A scholarly reading list

I was put on to this by The Unofficial Apple Weblog and will quote most of the story below. The gist is that National Association of Scholars felt that many of the books recommended for summer reading by colleges and universities just weren’t up to snuff. The result is their own reading list, one that they felt was more suitable: Read These Instead: Better Books for Next Year’s Beaches. TUAW’s contribution was to provide links to those available in free ePub format, many I have read, but others have been on my to-read list for quite some time.

Many of these titles are freely downloadable in ePub format and can be synced to iBooks for your portable reading pleasure. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the recommended books, along with quick links to iBooks-compatible downloads.

• Flatland by Edwin Abbot (Illustrated version)
• Confessions by St. Augustine
• Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (Also available in iTunes Audiobook format)
• The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (Illustrated version)
• Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin (Illustrated version, also available in MP3 audio)
• American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens
• Autobiography by Ben Franklin
• The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
• Speeches and Letters, Abraham Lincoln (the article refers to Speeches and Writings, so I hope I linked to the correct ePub here…)
• On Liberty by John Stuart Mills (PDF but iBooks-compatible)
• Apology of Socrates by Plato
• Crito by Plato
• Parallel Lives by Plutarch (PDF but iBooks-compatible)
• Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope
• Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (Illustrated version, also available as an audio book)
• Candide by Voltaire (Illustrated version, also available as an audio book)
• Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, Robert Louis Stephenson