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Around the World in Eighty Days (French: Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, first published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club.
The story starts in London on October 2, 1872. Phileas Fogg is a wealthy English gentleman who lives unmarried in solitude at Number 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens. Despite his wealth, which is of unknown origin, Mr. Fogg, whose countenance is described as “repose in action”, lives a modest life with habits carried out with mathematical precision. As is noted in the first chapter, very little can be said about Mr. Fogg’s social life other than that he is a member of the Reform Club. Having dismissed his former valet, James Foster, for bringing him shaving water at 84 degrees Fahrenheit rather than the regular 86, Mr. Fogg hires the Frenchman Passepartout, of around 30 years of age, as a replacement.
Later, on that day, in the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an article in The Daily Telegraph, stating that with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in 80 days.
He accepts a wager for £20,000 from his fellow club members, which he will receive if he makes it around the world in 80 days. Accompanied by his manservant Passepartout, he leaves London by train at 8.45 P.M. on October 2, 1872, and thus is due back at the Reform Club at the same time 80 days later, on December 21.
Fogg and Passepartout reach Suez in time. While disembarking in Egypt, they are watched by a Scotland Yard detective named Fix, who has been dispatched from London in search of a bank robber. Because Fogg matches the description of the bank robber, Fix mistakes Fogg for the criminal. Since he cannot secure a warrant in time, Fix goes on board the steamer conveying the travellers to Bombay. During the voyage, Fix becomes acquainted with Passepartout, without revealing his purpose. On the voyage, Fogg promises the engineer a large reward if he gets them to Bombay early. They dock two days ahead of schedule.
Now with two days extra, Fogg and Passepartout switch to the railway in Bombay, setting off for Calcutta, Fix now following them undercover. As it turns out that the construction of the railway is not totally finished, they are forced to get over the remaining gap between two stations by riding an elephant, which Phileas Fogg purchases at the prodigious price of 2,000 pounds.
During the ride, they come across a suttee procession, in which a young Parsi woman, Aouda, is led to a sanctuary to be sacrificed by the process of sati the next day by Brahmins. Since the young woman is drugged with the smoke of opium and hemp and obviously not going voluntarily, the travellers decide to rescue her. They follow the procession to the site, where Passepartout secretly takes the place of Aouda’s deceased husband on the funeral pyre, on which she is to be burned the next morning. During the ceremony, he then rises from the pyre, scaring off the priests, and carries the young woman away. Due to this incident, the two days gained earlier are lost but Fogg does not regret it.
The travellers then hasten on to catch the train at the next railway station, taking Aouda with them. At Calcutta, they can finally board a steamer going to Hong Kong. Fix, who had secretly been following them, has Fogg and Passepartout arrested in Calcutta. However, they jump bail and Fix is forced to follow them to Hong Kong. On board, he shows himself to Passepartout, who is delighted to meet again his travelling companion from the earlier voyage.
In Hong Kong, it turns out that Aouda’s distant relative, in whose care they had been planning to leave her, has moved, likely to Holland, so they decide to take her with them to Europe. Meanwhile, still without a warrant, Fix sees Hong Kong as his last chance to arrest Fogg on British soil. He therefore confides in Passepartout, who does not believe a word and remains convinced that his master is not a bank robber. To prevent Passepartout from informing his master about the premature departure of their next vessel, Fix gets Passepartout drunk and drugs him in an opium den. In his dizziness, Passepartout yet manages to catch the steamer to Yokohama, but neglects to inform Fogg.
Fogg, on the next day, discovers that he has missed his connection. He goes in search of a vessel that will take him to Yokohama. He finds a pilot boat that takes him and his companion (Aouda) to Shanghai, where they catch a steamer to Yokohama. In Yokohama, they go on a search for Passepartout, believing that he may have arrived there with the original connection. They find him in a circus, trying to earn his homeward journey.
Reunited, the four board a steamer taking them across the Pacific to San Francisco. Fix promises Passepartout that now, having left British soil, he will no longer try to delay Fogg’s journey, but rather support him in getting back to Britain as fast as possible (to have him arrested there).
In San Francisco, they get on the train to New York.
On the next day, Fogg starts looking for an alternative for the crossing of the Atlantic. He finds a small steamboat, destined for Bordeaux. However, the captain of the boat refuses to take the company to Liverpool, whereupon Fogg consents to be taken to Bordeaux. On the voyage, he bribes the crew to mutiny and take course for Liverpool. Going on full steam all the time, the boat runs out of fuel after a few days. Fogg buys the boat at a very high price from the captain, soothing him thereby, and has the crew burn all the wooden parts to keep up the steam.
The companions arrive at Queenstown, Ireland, in time to reach London via Dublin and Liverpool before the deadline. However, once on British soil again, Fix produces a warrant and arrests Fogg. A short time later, the misunderstanding is cleared up—the actual bank robber had been caught three days earlier in Edinburgh.
In response to this, Fogg, in a rare moment of impulse, punches Fix, who immediately falls to the ground. However, Fogg has missed the train and returns to London five minutes late, assured that he has lost the wager.
In his London house the next day, he apologises to Aouda for bringing her with him, since he now has to live in poverty and cannot financially support her. Aouda suddenly confesses that she loves him and asks him to marry her, which he gladly accepts. He calls for Passepartout to notify the reverend. At the reverend’s, Passepartout learns that he is mistaken in the date, which he takes to be Sunday but which actually is Saturday due to the fact that the party travelled east, thereby gaining a full day on their journey around the globe, by crossing the International Date Line. He did not notice this in the USA, since there were daily trains, and because he hired his own ship across the Atlantic.
Passepartout hurries back to Fogg, who immediately sets off for the Reform Club, where he arrives just in time to win the wager. Fogg marries Aouda and the journey around the world is complete.
For detailed information visit the site given below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days_(novel)
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (commonly known as A Christmas Carol) is a book by Charles Dickens that was first published on December 19, 1843 with illustrations by John Leech. Dickens called it his “little Christmas Book”. The first of the author’s five “Christmas books,” the story was instantly successful, selling over six thousand copies in one week. Originally written in six weeks under financial duress to help Dickens to pay off a debt, the tale has become one of the most popular and enduring Christmas stories of all time.
A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is a usurious moneylender who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of a Christmas Eve night. If the experience doesn’t change Scrooge’s ways, he will end up walking the Earth forever being nothing but an invisible and lonely ghost, like his deceased friend Jacob Marley. Mr. Scrooge is a financier/moneychanger who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. Since the death of his sister, Fan, he holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love, and the Christmas season.
Stave I: Marley’s Ghost
Christmas Eve, seven years to the day after the death of his business partner Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge and his downtrodden clerk Bob Cratchit are at work in Scrooge’s counting-house. Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, arrives with seasonal greetings and an invitation to Christmas dinner, but Scrooge dismisses him with “Bah! Humbug!”, declaring that Christmas is a fraud. Two gentlemen collecting charitable donations for the poor are likewise rebuffed by Scrooge, who insist that the poor laws and workhouses are sufficient to care for the poor, and that “If they would rather die than go there, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” As he and his clerk prepare to leave, he grudgingly permits Cratchit one day’s paid holiday the following day, but tells Cratchit he must be there the morning after Christmas all the earlier—otherwise, there will be a deduction from his wages.
Scrooge returns home to his cheerless rooms, and a series of supernatural experiences begins. His doorknocker appears to transform into Marley’s face; a “locomotive hearse” seems to mount the dark stairs ahead of him; the pictures on the tiles in his fireplace transform into images of Marley’s face. Finally, all the bells in the house ring loudly, there is a clanking of chains ascending the stairs, and the ghost of Marley passes through the closed door into the room.
The ghost warns Scrooge that if he does not change his ways, he will suffer Marley’s fate, but Scrooge’s fate would be even worse. He will walk the earth eternally after death, invisible among his fellow men, burdened with chains, seeing the misery and suffering he could have alleviated in his life but now powerless to intervene. Marley has arranged Scrooge’s only chance of redemption: three spirits will visit him on successive nights, and they may help change him and save him from his fate. As Marley leaves, Scrooge gets a nightmare glimpse of the tormented spectres who drift unseen among the living, and now shattered, he falls into bed.
Stave II: The First of the Three Spirits
The Ghost of Christmas Past, a strange mixture of young and old, male and female, with a light shining from the crown of its head, appears at the stroke of one. It leads Scrooge on a journey to some of his past Christmases, where events shaped his life and character. He sees his late sister Fan, who intervened to rescue him from lonely exile at boarding school, and, recalling his recent treatment of Fan’s son Fred, Scrooge feels the first stirrings of regret. They revisit a merry Christmas party given by Fezziwig, Scrooge’s kind apprentice-master, and Scrooge thinks guiltily of his own behaviour toward Bob Cratchit. Finally, he is reminded how his love of money lost him the love of his life, Belle, and the happiness this cost him. Furious, Scrooge turns on the spirit and tries to snuff it like a candle with its cap, only to find himself in his own bed, struggling only with a bedpost. Exhausted and confused, he falls almost immediately asleep.
Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits
Scrooge wakes at the stroke of two, confused to find it is still night. After a time, he rises and finds the second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, in an adjoining room, on a throne made of Christmas food and drink. This spirit, a great genial man in a green coat lined with fur, takes him through the bustling streets of London on the current Christmas morning, sprinkling the essence of Christmas onto the happy populace. They observe the meagre but happy Christmas celebrations of the Cratchit family and the sweet nature of their “forgotten” son Tiny Tim, and when the Spirit foretells an early death for the child if things remain unchanged, Scrooge is distraught and wishes to change the future. He is shown what others think of him: the Cratchits toast him, but reluctantly, and “a shadow was cast over the party for a full five minutes.” Scrooge’s nephew and his wife, Clara, and Friends gently mock his miserly behaviour at their Christmas party, but Fred maintains his uncle’s potential for change, and Scrooge demonstrates a childlike enjoyment of the celebrations.
They travel far and wide, and see how even the most wretched of people mark Christmas in some way, whatever their circumstances. The Ghost, however, grows visibly older, and explains he must die that night. He shows Scrooge two pitiful children huddled under his robes who personify the major causes of suffering in the world, “Ignorance” and “Want,” with a grim warning that the former is especially harmful. At the end of the visitation, the bell strikes twelve. The Ghost of Christmas Present vanishes and the third spirit appears to Scrooge.
Stave IV: The Last of the Spirits
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes the form of a grim spectre, robed in black, who does not speak and whose body is entirely hidden except for one pointing hand. This spirit frightens Scrooge more than the others, and harrows him with a vision of a future Christmas with the Cratchit family bereft of Tiny Tim. A rich miser, whose death saddens nobody and whose home and corpse have been robbed by ghoulish attendants, is revealed to be Scrooge himself: this is the fate that awaits him. Without its explicitly being said, Scrooge learns that he can avoid the future he has been shown and alter the fate of Tiny Tim, but only if he changes. Weeping, he swears to do so, and awakes to find that all three spirits have visited in just one night, and that it is Christmas morning.
Stave V: The End of It
Scrooge changes his life and reverts to the generous, kindhearted soul he was in his youth before the death of Fan. He anonymously sends the Cratchits the biggest turkey in the butcher shop, meets the charity workers to pledge an unspecified but impressive amount of money, and spends Christmas Day with Fred and his wife.
The next day, Scrooge sees his clerk arriving late and pretends to be his old miserly self before revealing his new person to an astonished Cratchit. He assists Bob and his family, becomes an adopted uncle to Tiny Tim, and gains a reputation as a kind and generous man who embodies the spirit of Christmas in his life.
For detailed information visit the site given below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol
Bridge to Terabithia is a work of children’s literature about two lonely children who create a magical forest kingdom. Written by Katherine Paterson, HarperCollins published the book in 1977. In 1978, Bridge to Terabithia won the Newbery Medal. Paterson drew inspiration for the novel from a real event that occurred in August 1974 when a friend of Paterson’s son was struck by lightning at a beach and killed.
Jesse (a.k.a. Jess) Aarons the only boy in a family of five children, is a middle child, living in rural southwest Virginia. His mother favors his sisters Brenda, Ellie, May Belle, and Joyce Ann, while his father works in Washington D.C. and therefore spends little time with his children. May Belle, the second youngest sister, adores Jesse and admires him. Leslie Burke is an only child who moves from Arlington, VA to the same area as Jesse, along with her wealthy parents, who are both writers.
Jess and Leslie soon become close friends. Jess shares his secret love of drawing with Leslie, where as Leslie shares with Jess her love of fantasy stories. With this new friendship, the two children create an imaginary kingdom in the woods near their homes, accessible only by a rope swing over a creek. They create the imaginary kingdom of Terabithia of which they name themselves King and Queen, and they spend every day after school there. In Terabithia, they are able to face their fears of the real world, such as of the seventh grade bully Janice Avery.
Leslie gives Jess a drawing pad and a set of watercolors as a Christmas present and Jess gives Leslie a dog whom she named Prince Terrien, or “P.T.” for short, as a Christmas present. They consider P.T. to be the royal clown of Terabithia.
Jesse has a crush on his young music teacher, Miss Edmunds, and would do anything to be with her. The central crisis occurs when Jesse accompanies Miss Edmunds to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and Leslie goes to Terabithia alone. The rope breaks as she is swinging over the rain-swollen creek. Though a good swimmer, Leslie falls into the creek and drowns. Jesse can overcome his grief only with the strength and courage that his friendship with Leslie had given him.
Jesse attempts to deal with his grief by going back to Terabithia alone to make a memorial wreath for Leslie. During his ceremony, he hears a cry for help and finds his younger sister, May Belle, caught in the midst of a fallen tree that she had been trying to use as a bridge across the creek. He helps her out of danger and rescues her.
Leslie’s grief-stricken parents decide later to leave the area. As Mr. and Mrs. Burke are leaving, Jesse asks to take some of their wooden planks by their shed. They say he may have anything left in the house; thus permitted, he goes down to Terabithia to build a bridge. After he finishes the bridge he takes May Belle over it, and makes her the Queen of Terabithia. He realises that while no one could ever replace Leslie, Terabithia must have a Queen and Leslie would agree.
For detailed information visit the site given below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Terabithia_(novel)
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