After sitting on my reading list for years, I finally got to The Leopard by Lampedusa (strangely for me, just after I finished the book, the NY Times ran two articles about Lampedusa and his 50 year old book). It was riveting, but in a way that was hard to explain to others - I [...]

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Forgotten books can be lost trails of thought with interesting and sometimes important lessons still to tell. Often those lessons emerge because a book is forgotten. I bought two books off the table at Green Apple’s outlet, for 50 cents a pound.
In the mid 1950s, Wallace Stegner, an unknown professor at Stanford, was commissioned to [...]

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“Throughout human history, people who took to the sea in Britain, on the Continent or in North America, did so usually because there was no other way of life open to them.” - Basil Greenhill, The Life and Death of the Merchant Sailing Ship, 1815-1895, 1980.
 ”The creditors sued, as they will . . . In [...]

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Over the last few months, we have been rebuilding our process for creating the PDFs and will start uploading new ones as we create them. We started with our most popular book, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We will continue to fine tune the process. The goal is to have the highest quality free downloadable books.

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Continuing the thoughts about imperialism and Conrad, we just added a new title by Valentine Chirol, a British high imperialist, meaning he was unequivocal in his belief that “advanced” societies could uplift “primitive” societies. These pro-imperial arguments often focus on the benefits to the colonized, as opposed to the benefits to the colonizers which are certainly [...]

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It’s been a while since we’ve added titles to Ria Press (we’ve been working on some behind-the-scenes tools to make running the site easier). Over the last few days, we’ve added Jules Verne titles from the Voyages Extraordinaires series. This group includes an illustrated edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. We’ll try to get [...]

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Genius though he was, Melville didn’t make up Moby Dick. Rather, the real-life sinking of Nantucket’s Essex by a whale inspired him. Philbrick recently wrote about the Essex, but Essex first mate Owen Chase’s short but powerful first hand-account is now available on Ria Press. Most incredible is Chase’s matter-of-fact nature in dealing with the sinking [...]

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Key themes in this year’s American election includes the role of government in providing healthcare, the scale of our overseas military operations, and of course, taxes. It seems we’ve been debating, essentially, the same things for more than 200 years. Paine’s Common Sense appeared when the young country was still trying to figure out the role [...]

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I continue to struggle with the theory that Heart of Darkness exposes Conrad as a racist. It seems impossible to read the story as anything but an indictment of colonialism and imperialism, and the racism inherent in those enterprises. If a reader wanted to accept a revisionist interpretation, Heart of Darkess could be an proto-indictment [...]

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Heart of Darkness by Conrad has been the most-read book on Ria Press since we started tracking such things. More than a century after publication, Heart of Darkness serves now as shorthand for doomed voyages, man’s savage tendencies, imperialism and racism. Its timelessness lives on in Apocalypse Now and other variations and reinterpretations. Incredibly to me, some modern readers insist Conrad himself was a racist. This seems like the ultimate in [...]

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