Penguin Classics, that more-than-1,500-titles collection of English-language literary classics, has a new free app for iOS devices available on Tuesday.
The paperback publisher, celebrating 65 years of the Classics collection this year, has created a catalog of its titles (which basically includes every author you have heard of, ever) and put it into an easily searchable database.
Not only can readers find book information by title and author, they can discover unknown classics by searching by subject, genre, time period and region. So, for example, if you wanted to find a nature-theme bildungsroman in 18th century America, you would find several books that fit that bill, including Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” and “The Morgesons” by Elizabeth Stoddard.
Of course, not all options combine so productively — try searching for postmodern psychological literary criticism from Haiti and you will come up snake eyes.
Each book page contains a summary, as well as a link to buy the paperback edition from Penguin USA’s online store. Social-media buttons can broadcast your love of “Homer’s Odyssey” or Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” to your friends, and a “More Like This” button will direct you to related titles.
Most enjoyable, however, are the quizzes contained within the app. There are 65 books in the app that have quizzes associated with them so you can test your knowledge of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (“To what animal does Archer compare May and the rest of Old New York?”) or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (“What do Huck and Jim find inside the floating house?”). The app also has quizzes that ask questions across all 65 titles (you can choose a quiz that takes one, five or 10-minutes long) if you want to relive that comp lit class you took freshman year.
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/a-gateway-to-great-books-on-your-iphone/
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