Seven Adventures from the XtreamFm Library
A reading list from the Adventure shelf, from a Michigan riverbank to the chessboards of Mars.
These seven books share a shelf and a temperament. Each opens somewhere on the far edge of ordinary life — a river swollen with spring melt, a balloon falling into the Pacific, a walled town of stone ladders climbing a cliff, a frozen goldfield, an English castle at the turn of a violent century, a chessboard on Mars. They come from different authors and different corners of the world, but they all begin by moving a person out of the settled centre of things and setting them down where the rules are not yet clear.
The list is for a reader who wants a story with somewhere to go, and who does not need it explained first. All seven are free to read here in full. Below, each entry says what the book is and where it starts, and links straight to its page.
The Riverman by Stewart Edward White
This is a book of the logging rivers, and it wastes no time telling you so. It opens with a landscape drawn as carefully as a map: the pond, the dam, the two-story mill on the flat below it, and past the small clearing nothing but forest running back to the higher ground. The people arrive after the place does, which tells you what kind of story this will be — one where the country and its work come first.
For a reader who has never seen a river used to move timber, White's opening is a plain, unhurried way in. The setting is precise enough to stand on, and the wind that comes up the length of the pond in the first lines is the first thing that moves in the book.
A strong wind blew up the length of the pond. It ruffled the surface of the water,
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
Verne begins in the worst possible moment and lets you work out the rest. There is no scene-setting: only voices in the air over the Pacific, arguing about ballast as their balloon drops toward the waves. By the time the book pauses to tell you it is four o'clock in the evening on the 23rd of March, 1865, the danger is already fully in motion.
It is a strong demonstration of how to open a story in the middle of trouble. The reader is dropped in exactly as the characters are — falling, over water, with the last sack of ballast already empty.
“There! the last sack is empty!”
Chapter 1
Men of Iron by Howard Pyle
Pyle sets his story in an England that has just changed hands. The year 1400 opens quietly, he tells us, only a short time after the weak and treacherous Richard II has been dethroned and Henry IV made King. But the peace is only a seeming one. Henry proves a just and merciful man, Pyle writes — as justice and mercy went with the men of iron of those days — and even so, the noble families who prospered under Richard have lost ground, and resentment is already gathering.
That last qualification, folded into the introduction, sets the tone: this is a world where even the mild rulers are hard. For a reader who likes their adventure grounded in a real and unsettled political moment, Pyle lays the ground plainly before anyone draws a sword.
Smoke Bellew by Jack London
London opens with a name, or rather with four of them in a row. His man begins life as Christopher Bellew, becomes Chris at college, then Kit among the Bohemian crowd of San Francisco, and ends up known by no other name than Smoke Bellew. As London puts it, the history of the evolution of his name is the history of his evolution.
It is a clever, economical way to promise a transformation before the story has properly started, and the machinery of that change is named right away: a fond mother, an iron uncle, and a letter. A reader who wants to watch a soft man be remade by a hard country is told, in the first paragraph, exactly what they have come for.
Nor would it have happened had he not had a fond mother and an iron uncle, and had he not received a letter from Gillet Bellamy.
THE TASTE OF THE MEAT. I.
Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas
A word of honesty about this one, taken from the book's own front matter. Ten Years Later belongs to the long sequence of D'Artagnan romances, and the material here is unusually frank about the confusion around it. The Vicomte de Bragelonne, it explains, is the final volume of the series and is usually split into three or four parts, the last of which is titled The Man in the Iron Mask.
The same note untangles a common mix-up: although this text calls itself the sequel to The Three Musketeers, there is another book, Twenty Years After, that comes between them. For a reader coming to Dumas through the famous characters, it is worth knowing where this volume sits before starting. The transcriber's notes here do that job.
A Message from the Sea by Charles Dickens
Dickens begins with a place worth stopping to look at, and a captain who does exactly that. Captain Jorgan has to look high, because the village is built sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There is no road in it, no wheeled vehicle, not a level yard. Two irregular rows of white houses climb the cliff like the sides of crooked ladders, and you go up or down the village by the steps between them.
It is a vivid, physical opening — a whole settlement you can see and almost climb — and the title hints that something has come to this vertical village from the water below. Jorgan's first words set the mood before any of that arrives.
“And a mighty sing’lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days of my life!” said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it.
CHAPTER I—THE VILLAGE
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
This one starts on Earth, at a chessboard, with a needling loser. The narrator has just been beaten at chess as usual, and consoles himself by teasing his opponent Shea about a theory that phenomenal chess players are always children under twelve, adults over seventy-two, or the mentally defective — a theory, he admits, that he lightly ignores on the rare occasions he wins.
The tone is dry and companionable, and the frame is deliberate: an ordinary evening, an ordinary game, and the mention of John Carter coming to Earth waiting in the title of the prelude. For a reader who wants their journey to Mars to begin from somewhere entirely familiar, Burroughs starts at the kitchen-table level and points outward from there.
The books, free to read
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