Five Weeks in a Balloon - Jules Verne

Five Weeks in a Balloon
by Jules Verne

I've always enjoyed the Jules Verne favorites (Round the World in 80 days, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea), but it's harder to find JV's other works, despite the fact that he's written over 50 books, so I snatched this one up when I saw it.

It's the story of 3 men crossing Africa (then not fully explored at the time) in a balloon (a novel method at the time). So it's basically fiction since no man had crossed that part of Africa and no one had succeed in taking a long trip in a balloon. As a result you have to take his geography and even his science in stride. It has been worked out by others that his balloon could never have made the trip and we now know that his description of that part of Africa was fanciful. So it's fiction, nevertheless it's good fiction. And we have to remember that this book was written over 100 years ago! So when I read this book, it is also an exercise in time travel for me, to read this book as it was written, in 1869, otherwise you will be offended at all the non-politically correct events that happen and the descriptions of the natives and the mind set at that time.

It's interesting to note that this book was supposed to be a forerunner to the much beloved Round the World in 80 days and I can imagine Mr. Verne testing out his ideas in this book. Jules Verne was the father of the explorer/adventure type novel and today's authors owe a lot to him. So sit back and travel back 100+ years and try this book!

Read

BLOOD and GOLD by Anne Rice

BLOOD and GOLD 

by 

Anne Rice

Time heals all wounds, unless, of course, you're a vampire. Cuts may heal, burns vanish, limbs reattach, but for the "blood god," the wounds of the heart sometimes stay open and raw for centuries. So it is for Marius, Anne Rice's oft-mentioned and beloved scholar. We've heard parts of his tale in past volumes of the Vampire Chronicles, but never so completely and never from his own lips. In Blood and Gold, Rice mostly (but not entirely) avoids the danger of treading worn ground as she fills out the life and character of Marius the Lonely, the Disenchanted, the Heartsick--a 2,000-year-old vampire "with all the conviction of a mortal man."

Plucked from his beloved Rome in the prime of his life and forced into solitude as keeper of the vampire queen and king, Marius has never forgiven the injustice of his mortal death. Thousands of years later, he still seethes over his losses. Immortality for Marius is both a blessing and a curse--he bears "witness to all splendid and beautiful things human," yet is unable to engage in relationships for fear of revealing his burden. New readers to the Chronicles may wish for a more fleshed-out, less introspective hero, but Rice's legions of devoted fans will recognize Blood and Gold for what it is: a love song to Marius the Wanderer, whose story reveals the complexities and limitations of eternal existence.

Read

The VAMPIRE ARMAND by Anne Rice

The VAMPIRE ARMAND 

by 

Anne Rice

In The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice returns to her indomitable Vampire Chronicles and recaptures the gothic horror and delight she first explored in her classic tale Interview with the Vampire (in which Armand, played by Antonio Banderas in the film version, made his first appearance as director of the Théâtre des Vampires). The story begins in the aftermath of Memnoch the Devil. Vampires from all over the globe have gathered around Lestat, who lies prostrate on the floor of a cathedral. Dead? In a coma? As Armand reflects on Lestat's condition, he is drawn by David Talbot to tell the story of his own life. The narrative abruptly rushes back to 15th-century Constantinople, and the Armand of the present recounts the fragmented memories of his childhood abduction from Kiev. Eventually, he is sold to a Venetian artist (and vampire), Marius. Rice revels in descriptions of the sensual relationship between the young and still-mortal Armand and his vampiric mentor. But when Armand is finally transformed, the tone of the book dramatically shifts. Raw and sexually explicit scenes are displaced by Armand's introspective quest for a union of his Russian Orthodox childhood, his hedonistic life with Marius, and his newly acquired immortality. These final chapters remind one of the archetypal significance of Rice's vampires; at their best, Armand, Lestat, and Marius offer keen insights into the most human of concerns.
The Vampire Armand is richly intertextual; readers will relish the retelling of critical events from Lestat and Louis's narratives. Nevertheless, the novel is very much Armand's own tragic tale. Rice deftly integrates the necessary back-story for new readers to enter her epic series, and the introduction of a few new voices adds a fresh perspective--and the promise of provocative future installments.

Read

MEMNOCH the DEVIL by Anne Rice

MEMNOCH the DEVIL 

by 

Anne Rice

The fifth volume of Rice's Vampire Chronicles is one of her most controversial books. The tale begins in New York, where Lestat, the coolest of Rice's vampire heroes, is stalking a big-time cocaine dealer and religious-art smuggler--this guy should get it in the neck. Lestat is also growing fascinated with the dealer's lovely daughter, a TV evangelist who's not a fraud.

Lestat is also being stalked himself, by some shadowy guy who turns out to be Memnoch, the devil, who spirits him away. From here on, the book might have been called Interview with the Devil (by a Vampire). It's a rousing story interrupted by a long debate with the devil. Memnoch isn't the devil as ordinarily conceived: he got the boot from God because he objected to God's heartless indifference to human misery. Memnoch takes Lestat to heaven, hell, and throughout history.

Some readers are appalled by the scene in which Lestat sinks his fangs into the throat of Christ on the cross, but the scene is not a mere shock tactic: Jesus is giving Lestat a bloody taste in order to win him over to God's side, and Rice is dead serious about the battle for his soul. Rice is really doing what she did as a devout young Catholic girl asked to imagine in detail what Christ's suffering felt like--it's just that her imagination ran away with her. If you like straight-ahead fanged adventure, you'll likely enjoy the first third; if you like Job-like arguments with God, you'll prefer the Memnoch chapters

Read

The TALE of the BODY THIEF by Anne Rice

The TALE of the BODY THIEF

by 

Anne Rice

It's been said that Vladimir Nabokov's best novels are the ones he wrote after starting a failed novel. Anne Rice wrote The Body Thief, the fourth thrilling episode of her Vampire Chronicles, right after she spent a long time poring over that most romantic of horror novels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to research a novel Rice abandoned about an artificial man. Perhaps as a result of Shelley's influence, The Body Thief is far more psychologically penetrating than its predecessors, with a laser-like focus on a single tormented soul. Oh, we meet some wild new characters, and Rice's toothsome vampire-hero Lestat zooms around the globe--as is his magical habit--from Miami to the Gobi desert, but he's in such despair that he trades his immortal body to a con man named Raglan James, who offers him in return two days of strictly mortal bliss.

Lestat has always had a faulty impulse-control valve, and it gets him in truly intriguing trouble this time. On the plus side, he gets to experience romance with a nun and orange juice--"thick like blood, but full of sweetness." But Lestat is horrified by an uncommon cold, and his toilet training proves traumatic. He's also got to catch Raglan James, who has no intention of giving up his dishonestly acquired new superpowered body. Lestat enlists the help of David Talbot, a mortal in the Talamasca, a secret society of immortal watchers described in Queen of the Damned. The swapping of bodies and supernatural stories is choice, and there's even a moral: never give a bloodsucker an even break

Read

The VAMPIRE LESTAT by Anne Rice

The VAMPIRE LESTAT 

by

Anne Rice

After the spectacular debut of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, Anne Rice put aside her vampires to explore other literary interests--Italian castrati in Cry to Heaven and the Free People of Color in The Feast of All Saints. But Lestat, the mischievous creator of Louis in Interview, finally emerged to tell his own story in the 1985 sequel, The Vampire Lestat.

As with the first book in the series, the novel begins with a frame narrative. After over a half century underground, Lestat awakens in the 1980s to the cacophony of electronic sounds and images that characterizes the MTV generation. Particularly, he is captivated by a fledgling rock band named Satan's Night Out. Determined both to achieve international fame and end the centuries of self-imposed vampire silence, Lestat takes command of the band (now renamed "The Vampire Lestat") and pens his own autobiography. The remainder of the novel purports to be that autobiography: the vampire traces his mortal youth as the son of a marquis in pre-Revolutionary France, his initiation into vampirism at the hands of Magnus, and his quest for the ultimate origins of his undead species. While very different from the first novel in the Vampire Chronicles, The Vampire Lestat has proved to be the foundation for a broader range of narratives than is possible from Louis's brooding, passive perspective. The character of Lestat is one of Rice's most complex and popular literary alter egos, and his Faustian strivings have a mythopoeic resonance that links the novel to a grand tradition of spiritual and supernatural fiction

Read

QUEEN of the DAMNED by Anne Rice

QUEEN of the DAMNED 

by 

Anne Rice

Did you ever wonder where all those mischievous vampires roaming the globe in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles came from? In this, the third book in the series, we find out. That raucous rock-star vampire Lestat interrupts the 6,000-year slumber of the mama of all bloodsuckers, Akasha, Queen of the Damned.

Akasha was once the queen of the Nile (she has a bit in common with the Egyptian goddess Isis), and it's unwise to rile her now that she's had 60 centuries of practice being undead. She is so peeved about male violence that she might just have to kill most of them. And she has her eye on handsome Lestat with other ideas as well. If you felt that the previous books in the series weren't gory and erotic enough, this one should quench your thirst (though it may cause you to omit organ meats from your diet). It also boasts God's plenty of absorbing lore that enriches the tale that went before, including the back-story of the boy in Interview with the Vampire and the ancient fellowship of the Talamasca, which snoops on paranormal phenomena. Mostly, the book spins the complex yarn of Akasha's eerie, brooding brood and her nemeses, the terrifying sisters Maharet and Mekare. In one sense, Queen of the Damned is the ultimate multigenerational saga.

Read

A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH

A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH
By
Jules Verne

Novel by Jules Verne, published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre. It is the second book in his popular science-fiction series Voyages extraordinaires (1863-1910). Otto Lidenbrock, an impetuous German professor of geology, discovers an encoded manuscript in which a 16th-century explorer claims to have found a passageway to the center of the Earth. Otto impulsively prepares a subterranean expedition, enlisting his young nephew Axel and a stoic Icelandic guide, Hans Bjelke. After descending into an extinct volcano in Iceland, the men spend several months in a underground world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic sea creatures until they ride a volcanic eruption out of Stromboli Island, off the coast of Italy

Read

Download audio book

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Audio Book)

Frankenstein
by
Mary Shelley

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus movement. It was also a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the is an 1818 novel written by Mary Shelley at the age of 19, first published anonymously in London, but more often known by the revised third edition of 1831 under her own name. It is a novel infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the RomanticIndustrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus and spawned a complete genre of . The story has had an influence across literature and popular culturehorror stories and films. Many distinguished authors, such as Brian Aldiss, consider this the very first science fiction novel.

Read

Download audio book

Credits

www.easymediabroadcast.com

Loads of other Audio Books available at the above mentioned website

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
by
Douglas Adams

"The British author of the Hitchhiker trilogy and other immensely popular lunacies, Adams
permits no whiff of common sense to spoil his new novel, which combines fantasy, hilarity
and creeping horrors," remarked PW . Here, sleuth Dirk Gently investigates a lawyer and an
advertiser who possess the soul of the god Odin. "The plot's ramifications are marvelous,
bloody and irresistible."

Read
Audio 8 parts
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams

The Meaning of Liff
by
Douglas Adams

It is a "dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet"; all the words
listed are place names, and describe common feelings and  objects for which there
is no current English word.  Examples are Shoeburyness ("The vague uncomfortable
feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's
bottom") and Abinger ("One who washes up everything except the frying pan, the
cheese grater  and the saucepan which the chocolate sauce has been made in").

Read

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Mostly Harmless

Mostly Harmless
by
Douglas Adams

In this installment of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga, Ford Prefect of the planet Betelgeuse relies on serendipity and his own quick wits to protect a new edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide from the loathsome Vogons.

Read

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish

So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
by
Douglas Adams

Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange trip through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription, the mysterious disappearance of Earth's dolphins, and the discovery of his battered copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy all conspire to give Arthur the sneaking suspicion that something otherworldly is indeed going on. . . .

God only knows what it all means. And fortunately, He left behind a Final Message of explanation. But since it's light-years away from Earth, on a star surrounded by souvenir booths, finding out what it is will mean hitching a ride to the far reaches of space aboard a UFO with a giant robot. But what else is new?

Read
Audio 8 parts
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 3 - Life, the Universe, and Everything

Life, the Universe, and Everything
by
Douglas Adams

The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads--so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the white killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation.
They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler, who tries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane to see if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vicepresident of the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered by irrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-head honcho of the Universe; and Trillian, the sexy space cadet who is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressed Beeblebrox.
How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows as they try to avert "universal" Armageddon and save life as we know it--and don't know it!
"ADAMS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE TREASURES: an author who, one senses, has as much fun writing as one has readings


Read

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
by
Douglas Adams

Warning! This second volume in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series is definitely not a standalone book. Enjoying, or even understanding, the continuing adventures of Earthling Arthur Dent, his strange pal Ford Prefect, and the very, very odd Zaphod Beeblebrox requires previous study and preparation. Confusion and possible insanity awaits the poor soul who tries to figure out the second title without having read the first. Arthur and Ford, having survived the destruction of Earth by surreptitiously hitching a ride on a Vogon constructor ship, have been kicked off that ship by its commander. Now they find themselves aboard a stolen Improbability Drive ship commanded by Beeblebrox, ex-president of the Imperial Galactic Government and full-time thief.

Read

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by
Douglas Adams

Join Douglas Adams's hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You'll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue. The Hitchhiker's Guide is rich in comedic detail and thought-provoking situations and stands up to multiple reads. Required reading for science fiction fans, this book (and its follow-ups) is also sure to please fans of Monty Python, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and British sitcoms.

Read

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

'Fahrenheit 451 is the most skilfully drawn of all science fiction's conformist hells' Kingsley Amis 'Bradbury's is a very great and unusual talent' Christopher Isherwood 'Ray Bradbury has a powerful and mysterious imagination which would undoubtedly earn the respect of Edgar Allen Poe' Guardian 'It is impossible not to admire the vigour of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination' Spectator 'As a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury has long been streets ahead of anyone else'

Read

The Gods of Eden

The Gods of Eden - Willaim bramley

They Came To Earth Millions Of Years
Ago To Spread The Poison Of Hatred,
War And Catastrophe...
They Are With Us Still...
Human history is a seemingly endless succession of bloody conflicts and devastating turmoil. Yet, inexplicably, in the light of astonshing intellectual and technological advancement, Man's progress has been halted in one crucial area: he still indulges the primitive beast within and makes war upon his neighbors.
As a result of seven years of intense research, William Bramley has unconvered the sinister thread that links humanity's darkest events -- from the wars of the ancient pharaohs to the assissination of JFK. In this remarkable, shocking and absolutely compelling work, Bramley presents disturbing evidence of an alien presence on Earth -- extraterrestrial visitors who have conspired to dominate Humankind through violence and chaos since the beginning of time...a conspiracy which continues to this very day.


Read

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne

Novel by Jules Verne, first published in French as Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers in 1869-70. It is perhaps the most popular book of his science-fiction series Voyages extraordinaires (1863-1910). Professor Pierre Aronnax, the narrator of the story, boards an American frigate commissioned to investigate a rash of attacks on international shipping by what is thought to be an amphibious monster. The supposed sea creature, which is actually the submarine Nautilus, sinks Aronnax's vessel and imprisons him along with his devoted servant Conseil and Ned Land, a temperamental harpooner. The survivors meet Captain Nemo, an enigmatic misanthrope who leads them on a worldwide, yearlong underwater adventure. The novel is noted for its exotic situations, the technological innovations it describes, and the tense interplay of the three captives and Nemo (who reappears in The Mysterious Island). -

Read

Download Audio book

Arthur C. Clark – The Odyssey Collection

Read