Every Friday, Marilyn Knapp Litt, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, brings us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle. Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog, ClassicKindle.com, a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so you don’t miss anything. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle, a travel memoir published by Edith Durham in 1920.
Edith Durham is well known for her travel writing, all of it set in the Balkans. She is not without controversy, because she took sides, but in her preface she seems to acknowledge that she does not tell the whole story.
MINE is but a tale of small straws; but of small straws carefully collected. And small straws show whence the wind blows. There are currents and cross currents which may make a whirlwind.
The book has a very promising beginning.

It was in Cetinje in August, 1900, that I first picked up a thread of the Balkan tangle, little thinking how deeply enmeshed I should later become, and still less how this tangle would ultimately affect the whole world. Chance, or the Fates, took me Near Eastward.

Completely exhausted by constant attendance on an invalid relative, the future stretched before me as endless years of grey monotony, and escape seemed hopeless. The doctor who insisted upon my having two months’ holiday every year was kinder than he knew. “Take them in quite a new place,” he said. “Get right away no matter where, so long as the change is complete.”

Along with a friend I boarded an Austrian Lloyd steamer at Trieste, and with high hopes but weakened health, started for the ports of the Eastern Adriatic.

Here is a little bit of truth about diplomacy:

But in truth if people really want to get something out of you they do not care what you look like. Nor will any costume in the world assist you if you have nothing to say.

The great travel writers of old were writing about places that most people would never go, because travel was difficult, expensive and hazardous and it took a special person to be a traveler. When we read their books, we read about trips we can never take, because that world is gone and today we can only be tourists.

Click here to get your free copy of  ‘Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle” published by Edith Durham >>>

Every Friday, Marilyn Knapp Litt, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, brings us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle.  Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog,  ClassicKindle.com,  a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so you don’t miss anything. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

 Dubliners by James Joyce, a collection of short stories, published in 1914.
This is not a difficult work. The short stories each stand on their own, but are united in their Dublin setting.
Here is the first paragraph from the book and the first paragraph from the story, The Sisters:

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse.

The story, The Dead, may be familiar to you if you saw the excellent movie adaptation which was John Huston’s last film.
Here is another snippet from the story, Eveline

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. O course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.

“Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?”

“Look lively, Miss Hill, please.”

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

Joyce is not underrated, but you could say he is “underread.“ Treat yourself to this story collection, carefully crafted and published after much perseverance on Joyce’s part – as were all his books.

Click here for your free copy of “Dubliners” by James Joyce >>>

Every Friday, Marilyn Knapp Litt, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, brings us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle.  Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog,  ClassicKindle.com,  a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so you don’t miss anything. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

Little Dorrit – by Charles Dickens

I am fascinated by the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. It is where Dickens’ own father was sent and that fall reverberated, sending young Charles from school to an ignominious job – an experience that can be seen to color the difficult lives of many of his young characters.

The Marshalsea itself is a character in Dickens’ Little Dorrit. I think it is a somewhat overlooked novel. It is not that I would tell people not to read his more famous works, but you have to read this novel too!

“There had been taken to the Marshalsea Prison, long before the day when the sun shone on Marseilles and on the opening of this narrative, a debtor with whom this narrative has some concern.

He was, at that time, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman, who was going out again directly. Necessarily, he was going out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a debtor who was not. He brought in a portmanteau with him, which he doubted its being worth while to unpack; he was so perfectly clear—like all the rest of them, the turnkey on the lock said—that he was going out again directly.

He was a shy, retiring man; well-looking, though in an effeminate style; with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands—rings upon the fingers in those days—which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail. His principal anxiety was about his wife.

‘Do you think, sir,’ he asked the turnkey, ‘that she will be very much shocked, if she should come to the gate to-morrow morning?’

The turnkey gave it as the result of his experience that some of ’em was and some of ’em wasn’t. In general, more no than yes.”

Oddly enough this book has been filmed twice and both times was marred by audio that could not be understood. The actors talked in an undertone and mumbled all at once. I think it was an effort to convey a tone from the book, which evokes so well the busy society of the prison.

It is such an odd concept to us that people would be locked up for owing money – ensuring that they could not work to pay off their debts! But odder still is that their families sometimes moved into the prison as well, but those people could go back and forth because they were not debtors. So in a sense the Marshalsea was like a ghetto where some have access and egress during daylight hours. Of course this brings about trading and scheming in an effort to collect the money needed to leave.

The prison was torn down before Dickens wrote the novel -I visited the site in London to see a massive brick wall that is still standing. As Dickens says of its destruction in the foreword to this novel, “ . . . the world is none the worse without it.”

How ironic then that he re-created it as completely as Joyce did Dublin. The Marshalsea, with its sad and colorful inhabitants, will stand forever.

Get you free copy of “Little Dorrit” by Charles Dickens here >>>