Yet Another Solo Summary:
Great Expectations -
This classic tale by Charles Dickens tells of an orphan, Pip, who through a series of strange circumstances first finds a trade as a blacksmith's apprentice and then learns that he has "great expectations" of a future inheritance from an anonymous benefactor. He soon learns to live the profligate life of a gentleman as he gradually sheds his associations with the gentle souls of his past, Joe (the blacksmith) and Biddy (a level-headed young lady). He throws his money at improving the prospects of his roommate and friend Herbert and his heart at an "ice princess" whose heart will never respond. But then an escaped convict from his distant past comes calling, and all Pip's hopes dissolve.
The Poison Belt (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) -
Three years after the events that took place in The Lost World (http://librivox.org/the-lost-world-by-sir-arthur-conan-doyle/), Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow explorers (Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and reporter E.D. Malone) to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him.
What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just-received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.
Shutting themselves tightly up in Challenger's house, they start to consider what may be done. But as their countrymen start to drop, will their oxygen last long enough to determine and implement a solution?
The Pathfinder (by James Fenimore Cooper) -
Natty Bumppo goes by many names: La Longue Carabine, Hawk Eye, Leatherstocking, and in this tale, The Pathfinder. Guide, scout, hunter, and when put to it, soldier, he also fills a lot of roles in pre-Revolution upstate New York. An old friend, Sergeant Dunham of the 55th Regiment of Foot, asks him to guide his daughter through the wilderness to the fort at Oswego where Dunham serves. With the French engaging native Indian allies against the British and the Yankee colonists, such a journey is far from safe.
Dunham has a plan in mind - to see his daughter Mable married off to the most redoubtable frontiersman and marksman in the territory, who is Pathfinder himself. But as an attractive and marriageable young lady, she draws other suitors. Then a military expedition contrives to put Sgt. Dunham, Mable, Pathfinder, and two other wooers into an isolated and dangerous garrison. Here treachery raises the stakes, and with the soldiers of the detachment shot down or captured, all of them must show mettle for any of them to escape with their scalps.
Tom Swift and His War Tank (by Victor Appleton) -
Tom Swift, that prolific youthful inventor, is engaged in trying to help the Allies win WWI. After reading newspaper accounts of the British tanks, Tom takes a sheet of paper and sets out to design a better one from scratch. And fortunately, he can throw the whole family business behind his venture.
He has two problems: First, his friends and acquaintances are questioning his patriotism because he hasn't enlisted as a rifleman for the front lines. Even his girl is worried his blood isn't true-blue. But that's because he is developing his tank in secret, and they don't know he's concentrating on winning the war the American way, with machines.
The second problem is that the German spies have penetrated the secret of what is being built in the high-security shop on the Swift property. And they will stop at nothing to steal its design - not kidnapping Tom, and not kidnapping the tank itself, complete with crew.
Tom and his buddies had better work fast, or the American riflemen are going to find the Kaiser's soldiers using American-designed tanks against them!
