Books in The World's best reading series

1997 World's Best Reading hardcover, O. Henry (The Ransom of Red Chief). O.Henry's Christmas classic, and other stories with artful twists, in an amazing Scholastic Classics edition introduced by award-winning author Pam Munoz Ryan A young woman makes a drastic decision -- and her husband has a Christmas surprise in return. A dying girl attaches her fate to that of a leaf. A writer sobs at the sight of a menu. A detective tracks a theif to an unexpected hideout. - Amazon

This is the chilling classic of a girl haunted by her own imagination and by the ghost of Rebecca de Winter. After honeymooning in Italy the dashing Max de Winter returns with his innocent young bride to Manderley, the beautiful family estate in Cornwall. Yet the former mistress' disturbing presence lingers throughout the house. Du Maurier's shy heroine is tortured by constant comparisons to the glittering socialite who was her precedessor and she is heading towards tragedy and despair when Rebecca herself appears...

The American classic about a young girl's coming of age at the turn of the century. "A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life...If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience...It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919...Their daughter Francie and their son Neely knew more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." --New York Times "One of the most dearly beloved and one of the finest books of our day." --Orville Prescott "One of the books of the century."--New York Public Library

The Sea Wolf is a 1904 psychological adventure novel by American novelist Jack London about a literary critic and other survivors of an ocean collision who come under the dominance of Wolf Larsen, the powerful and amoral sea captain who rescues them. Its first printing of forty thousand copies were immediately sold out before publication on the strength of London's previous The Call of the Wild.

1990, hardcover reprint (of a work first published in 1869), illustrations throughout, Reader's Digest, NY. 432 pages. Nicely printed on ivory colored stock. The folks at the Reader's Digest have done a service to those who wish to have nice hardcover editions of classics. Here is a good example. Mark Twain's thoughts on a "pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land."

Around the World in Eighty Days was written during difficult times, both for France and for Verne. It was during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) in which Verne was conscripted as a coastguard, he was having money difficulties (his previous works were not paid royalties), his father had died recently, and he had witnessed a public execution which had disturbed him. However despite all this, Verne was excited about his work on the new book, the idea of which came to him one afternoon in a Paris café while reading a newspaper. The technological innovations of the 19th century had opened the possibility of rapid circumnavigation and the prospect fascinated Verne and his readership. In particular three technological breakthroughs occurred in 1869-70 that made a tourist-like around-the-world journey possible for the first time: the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in America (1869), the linking of the Indian railways across the sub-continent (1870), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). It was another notable mark in the end of an age of exploration and the start of an age of fully global tourism that could be enjoyed in relative comfort and safety. It sparked the imagination that anyone could sit down, draw up a schedule, buy tickets and travel around the world, a feat previously reserved for only the most heroic and hardy of adventurers. Although a journey by hot air balloon has become one of the images most strongly associated with the story, this iconic symbol was never deployed in the book by Verne himself , but dismissed, it "would have been highly risky and, in any case, impossible."

An orphan living on the dangerous London streets, Oliver has no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. The capital's underworld—replete with prostitutes, thieves and lost and homeless children—are displayed in this realistic and gritty look at the disadvantaged and abused.