Great Classic Stories 2

The ones that stuck out as being good in this collection were
Young Goodman Brown: He wanted to be good, but saw that everyone that he respected was in cohorts with the devil. It also made me wonder what happened to the deep religiousity form early New England. Will the other super religious areas change that way also?
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper: A great Mark Twain humor piece that I had not read before.
A Piece of String : A small thing ends up leading to dire consequences (watch out for strings!)
Head and Shoulders: life intervenes, and roles switch, with the academic's showgirl wife eventually attracting his past intellectual idol.
I didn't like Nuns at Luncheon or Cousin William.

The stories:
Young Goodman Brown (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835)
The Cask of Amontillado (Edgar Allan Poe, 1846)
Cousin William (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1855)
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper (Mark Twain, 1870)
A Piece of String (Guy de Maupassant, 1883)
Angela, An Inverted Love Story (W.S. Gilbert, 1890)
Oh! The Public (Anton Chekhov, 1885)
The Nightingale and the Rose (Oscar Wilde, 1888)
The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin, 1894)
A Coward (Edith Wharton, 1899)
A Jury of Her Peers (Susan Glaspell, 1917)
Araby (James Joyce, 1914)
The Mark on the Wall (Virginia Woolf, 1917)
The Interlopers (Saki, 1919)
Head and Shoulders (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920)
The Stranger (Katherine Mansfield, 1921)
The Blind Man (D.H. Lawrence, 1922)
Nuns at Luncheon (Aldous Huxley, 1922)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The science seems impressive, though the story gets tedious. The tone of the story felt more like Darwin than other Jules Verne adventure novels.

In this story, there are reports of a giant sea creature in the ocean. The narrator ends up on a ship that is going out to investigate. Through a series of events, he and two others end up being rescued by a the "creature" which turns out to be the ship "Nautalis". The captain of the ship, Nemo, has recused himself from society and lives now in the sea.

The narrator and his companions are now "prisoners" aboard the Nautilus. However, they are given freedom to explore, with their only main restriction that they are not permitted to leave the ship on their own. Through this they discover all of the great discoveries that Nemo has made, including submarine travel, undersea tunnels, electric ships, precious metal and mineral stores, strange animals and parts of the earth nobody has seen. Some of the science was ahead of its time, while other has been shown to be wrong.

In there voyages, they have a few adventures, including Nemo's attacks on some unknown enemy crews. However, the main conflict is against nature, rather than man. They have to fight giant sea creatures, escape from enclosing icebergs and endure horrid storms.

Eventually the narrator and his companions (the Narrator, Pierre Aronnax, his servant, Conseil, and the Canadian, Ned Land) escape the ship on a boat and live to tell their tale.