Old Friends, selected by Mary Petrelli

The 100 books on this CD were selected by Mary Petrelli. She explains, "These are books that I discovered from the second grade on through high school, and I love them as much today as I did when I first read them. Each book is the key to some very happy memories."

Intended for use with Windows and Linux PCs and recent Macs (OS X), "Old Friends" contains the full text of 100 books, in plain text format, organized for easy access.

These are the 100 books Mary selected:

Louisa Mae Alcott

• Eight Cousins
• Flower Fables
• A Garland for Girls
• Hospital Sketches
• Jack and Jill
• Jo's Boys
• Little Men: Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys
• Little Women
• Marjorie's Three Gifts (short story)
• A Modern Cinderella
• An Old-Fashioned Girl
• On Picket Duty and Other Tales
• Rose in Bloom (sequel to Eight Cousins)
• Under the Lilacs
• Work

Jane Austen

• Emma
• Lady Susan
• Love and Friendship
• Mansfield Park
• Northanger Abbey
• Persuasion
• Pride and Prejudice
• Sense and Sensibility

Helen Bannerman

• The Story of Little Black Sambo (short story)

Frank Baum

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Charlotte Bronte

• Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte

• Wuthering Heights

Frances Hodgson Burnett

• The Dawn of a To-Morrow
• In the Closed Room
• A Lady of Quality
• A Little Princess
• Little Lord Fauntleroy
• The Lost Prince
• Sara Crewe
• The Secret Garden
• The Shuttle

Robert Burns

• Poems and Songs

C. Collodi  [Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini]

• The Adventures of Pinocchio (Translated from the Italian by Carol Della Chiesa)

Emily Dickinson

• Series One
• Series Two
• Series Three

Mary Mapes Dodge

• Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates

George Eliot

• Silas Marner

The Brothers Grimm

• Fairy Tales
• Household Tales

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• The House of the Seven Gables
• The Scarlet Letter
• Tanglewood Tales
• Twice-Told Tales
• The Gray Champion
• The Wedding Knell
• The Minister's Black Veil
• The May-Pole of Merry Mount
• The Gentle Boy
• Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe
• Wakefield
• The Great Carbuncle
• David Swan
• The Hollow of the Three Hills
• Dr. Heidegger's Experiment
• Legends of the Province House
•   I. Howe's Masquerade
•   II. Edward Randolph's Portrait
•   III. Lady Eleanore's Mantle
•   IV. Old Esther Dudley
• The Ambitious Guest
• Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure
• The Shaker Bridal
• Endicott and the Red Cross

Washington Irving

• The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

• The Author's Account of Himself
• The Voyage
• Roscoe
• The Wife
• Rip Van Winkle
• English Writers on America
• Rural Life in England
• The Broken Heart
• The Art of Book-making
• A Royal Poet
• The Country Church
• The Widow and her Son
• A Sunday in London
• The Boar's Head Tavern
• The Mutability of Literature
• Rural Funerals
• The Inn Kitchen
• The Spectre Bridegroom
• Westminster Abbey
• Christmas
• The Stage-Coach
• Christmas Eve
• Christmas Day
• The Christmas Dinner
• London Antiques
• Little Britain
• Statford-on-Avon
• Traits of Indian Character
• Philip of Pokanoket
• John Bull
• The Pride of the Village
• The Angler
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• L'Envoy

Helen Keller

• The Story of My Life

Andrew Lang

• The Blue Fairy Book
• The Brown Fairy Book
• The Crimson Fairy Book
• The Grey Fairy Book
• The Lilac Fairy Book
• The Orange Fairy Book
• The Pink Fairy Book
• The Red Fairy Book
• The Violet Fairy Book
• The Yellow Fairy Book

Hugh Lofting

• The Story of Dr. Dolittle
• The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Song of Hiawatha

Lucy Maud Montgomery

• Anne of Avonlea
• Anne of Green Gables
• Anne of the Island
• Anne's House of  Dreams
• Chronicles of Avonlea
• Further Chronicles of Avonlea
• The Golden Road
• Kilmeny of the Orchard
• Rainbow Valley
• Rilla of Ingleside
• The Story Girl

Anna Sewell

• Black Beauty

Margaret Sidney

• Five Little Peppers Abroad
• Five Little Peppers Midway
• Five Little Peppers and their Friends

Johanna Spyri

• Heidi

Robert Louis Stevenson

• A Child's Garden of Verses
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Uncle Tom's Cabin

Gene Stratton-Porter

• At the Foot of the Rainbow
• A Daughter of the Land
• Freckles
• A Girl of the Limberlost
• The Harvester
• Her Father's Daughter
• Laddie
• Moths of the Limberlost
• The Song of the Cardinal

Jonathan Swift

• Gulliver's Travels

Sara Teasdale

• Flame and Shadow
• Helen of Troy and Other Poems
• Love Songs
• Rivers to the Sea

Mark Twain

• Huckleberry Finn
• Tom Sawyer

Talking" software included on this book CD

Text-to-voice conversion software can allow you to hear as well as read these books. So you can test this capability and decide if it might be valuable to you, we include the include the installation file for ReadPlease 2003 on this CD. (NB -- This version of the software is intended for Windows PCS, not Macs.) You can use that file to install a trial copy of ReadPlease Plus, which is a commercial-quality product and can read files of any size. This trial copy is good for 30 days, after which, if you wish, you could buy a license from ReadPlease for $49.95. As an alternative, you can use that same file to install their free version, which doesn't expire, but which can only handle 16K of text at a time; which means that to read a book, you would have to copy and paste one peice of text after another.

When the rapid, automatic 10 Mbyte installation is done, you will be able to open ReadPlease by clicking on an icon on your desktop. Controls in the right column allow you to change the speed of the voice (with a sliding bar), change the font size (with a sliding bar), and switch among four different voices (with the right and left arrows.

When you run ReadPlease, you see the text, with yellow highlighting moving from one word to the next, while you hear that same text. And you can at any time edit the text in the video window. Just position your cursor, click you mouse, and tuype whatever you like -- for instance, annotation or marks to show where you last stopped reading. Then save the edited file on your hard drive.

Please keep in mind that ReadPlease is their software not ours. They are the experts on it. You can listen to samples at their site www.readplease.com, where you can also see detailed help files.