The Stories So Far

It's been about two and a half days since I bought my Kindle; I've been loading it up, at intervals, with downloads mostly from Project Gutenberg. At this point, I've put 49 books on it, grouped into collections as follows.

Fantasy (6): E. Nesbit, Five Children and It; James Stephens, The Crock of Gold; Ernest Bramah, Kai Lung's Golden Hours; Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book; James Barrie, Peter Pan; Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Books I-IX. (Maybe it's a little unfair to put Saxo here, but what he wrote - at least this part of it - sure isn't history.)

Exploration (2): William Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland and A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland. (Dampier was a pirate, explorer, and naturalist; I read a biography of him a while back.)

Palliser (6): Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke's Children. (I hived this series off separately; I imagine I'll do likewise with other longish series.)

Math (6): David Hilbert, The Foundations of Geometry; Evariste Galois, Oeuvres Mathematiques; Felix Klein, On Riemann's Theory of algebraic functions; Karl Friedrich Gauss, General Investigations of Curved Surfaces; George Boole, Investigation of the Laws of Thought; William Burnside, Theory of Groups of Finite Order. (These are classics. I went for translations where possible, but the Galois was only available in French.)

Mystery (5): Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of ..., The Return of ...; G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown and The Wisdom of Father Brown. (I actually have a couple of volumes of Doyle in paper, but they aren't complete. These three have, I think, all of the short stories; I'm not sure about the novels.)

Adventure (5): Rudyard Kipling, Kim and The Man Who Would Be King; Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood; Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda. (I've been wanting the last three for quite a while. I have a lot of Kipling, but not these two novels until now.)

Science (3): Galen, On the Natural Faculties; Charles Darwin, The formation of vegetable mould; Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology. (The Galen I bought on a whim. The Darwin is the paper on earthworms that first established his reputation the last paper he ever wrote. The Lyell is a classic, championing uniformitarianism against the then-popular theory of catastrophism.)

History (2): Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution; "Charles Johnson", Pirates. ("Johnson" is a pseudonym; he may have been Daniel Defoe, but this is disputed. This is an abridged version of a longer work; I couldn't find the longer one.)

Essays (4): G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered; Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; Walter Scott, Journal; Samuel Pepys, Diary. (This is a hodgepodge category of prose nonfiction that doesn't fit anywhere else. I have one volume - one year - of Pepys in paper, but couldn't resist a chance at the complete Diary. I'll probably be getting more of Chesterton's essay collections.)

General Fiction (6): Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; George Eliot, Silas Marner; William Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations and Poems. (Another hodgepodge. The Landor doesn't fit here comfortably - it's a one-of-a-kind work, AFAIK - but here it'll stay for the time being.)

Science Fiction (4): Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Dr. Moreau; Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon.

So, that's the State of the Kindle as of this evening.