Welcome to the
This is a personal project, the kind of think that points to a huge amount of spare time, of which I have just the right amount needed to do three things: reading, surfing the web, learning foreign languages and reading blogs. The current pages are an amalgamation of those three hobbies.
During those long lapses of spare time it occurred to me that I'd like to be able to read a book online without having to scroll around to find the paragraph I just finished yesterday (like you do in Mobipocket Reader on a Blackberry) but also to have a translation available ant hand though a link in order to read the text in its original language or to have a go at it on some foreign language. Since nobody seems to indulge in such geeky interests I realized I'd have to do it myself. So this is it.
The current collection includes five classic works of western literature by Alexandre Dumas and Leo Tolstoi. Each one is available in a different set of translations as public domain availability of these texts varies with the language. In every site you'll find a chapter index with links to the text, links to a page with resources about the author and/or book and links to the beginnings of your current chapter in every other language available.
The titles so far are:
The Count of Montecristo by Alexandre Dumas. The quintessential story about reversals of fortune, revenge and redemption. Arguably the best loved work by Dumas, The Count of Montecristo is an entertaining and engaging page turner full of vivid charachters and a set of tightly entangled storylines. Like most of the author's works, the writing style is light, full of dialogues and mercifully short on descriptions.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. This is the one novel that disputes Montecristo's right to be regarded as Dumas' masterpiece. It's the first installment in the D'Artagnan Novels, and by far, the best known and more entertaining of them all. This book introduces the characters of D'Artagnan, and the Three Musketeers (Athos, Porthos and Aramis), the cloak and dagger dream team. While the bit of the storyline involving Buckingham and the Queen's diamonds is widely known through movie and other adaptations, the whole story is much more complex and twice as long.
Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas. There is a saying in the Spanish speaking world which goes something like The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After are not the same thing. It's meant to convey the same meaning as I'm too old for this sh... . That would be a fair assessment of this second D'Artagnan adventure: it no longer deals with unbreakable friendship and youthful exploits but with the compromised nature of mature friendship and the disillusions of becoming old without fulfilling yesterday's promises. It's also different from the first book in the way of not being so much of an entertaining reading.
The Vicomte de Bragelonne or Ten Years After. The last book in D'Artagnan's trilogy, and the longest by far. While it was meant by Dumas a a single novel it's very rarely treated as such in any language, because of its lenght and because of three distinct and very loosely related storylines: the monarchical restoration in England, the soap-operatic love triangle between Raul de Bragelonne, Mme de la V. and Louis XIV, and the fate of the king's imprisoned brother. Each segment is as long as any of the previous novels so they are usually published independently under varying titles ( i.e.: The Vicomte Bragelonne, Ten Years After, Louise de la V., The Man in the Iron Mask). Truth be told: this is a book with something for everyone but in order to find the stuff you would like, you will have to browse through hundreds of pages of stuff that only other people would like. If you want the cloak and dagger bit, skip the first two thirds --that's what movie adaptations have been doing with this book for decades.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi. So you read the three books above and now you are Dumas-sick and need an antidote, huh? This is it. While Dumas aimed to entertain, Tolstoi was looking for the meaning of life or at least the meaning of life as a Russian gentlemen in the late XIX century. In his view, the answer to this question was 42. Well, not exactly... but 42 is the number of months prophesized for the reign of the beast in the Apocalypse which, in this novel, are Napoleon and his reign and campaign in Russia is, for Tolstoi, the key to understand russian identity in his own time. So War and Peace is a sketch of the Napoleonic wars in Russia, the way it changed things and all that followed.
You'll find a resource directory for every author linked through the pages of his respective books as well as an "about page" for each book.
Other titles will follow soon. Any comments and thoughts are welcome noscroll@ltm.atspace.com