Well, Oprah's book pick has been released and it's a double volume from Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels (Oprah's Book Club) ($7.99 Kindle, $11.00 Paperback). This is an enriched edition from Penguin, not a barebones scan from Gutenberg (more about those later). In a major break from the usual pricing we've seen from the Agency 5, this edition is fairly reasonably priced for the Kindle edition (and Amazon is deeply discounting the paperback, which lists at $20, charging just a dollar over what they pay to Penguin, if they have the usual 50% wholesale rate on it).Book Description
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of the guillotine.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor—these form a series of events that changes the orphaned Pip’s life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens’s haunting late novel depicts Pip’s education and development through adversity as he discovers the true nature of his “great expectations.”
This enriched edition includes: illustrations of 18th century fashion and culture in Dickens’s Victorian world, the early reception for both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, a filmography of Dickens’s novels, further reading about the author as well as what informed the thematic elements of these classic novels.
I love the cover picture shown on this free edition of A Tale of Two Cities at Amazon (even if it probably isn't in the actual Kindle book). I didn't actually download this one (although at least the description implies it isn't _just_ a Gutenberg scan, as someone took the time to add a description), as I instead downloaded the free, illustrated edition by MobileRead member HarryT.
There is a free edition of Great Expectations at Amazon as well, but again I skipped this one and again downloaded the free, illustrated edition by MobileRead member HarryT.These are not the only Charles Dickens books (or formats) available at MobileRead, either, where the members hand-convert many public domain texts (with and without illustrations). For Charles Dickens, alone, I found 34 Mobi formatted books and 33 EPUBs, including Christmas Stories (Illustrated) and Christmas Books (Illustrated). The first is a collection of short stories and the second his five "christmasy" novels.
