Book Summaries or Reviews

[thistlechick]

This project is Complete. Thank you for your help!

We're working on including summaries or reviews of each book on their catalog pages.

Summaries include the basic story elements, character information, and brief historical background about the publication or author. Reviews, in addition to the elements in a summary, offer an opinion on the work. These may be as simple as providing a summary from wikipedia.org or other public domain source. If so, please indicate the source. If writing your own, please indicate how you would like to be attributed.

Please help us out by claiming titles below for which you would like to write a summary or review. Please limit your entries to 4-5 sentences.

Books
Done - Alice?s Adventures in Wonderland
Done - The Secret Agent - Hugh
Done - Notes from the Underground - Hugh
Done - Call of the Wild - Gesine
Done - Five Children and It - Kara
Done - Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus
Done - Treasure Island - Kara
Done - Psmith in the City - Gesine

Short Works
DoneThe Parenticide Club - Peter
Done - The Gift of the Magi
DoneThe Open Library
DoneA Modest Proposal - Hugh
Done - The Awful German Language - Kara
Done - The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

Poetry
Done - The Voice of the Ancient Bard
Done - In Flanders Fields
Done - ?Twas the Night Before Christmas (A Visit From St. Nicholas)
Done - I Do Not Love Thee - Peter
Done - The Raven
Done - The Road - Peter
Done - Sonnet 23 - Annie
Done - The Cow
Done - A Noiseless Patient Spider
Done - Where My Books Go - Annie

[Stephan]

I?ve found me some on the web already, so i could create the torrents for them. They are not always fitting, neither beautifull.
Unfortuantly they are not all from wikipedia, for you to quote them easily.

PILGRIMS PROGRESS
Translated into over 100 languages, The Pilgrim's Progress
is one of the most famous classics of literature. It is an
allegorical novel, describing a Christian's journey through
life to reach heaven. Part 1 was written by John Bunyan in
1679 whilst he was imprisoned for conducting unauthorised
religious services, whilst Part 2 was not written until 1684,
and is not included in many versions of this text. This
recording includes both parts, and inline scripture
references.


ALICE
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a work of children's
literature by the British mathematician and author Reverend
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a
rabbit-hole into a fantasy realm populated by talking creatures
and anthropomorphic playing cards.
The tale is fraught with satirical allusions to Dodgson's
friends and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were
expected to memorize. The Wonderland described in the tale plays
with logic in ways that has made the story of lasting popularity
with children as well as grown-ups.


SECRET AGENT
The Secret Agent is a 1907 novel by Joseph Conrad. It concerns
a terrorist bombing in London planned by the main character,
Verloc, an agent provocateur of a foreign power (not named in
the text, but apparently Russia).


NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Notes from Underground (also translated in English as Notes
from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) (1864)
is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is considered the
world's first existentialist work. It presents itself as an
excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated,
unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as
Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St.
Petersburg.


CALL OF THE WILD
"[It was] because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had
found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation
companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing
into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they
wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil,
and furry coats to protect them from the frost."
Chapter 1, pg. 1


FIVE CHILDREN & IT
Like Nesbit's Railway Children, the story begins when a group
of children move from London to the countryside of Kent. While
playing in a gravel pit soon after the move, they uncover a
rather grumpy, ugly and occasionally malevolent sand-fairy known
as the Psammead who is compelled to grant one wish of theirs
per day


FRANKENSTEIN
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. First published in London in 1818, it is a Gothic novel infused with the spirit of the Romantic movement. The story has had an influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories and films. Many distinguished authors, such as Brian Aldiss, claim that it is the very first science fiction novel.


TREASURE ISLAND
Treasure Island is a boys adventure novel by Scottish author
Robert Louis Stevenson, a thrilling tale of "buccaneers and
buried gold". First published as a novel in 1883, it was
originally serialised in the children's magazine Young Folks
between 1881-82 under the title The Sea Cook, or Treasure
Island.
Traditionally considered a coming of age story, it is an
adventure tale of superb atmosphere, character and action,
and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality—as
seen in Long John Silver—unusual for children's literature
then and now. It is one of the most frequently dramatised of
all novels, and its influence on popular lore about pirates
can not be overestimated.


PSMITH
This LibriVox public domain reading of PG Wodehouse's 1910
novel 'Psmith in the City' finds the eponymous hero and his
friend (or as Psmith styles him, 'my confidential secretary
and adviser') Mike Jackson having just left Eton, and being
forced to enrol in the service of the New Asiatic Bank. The
joy of reading Wodehouse is in his other-worldliness. George
Orwell stated in his defence of PG Wodehouse that although
the majority of his 'Jeeves' stories were set in the aftermath
of the Great War, his characters stayed rooted in the
Edwardian age.

[hugh]

I'll do:
-Notes
-Secret Agent

[thistlechick]

Thank you Hugh.

Stephan, those are really great, but we cannot put them on our catalog pages unless we credit the sources. If you wrote them yourself, that works... just let me know. Otherwise, if you can give me the url from which you took those summaries, I can include them. I'm not really sure how this torrent thing works, but I suspect that we ought not use copyrighted summaries there either unless they are properly cited.

[Stephan]

Oh Oh.

[Peter Why]

Parenticide Club; poems "I do not love thee" and "The Road". A day or two, as I'll have to do a little research.
Peter

[thistlechick]

Parenticide Club; poems "I do not love thee" and "The Road". A day or two, as I'll have to do a little research.
Peter

Excellent! Thank you Peter =)

[kayray]

I'll do Five Children and Treasure Island and Awful German

Do the poems *need* summaries? Or would something like "Librivox's Weekly Poetry Project for the week of January 2nd, 2006" be good enough?

k

[thistlechick]

I'll do Five Children and Treasure Island and Awful German

Do the poems *need* summaries? Or would something like "Librivox's Weekly Poetry Project for the week of January 2nd, 2006" be good enough?

k

Thanks Kara...

as for the poems... it certainly would be nice to have a sentence or two of history of the poem... but it sure isn't a priority =)

I'm also thinking that we are going to need a poetry index (and a story index) pretty soon if we aren't going to have a real database.

[LibraryLady]

I'll do Where My Books Go and Sonnet 23.

Thanks for getting this organized Betsie.

I agree that the catalog page is getting pretty long and unreadable. I know we've been putting off organizing into genres but it might be time to start thinking about how that will work.

[thistlechick]

I'll do Where My Books Go and Sonnet 23.

Thanks for getting this organized Betsie.

I agree that the catalog page is getting pretty long and unreadable. I know we've been putting off organizing into genres but it might be time to start thinking about how that will work.

Thank you Annie =)

Yep, we need to do something better with that catalog index page... I'm sure it will happen at exactly the right moment =)

[kri]

I don't know exactly how you're doing it in Wordpress, but...You could easily organize the catalog page better with Wordpress and its Pages functionality, so you don't have everything bunched on one page. You could just have categories of catalog pages linked from the main catalog page. You could even automate certain aspects of it with the template tags. It wouldn't be as good as a "Librivox Database" perse, but it would do the trick.

[Gesine]

I'll do Call of the Wild and Psmith in the City.

[LibraryLady]

I don't know exactly how you're doing it in Wordpress, but...You could easily organize the catalog page better with Wordpress and its Pages functionality, so you don't have everything bunched on one page. You could just have categories of catalog pages linked from the main catalog page. You could even automate certain aspects of it with the template tags. It wouldn't be as good as a "Librivox Database" perse, but it would do the trick.

This would be a viable temporary solution and it's definitely something to think about. I think we're just putting off another major rehaul until we absolutely have to do it, as Betsie said. The forum reorganization and meta-coordination division of tasks has us a bit exhausted I think. Let's just record for a little while and procrastinate a little longer, shall we.

[thistlechick]

I'll do Call of the Wild and Psmith in the City.

Great! Thanks Gesine =)