Eternal youth and beauty is a temptation hard to resist. But at what price? .The subject of a painting and admired for his beauty, Dorian Gray trades his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Amidst a lifestyle of hedonism and secret lives, he nonetheless manages to maintain the persona of a very proper gentleman in the eyes of society. But his portrait tells a very different story.... Brilliant. Very interesting reading.

The works of H.G. Wells are well known for their prophetic ideas. The War in the Air is one of these works. Written in 1907, it presented the idea of using aircraft for the purposes of warfare. The protagonist in this story is Bert Smallways who becomes accidentally entangled in a German plot to bomb New York City from the air. As the bombardments and air warfare become more intense and destruction surrounds him, Bert faces the true horror of war ... even after it has ostensibly ended.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The trip has been recreated many times since most recently in 2005 for the BBC. Quotes and references turn up regularly, ranging from references in Robert A. Heinlein's 1958 Have space suit will travel through to the 2006 film Pirates of the Caribbean.

Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" was published in 1999. The book quickly began to define a certain vocabulary for thinking about the regulation of cyberspace. More than any other social space, cyberspace would be controlled or not depending upon the architecture, or "code," of that space. And that meant regulators, and those seeking to protect cyberspace from at least some forms of regulation, needed to focus not just upon the work of legislators, but also the work of technologists.

Code v2 updates the original work. It is not, as Lessig writes in the preface, a "new work." Written in part collectively, through a Wiki hosted by JotSpot, the aim of the update was to recast the argument in the current context, and to clarify the argument where necessary.

Written in 1792 it is one of the earliest works on "the woman question". The controversial life of its author caused the earliest feminists to distance themselves from the work. Some major themes include education for girls, the debased position of women in society, the necessary equality of men and women, and the right of women to work.

What do you do when you are a young, headstrong woman who wants to lead an independent life during a time when it was taboo? Shunning social convention, Ann Veronica sets forth at aged twenty-one to study in London, freeing herself from the familiar. Beyond the family home, she discovers a world of intellectuals and suffragettes...and falls in love with a married man. But nothing comes for free..... With its feminist overtones, Ann Veronica caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1909.

Raskolnikov is a desperately impoverished young student and intellectual who robs and murders a moneylender to ease his own financial problems and, he rationalises, to better the world by expelling it of her evil doings. However, after he falls ill, he is eventually burdened by his past actions and seeks salvation. Was it justifiable homicide? Captivating and often disturbing, this novel explores this and other profound life concepts. Crime and Punishment is considered to be the one of the most influential Russian novels ever written. Read it and see why.