Three Free Books: Big Bricks I Love

These three books are the quintessential Classics with a capital C. I read them reluctantly at first but soon added them to my favorites list. There is a reason these are well-known. They tug at your heartstrings, make you laugh, and introduce you to people worth knowing and stories worth reading.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo - Jean Valjean starts this story as a convict whose sentence is up. He was condemned to ten years of hard labor for a minor offense and faces a future full of shame and ostracism. His justifiable bitterness is challenged by an act of grace that sets him on a path to redemption. (I get tearful just thinking of it.) And there is more: the orphaned daughter of a prostitute becomes his ward; Jean Valjean is relentlessly pursued by the uncompromising policeman, Javert; then comes the French Revolution and its famous barricades. Valjean's noble struggle for redemption coincides with a larger political battle for the ideals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité as the old order represented by Javert fails. And even though Cosette is a spineless drip and there are digressions where a modern reader may nod off, hang in there - this is a profoundly moving and exciting story.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - Jealousy and political intrigue conspire to imprison young Edmond Dantès on the eve of his marriage. Betrayed by his nearest and dearest, and by the perversion of justice, he is sent to the Château d'If, a prison fortress on an island where his enemies intend for him to die forgotten. Instead, he meets a fellow prisoner who educates him and reveals the secret hiding place of a vast fortune. Dantès escapes and uses the money to remake himself into the urbane Count of Monte Cristo with one goal in mind: vengeance. This book has been adapted into film more times than I can count because it's the perfect adventure story. There's a chapter that I would give my right hand to have written where the Count has a conversation with an oblivious enemy on the nature of revenge - a thrilling example of dramatic irony.

Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray - Becky Sharp is the coolest character ever. She's smart, beautiful, ruthless. She is poor and orphaned, but has the looks and charm to get what she wants from men who have the wealth and power she craves. (She is a forerunner of Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.) Becky uses every tool at her disposal to scheme her way into a better caste. Thackeray uses this sharp-witted minx to expose the failings and hypocrisies of high society, where appearance is everything and everyone is obsessed with money.

The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The fearless d'Artagnan befriends three noble Musketeers and together, all for one and one for all, they oppose Cardinal Richelieu and his deadliest spy, the seductive Milady de Winter.

The Musketeers are the most glamorous and dangerous regiment of the King's army, so naturally nineteen-year-old d'Artagnan's lifelong ambition has been to join their ranks. But on his first day in Paris, the awkward young Gascon manages to annoy three of the most prominent Musketeers: Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. In spite of their unpromising beginning, the four men become close friends and together help subvert Cardinal Richelieu's jealous plots against the French queen.

The three Musketeers each have their own secrets and ambitions, humorously shown when the men are separated after a dangerous mission. Aramis is a beautiful fop whose interest in the church waxes and wanes with his mistress's faithfulness; Porthos is an epicure whose dearest ambition is to own a gilded coach; and Athos is a brooding nobleman with a mysterious past.

Our dashing heroes take advantage of rich women and adore violence. The perpetually penniless gallants gamble, drink, and preen because they are magnificent Musketeers - always ready to die for king, honor, or love. Actually, there isn't much they wouldn't throw their lives away on as long as it looks amusingly dangerous. There's a particularly effective scene where they have a picnic under enemy fire just to find a private place to talk.

Their greatest enemy is as deadly and effective, but more subtle about it: she is Milady de Winter, with an angel's face and a devil's heart. We get plenty of scenes of Milady using her wit and beauty to subdue weaker minds (and let's face it, everyone has a weaker mind than this ultimate femme fatale, with the possible exception of Richelieu). She's a spy with an endless thirst for revenge, and a special hatred of d'Artagnan. She's by far the most chilling and resourceful villain I've come across in a long time.

There is plenty of historical detail in this novel, since Dumas uses real people and events in French history (he wrote it in 1844, but the action occurs around 1628). For example, the infamous Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, was a real person - though Dumas neglects to mention that Buckingham was King James I's lover as well as the lover of the French Queen, Ann of Austria. For the full gossip, read The Queen's Diamonds by historian Roger MacDonald.

Historical hottie, George Villiers

You can't do much better for swashbuckling action and tales of revenge than the prolific Dumas, so pick up my other favorite book by him, The Count of Monte Cristo, next. (There are lesser-known sequels to The Three Musketeers, too: the series is known as the d'Artagnan Romances and includes The Man in the Iron Mask.) For action of another sort, but with treacherous villains that might have given Milady a run for her money, read Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After being abandoned to die in space, Gulliver Foyle seeks his monstrous revenge on the people who wronged him.

Gully Foyle is a man of no talents and little worth to those around him: "Of all brutes in the world he was among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive." The actions of the Vorga, a ship that receives his distress signal but passes him by, give his life new meaning. He transforms himself into an instrument of revenge, driven only by a bottomless bloodlust.

The world Foyle inhabits is classic science fiction, vivid and strange: the galaxy is heavily populated, full of human half-telepaths and grotesques. Most of the population has a limited ability to teleport from place to place using psychic power (this is called "jaunting"), a leap in technology that has radically shifted culture and the economy. Women are considered property, values are Victorian, and organized religion is an outlawed perversion. There is war between Earth and the Outer Satellites.

In the tradition of sci-fi, the woman are gorgeous and often prey to instalove with the aggressive anti-hero (though they are still fuller characters than what you'll find in, say, Larry Nivens' Ringworld). There is Jisbella McQueen, a rebel that Foyle meets in a pitch-black prison designed to foil jaunting. Then there is Robin Wednesbury, an unfortunate 'telesend' (a half-telepath: she can only broadcast her thoughts, not receive those of others) who Foyle brutally misuses. And Lady Olivia Presteign, the blind daughter of a business tycoon who can only see the infrared spectrum of light.

Add to this an insane traveling circus, the atavistic 'Scientific People', a tigerish facial tattoo, a mysterious element known as PyrE, and weird visions of a burning man, and you have a perfect example of golden age science fiction at its wildest. It's got the retro appeal of the most outlandish original Star Trek episodes, and the reforged Foyle could easily be a rough-edged version of the irresistible Captain Kirk.

Just like this.

Bester is also known for his novel The Demolished Man (1953), the first-ever winner of the Hugo Award, but I think The Stars Our Destination is a better book. The Demolished Man relies too heavily on Freudian pseudo-psychology, though its story about an impossible murder committed in a society of "Peepers" (more telepaths!), has a great starting premise with plenty of noir appeal. (Some silliness with a love interest who undergoes an infant regression knocked The Demolished Man down from a loved-it to a shaky liked-it for me.)

There is a definite connection to be made between The Stars Our Destination and Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. Both feature men on a quest for revenge who happen into large fortunes and a bit of reeducation.

For more excellent old-school sci-fi, don't miss The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. After a mysterious meteor strikes everyone on Earth blind, giant man-eating plants engineered by the Soviets start taking over the world. It's a zombie apocalypse with walking asparagus. But awesome.

Quotable:
"He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love." - 18

"Olivia Presteign was a glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips, and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields." - 42