I mis-spoke myself
The quest for the why-of-lie has led me to Sissela Bok's Very Important 1978 work of philosophical ethics, "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life."
LYING IS DESTROYING CIVILIZATION. ITS NEFARIOUS EVIL EATS AWAY AT OUR VERY BEING. READ AND DESPAIR, O MISERABLE SWINE.
I put it away and found Mark Twain's
"On the Decay of the Art of Lying." Read in five parts, two to four minutes per bit.
And yay for
Project Gutenberg, which creates and collates free e-books for the reading challenged. Homo authors read by a real live human bean include kiddie storyteller
Hans Christian Andersen, poet
Walt Whitman and, er, no lesbians in English that I could see. There are also
a few hundred computerized readings, but Oscar Wilde's jailbird agony in
"De Profundis" is lost when read by a machine. An
Edith Wharton fan ensured that much of her friendly oeuvre is on there, too.
But I think I'll stick to hetero pulpist
Sax Rohmer's "The Insidous Dr. Fu Manchu." There's a book whose lies can only be enhanced by a machine.