who listen to books (using text-to-voice conversion programs) rather than reading them on a computer screen.

Intended for use with Windows and Linux PCs and recent Macs (OS X), this Hobbies CD with 100 classic books in plain text form sells for $19 at our online store.

For details about this publishing service, check the readme document. You can contact us at seltzer@samizdat.com, B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269.

User's  Guide: Suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD ROM

If you would like to have your PC (with speakers) read these texts aloud to you, while they are displayed in text on the screen, see below about the free ReadPlease software that we have included on this CD.

These books are in plain text format. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original.  You can open these books by clicking on the titles in this index page with your Web browser or a recent Windows-based word processor.

We publish plain text books (unencrypted) on CD, and we want to provide a simple way for customers and other interested people to share their insights into how to get the most out of this new way of reading and studying. To do so we have set up an email discussion group at Yahoo. All are welcome to join and to post here, but I'll manage this group in "moderated" style, filtering messages before they go out to the whole group, to control the volume of the messages and to make sure that they are on-topic. Tips and information that would be helpful to people you have plain text books on CD are welcome -- including examples of how you are using yours, suggestions for improvement,  suggestions for future CDs, and useful/interesting texts found on the Web that should be included in future CDs. To subscribe, go to the discussion group Web site at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/plaintextbooksoncd  or send a blank email to plaintextbooksoncd-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Major sections of this CD:

Table of Contents

Intended for use with Windows PCs and recent Macs (OS X), this Hobbies CD with 100 classic books in plain text form sells for $19 at our online store.

Novels

Jane Austen

Joseph Conrad

Daniel Defoe

Charles Dickens

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Thomas Hardy

G.A. Henty

Henry James

Jack London

Mary Shelley

Bram Stoker

Mark Twain

Edith Wharton

Short Story Collections

Multi-Author Collections

Hans Christian Andersen

  • Fairy Tales

    • Sherwood Anderson

    Honore de Balzac

  • Volume 1
  • Translator's Preface
  • Prologue
  • The Fair Imperia
  • The Venial Sin
  • The King's Sweetheart
  • The Devil's Heir
  • The Merrie Jests of King Louis XI
  • The High Constable's Wife
  • The Maid of Thilouse
  • The Brothers-in-Arms
  • The Vicar of Azay-Le-Rideau
  • The Reproach

    • Ambrose Bierce

  • Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories

    • Anton Chekhov

  • Volume 11, The Schoolmaster and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett

    • Kate Chopin

    Alphonse Daudet

    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  • Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    • F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Gustave Flaubert

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    Nicolai Gogol

  • Taras Bulba and Other Stories

    • Joel Chandler Harris

    Bret Harte

  • The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales

    • Nathaniel Hawthorne

    O. Henry

    Washington Irving

    Jack London

  • Call of the Wild
  • Martin Eden
  • South Sea Tales

    • Guy de Maupassant

    Herman Melville

    Edgar Allan Poe

    Leo Tolstoy

  • The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

    • Mark Twain

    Poetry

    Matthew Arnold

    William Blake

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    Robert Browning

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Dante

    Emily Dickinson

    John Keats

    Edward Lear

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    Edgar Lee Masters

    John Milton

    Edgar Allan Poe

    Alexander Pope

    Willliam Shakespeare

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Alfred Lord Tennyson

    Francis Thompson

    Walt Whitman

    William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Biography

    Helen Keller

    Booker T. Washington

    Frederick Douglass

    Nat Turner

    Essays

    Addison and Steele

    Sir Francis Bacon

    W.E.B. DuBois

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Desiderius Erasmus

    Michel de Montaigne

    Henry David Thoreau

    Philosophy

    Aritstotle

    Marcus Aurelius

    Boethius

    Rene Descartes

    John Dewey

    William James

    Friedrick Nietzsche

    Plato

    Arthur Schopenauer

    Political Science

    Niccolo Machiavelli

    John Stuart Mill

    Sun Tzu

    Religion

    Collections

    Confucius

    Lao Tzu

    Moses Maimonies

    Ernest Renan


    Intended for use with Windows and Linux PCs and recent Macs (OS X), this Hobbies CD with 100 classic books in plain text form sells for $19 at our online store.

    How to install and use the free ReadPlease software included on this CD

    Click here if you would like to install this software. When you click on that link, you will be asked wheter you want to save it on your computer or just run it. Choose Save -- it will only take about 10 Mbytes; so choose Save. Then select which version you want to install and the directory that you'd like to put it in. When the rapid, automatic installation is done, you will be able to open ReadPlease by clicking on an icon on your desktop.

    When running ReadPlease, click on File, then Open, and browse to the texts you are interested on the CD (or any other text file you have). Click on Play and it will start "reading" the book aloud to you. Highlight a chunk of text (of any size) with your browser and then click on Selection, and it will read the text you selected. Controls in the right column allow you to change the speed of the voice (with a sliding bar), change the font size (with a sliding bar), and switch among four different voices (with the right and left arrows).

    When you run ReadPlease, you see the text, with yellow highlighting moving from one word to the next, while you hear that same text. And you can at any time edit the text in the video window. Just position your cursor, click you mouse, and type whatever you like -- for instance, annotation or marks to show where you last stopped reading. Then save the edited file on your hard drive.

    Please keep in mind that ReadPlease is their software not ours. They are the experts on it. They have even better versions with even clearer, more natural voices, which they sell. You can listen to samples at their Web site www.readplease.com, where you can also see detailed help files.  And you can contact them at: ReadPlease Corporation, 121 Cherry Ridge Road, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada P7G 1A7. Phone: 807-474-7702

    Tips for using/enjoying the texts on this CD:

    The easiest way to get started is to click on My Computer, then on your CD drive, then on index.html. (That should bring you to here, in Word or your Web browser, or WordPad or Notepad, depending on your computer's setup.)

    From the index, click on an individual work to see the full text in your browser or in Word. Click "Back" in your browser to return here.  Use the "find" function in your browser (under Edit/Find in both Netscape and IE) to find any word or phrase within a document.

    When you stop reading, jot down the last phrase (a unique set of words) so you can search for that the next time you want to read and easily find the spot where you left off.

    If you just want to read and if you have a large screen, use your browser and under View increase the type size to meet your taste.

    If you just want to read and you have a small screen, try using WordPad or Word.

    If you want to take notes while you read, first save the file on your hard drive, then open it in WordPad or Word, enter your notes with the text (making them distinctive with bold or italic or by enclosing them in brackets] as you go along, and save the entire file, with those changes, when you are done.

    If you use Word, you can Select All [under Edit], and modify the font and type size (to make the letters larger and easier to read) [under Format and Font], and save the files on your hard drive [under File, Save As] with whatever changes you have made (including notes you made while reading).


    This CD currently contains 40 books. We continuously add books to our CDs as they become available over the Internet. For a list of recent updates (what we added and when), see www.samizdat.com/cdupdate.html  If you buy a CD at the retail price of $29, you have the right to buy an upgraded version of the same CD for just $10, a maximum of four times per year. The "upgraded" version will contain all the texts, not just the new ones.

    Note regarding copyright:  We include works published in the US before 1923, works from Australia and Canada when the author died 50 years or more ago, and works from the European Union (including the United Kingdom and Ireland) when the author died 70 years or more ago. NB -- Due to The European Union's extension of copyright by 20 years to 70 years after the death of the author, many works which had been in the public domain under the previous law are now once again under copyright. Hence we are unable to include on our CDs some popular writers whose works are still readily available over the Internet.

    This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com

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