English · Intermediate
Read A Princess of Mars in Englishwith every sentence explained
Edgar Rice Burroughs · 1912
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs was first published in 1912. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and science fiction. It runs to about 65,700 words.
A cave in Arizona. A red star in the night sky. And suddenly, a soldier is standing on Mars.
John Carter is a former Confederate officer, now prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills. Hiding from a war party in a mysterious cave, he feels a strange paralysis, and suddenly finds himself standing on a dying red planet that its people call Barsoom.
In the light Martian gravity, Carter can leap like a giant and fight like ten men. He is soon captured by the green Martians, fierce four-armed warriors who live in ruined cities. Among them he earns the respect of the chieftain Tars Tarkas, and the loyalty of a huge, ugly, devoted Martian dog. Then the green men capture a prisoner from a human-looking race: Dejah Thoris, the proud and beautiful princess of Helium.
This 1912 adventure launched a whole genre of planetary romance, and influenced Star Wars, Superman and Avatar. It is fast, colourful and pure fun.
- Author
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- First published
- 1912
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Fantasy, Science Fiction
- Length
- About 65,700 words
How it opens
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection.
Reading A Princess of Mars in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
