100 Classic Books
By Christopher Healy,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
The themes and content of these masterpieces vary greatly.
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100 Classic Books
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What’s It About?
100 CLASSIC BOOKS puts a library of literary masterpieces at your fingertips. Books range from Treasure Island, Black Beauty, and Little Women to Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. A quiz can help you decide which book to read. It asks you if you prefer certain time periods or certain genres, whether or not the book has ever been made into a movie, etc. Pages can be flipped with a finger swipe, and you can easily scan ahead by chapter or page through a user-friendly menu. You can place bookmarks in up to three novels at a time.
Is It Any Good?
Will reading books on a screen ever be as good as reading them on paper? That's still up for discussion. But there's nothing bad about reading these great works of literature on your DS. 100 Classic Books gives you such a wealth of stories to choose from that the addition of that "what should I read?" quiz is much appreciated. The screen may be small (using a DS XL might work even better), but the font is clear and has a nice, real-book-like quality. It also helps to show real book covers for each.
Reading these books is enjoyable and provides a nice edifying feeling -- like you're improving yourself and entertaining yourself at the same time. For some, this kind of reading will never take the place of holding a real paper book in your hands, but for people who would like to quickly increase their home library for a mere $.20 a book, this is a sweet bit of software.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the many themes in these classic books: War, love, ethics, human nature.
You can also talk about why you choose a particular book to read. What did you base your choice on? Did you use the built-in quiz to help you decide? Did you pick books you've heard of already? Are you more interested in trying one you know nothing about?
Game Details
- Platforms: Nintendo DS , Nintendo DSi
- Available online?: Not available online
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Release date: June 14, 2010
- Genre: Educational
- ESRB rating: NR
- Last updated: August 30, 2016
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