When the absent-minded Earl of Emsworth wanders off with the pride of his scarab collection, American millionaire J. Preston Peters is willing to pay $5000 to the person who can get it back for him. Discretion is necessary since Peters’ daughter is engaged to Emsworth’s son. Joan Valentine and Ashe Marson both decide to go after the reward—she as Aline Peter’s ladies maid, and he as Mr. Peter’s valet—and they all end up at Blandings Castle. But is it possible for anyone to steal back the scarab with The Efficient Baxter ever vigilant? This is, IMHO, one of Wodehouse’s funniest novels. –Debra Lynn...

Comedy

Where Men and Gods Fear to Tread lays out the intertwined nature of all major world religions and even shows the religion from which they are all descended (the Urreligion). It also incorporates discussion of every major world's religions basic practices, philosophies, and shortcomings. This is an audiobook of Book 3....

Where Men and Gods Fear to Tread lays out the intertwined nature of all major world religions and even shows the religion from which they are all descended (the Urreligion). It also incorporates discussion of every major world's religions basic practices, philosophies, and shortcomings. This is an audiobook of Book 2....

A Concrete Verse poem which may be considered an elegiac Idyll on Beauty as Idée was written over a Thirty-year Entr'acte. It was composed of and with occurrences that began in 1963 of which some lines may be found in poems from "Miss Crabtree's Daughters" and "On the Nature of Existence"....

Light as ponderous settling fog obscures | Reflections of flesh once was | Hundred-year mirror | Age has | photographs belied | They silently exist | by prusse Moon lit: | forgotten | were Reminiscences to be found; | Sorrows in Solitude solace consoled by one not seen; | embraces and caresses adumbrated | by Presence; | Existence frolicked imp-like: | Revelments paled | Resplendences paled | The currents set by Chronos slowed in the dark of Chaos; | And Beauty smiling | in | Mémoire | translucide...

The Peculiar Conundrum is a political allegory, substituting difficult legal concepts with rules of sports. In the fictional country of Aminica (the United Franchises of Aminica), General Managers (Senators) and Head Coaches (Representatives) ignore many of their constraints listed in the Compact (Constitution) and act with impunity. The Sports Commissioner (President) and Referees (Supreme Court Justices) likewise do as they please. The country founded upon sports freedom, where soccer is named as the Supreme Sport of the Land, gets transformed by open corruption into football played to the death, where back-room deals enrich sports politicians and We The People are oppressed. But one man, Brandon Crawford, with the help of his brothers, work tirelessly to understand the peculiar conundrum, the odd phenomenon, of members of Congress and federal officials seemingly acting contrary to founding principles with impunity, so we may finally end the methodical push toward absolute tyranny....

From the Back Cover: Envision for a moment, the following nonsensical sportscast: “Only seventeen seconds remain on the clock as we near the end of the sixth inning. The soccer ball is caught by Right End Tom King, only 9 yards from home plate. “To keep from being called for ‘Traveling,’ King dribbles the ball but still manages to get past the Goalie without being tackled. Moments later he slam-dunks the ball through the basket to score a touchdown and the Cattails win the game.” It wouldn’t take much of a sports enthusiast to realize something was strangely amiss with this “game,” as the rules and terms from soccer, baseball, basketball and football were all intermixed into one bewildering event. And, with millions of die-hard sports fans across America who intricately know every rule and regulation of their favored sport, there is about zero chance any huckster would succeed in passing this off as a legitimate game. But, replace the game with politics, law and government, and tragically the most sacred of our country’s founding legal and moral principles may be substituted by their polar opposites with nothing but the weak...

Excerpt: Chapter 1. The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi -- 2. I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob?s brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob -- 3. And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness -- 4. Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the LORD hath indignation for ever -- 5. And your eyes shall see, and ye shall say, The LORD will be magnified from the border of Israel -- 6. A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be a father, where is mine honour? and if I be a master, where is my fear? saith the LORD of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my name. And ye say, Wherein have we despised thy name?...

Excerpt: ?WHAT do you think she?d do if she caught us? We oughtn?t to have it, you know,? said Maisie. ?Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom,? Dick answered, without hesitation. ?Have you got the cartridges?? ?Yes; they?re in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?? ?Don?t know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them.? ?I?m not afraid.? Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver....

Excerpt: Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of the Riots of ?Eighty by Charles Dickens.

Excerpt: The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf.

Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Boarding-House. Mrs. Tibbs was, beyond all dispute, the most tidy, fidgety, thrifty little personage that ever inhaled the smoke of London; and the house of Mrs. Tibbs was, decidedly, the neatest in all Great Coram-street. The area and the area-steps, and the street-door and the street-door steps, and the brass handle, and the door-plate, and the knocker, and the fan-light, were all as clean and bright, as indefatigable white-washing, and hearth-stoning, and scrubbing and rubbing, could make them....

Introduction: Among the notable books of later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time--must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself--a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and America, has succeeded the prevalence of those more tolerant and rational principles by which the statesmen of our own day are actuated....

Excerpt: The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott.

Excerpt: The Sentimentalists by George Meredith.

HOMEWARE. PROFESSOR SPIRAL. ARDEN,............................................ In love with Astraea. SWITHIN,................................................... Sympathetics. OSIER. DAME DRESDEN............................ Sister to Homeware. ASTRAEA,........... Niece to Dame Dresden and Homeware. LYRA,..................................................................... A Wife. LADY OLDLACE. VIRGINIA. WINIFRED....

The mystery of a secret room, scene of many murders, is unraveled by Carlos Paredes, the Panamanian Sherlock Holmes. (Summary by manybooks.net)

Fiction, Mystery

Excerpt: One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them. Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet had time to sink into the snow....

Written by Louisa May Alcott under her pseudonym, A. M. Barnard, this Christmas story deals with the themes of love and defending one's honor. Although he is disinherited and poor, Maurice Traherne tries to win the hand of his love, Octavia.(Summary by Jennifer Stearns)...

Fiction, Romance

Inhabitants of the small town of Hamilton joke that they are afraid of being the dummy when playing Bridge, for fear of being murdered. Meanwhile, Special Investigator Bonnie Dundee demands a re-enactment of the 'death hand' to try and find out why, and how, the victim was killed during a high society Bridge party. (Summary by Gesine)...

Mystery

Excerpt: Chapter 1. Passing over Ickleworth Bridge and rounding up the heavily shadowed river of our narrow valley, I perceived a commotion as of bathers in a certain bright space immediately underneath the vicar?s terrace-garden steps. My astonishment was considerable when it became evident to me that the vicar himself was disporting in the water, which, reaching no higher than his waist, disclosed him in the ordinary habiliments of his cloth. I knew my friend to be one of the most absentminded of men, and my first effort to explain the phenomenon of his appearance there, suggested that he might have walked in, the victim of a fit of abstraction, and that he had not yet fully comprehended his plight; but this idea was dispersed when I beheld the very portly lady, his partner in joy and adversity, standing immersed, and perfectly attired, some short distance nearer to the bank....

Excerpt: The Rose and the Ring by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Excerpt: Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: ?Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening? Let her off easy, but not too easy.? I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: ?Will do what I can.? It was not till I had dressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the difficulty of the condition attached. The difficulty was not of course in letting her off easy but in qualifying that indulgence. ?I simply won?t qualify it,? I said to myself. I didn?t admire her, but I liked her, and I had known her so long that I almost felt heartless in sitting down at such an hour to a feast of indifference. I must have seemed abstracted, for the early years of my acquaintance with her came back to me. I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down, hut the lady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane. I tried my other neighbor, who pronounced her books ?too vile.? I had never thought them very good, but I should let her off easier than that....