They stripped Jebu naked. They threw his yellow aspirant’s tunic into the fire bowl on the right side of the altar.

“You will not need that again. Tomorrow morning you will put on the grey robe of an initiate. Or you will be dead, and we will burn your body:” Sitting on an unpainted wooden stool before the altar, Taitaro, abbot of the Waterfowl Temple, looked steadily at Jebu. Around his neck Taitaro wore the plain white rope that symbolized his office. He was Jebu’s stepfather, but tonight his eyes said, I know you not. He would burn Jebu’s body and throw the ashes in the rubbish pit if his son failed, and he would never look back.

But I thought I’d give it a quick look through first. From the number of sword fights and battles I skimmed, I’m guessing that the above initiate is actually joining some sort of warrior order rather than a religious one. I’m looking forward to reading it. It should provide plenty of reading since it’s 307 days long (I think there may actually be two or three books in it). The OCR wasn’t perfect so you may run into typos if you get ahead of me.

The author’s son Mike Shea is who kindly decided to Creative Commons license it. He has some writing of his own if you’re looking for other things to read.

In site news, I finally managed to remove all the custom edits from the Wordpress base code (thank to finding a couple handy filters and the new comment feeds by categories) so upgrading should be a lot easier now. I also added licensing information to the sidebar so modern authors who are kind enough to release their work (e.g. Karl Schroeder, Cory Doctorow) can get the proper credit.

The present translation is a faithful yet communicative rendering of the original French texts published in Paris by J. Hetzel et Cie.– the hardcover first edition issued in the autumn of 1871, collated with the softcover editions of the First and Second Parts issued separately in the autumn of 1869 and the summer of 1870. Although prior English versions have often been heavily abridged, this new translation is complete to the smallest substantive detail.

Enjoy.

• The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - The “Mariner” part got me interested and it’s a pretty quick read at 28 days.
• Around the World in 80 Days - I finished up The Voyage of the Beagle recently and I enjoyed the Victorian travel log nature of it so I thought I would take that to a fictitious extreme. I was a little disappointed to learn that Jules Verne wrote in French so this is a translation. Somehow I had always thought he was British.
• The War of the Worlds - I think I read this book as a kid but I can’t remember much. I just watched Citizen Kane and Orson Welles reminded me of this one and I’ve always liked science fiction so I thought I might as well load it up here.
• The Tale of Two Cities - I read this one as a kid. I remember I liked once I finally got into it. If I remember right the first few dozen pages were tough going but once I got used to Dickens’s style I really enjoyed it.

Hope you enjoy.