An Audiobook GoldMine

Have a spare twenty minutes and need something cool to fill your time with? Check out these interesting renditions of popular and obscure stories/poems.
Image may contain Furniture Shelf and Bookcase
Image: Sarah Pinault

In 2009 not long after the birth of my first son, my husband was stricken with Labyrinthitis. This rendered him mostly useless for several months. As part of his physical therapy he would spend the whole day loading the dishwasher, yes, it would take that long. After exhausting every extra on the extended Lord of the Rings boxset, he turned to audiobooks from our local library and recomendations from me. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel was a huge hit and something he would never have ordinarily sat down to read.

Despite a childhood obsession with The A Team and the Case of the Silver Swan I'm not really an audiobook kind of person. I like the feel of a book, I like turning the pages. However, I recently stumbled across a site which compiled a list of free recordings from across the internet, some of which are just too delicious for words:

  • Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi briefly played the Master in Doctor Who Season Three, he also provides a reading of Bertrand Russell's ABC of Relativity: Understanding Einstein.
  • Edgar Allen Poe is a frequent addition to any site containing free audio files, here I discovered my favorite Poe classic, "The Raven," read by Chrisopher Walken and John de Lancie. Though I'm not sure I can get James Earl Jones and Homer Simpson out of my head.
  • An inspiration to the writers of short stories across the world, Anton Chekhov's "The Beauties" is here read by Phillip Pullman.
  • One of the things I have always found intriguing is when authors read their own work, the inflection, the passion, the humor they add to their work. Here you can see Neil Gaiman, via a cell phones camera, reading his extremely short story "Other People".
  • If you have a taste for the dulcet tones of Sean Connery, you can listen to Ithaca by CP Cavafy.
  • Though if your tastes run more to James Franco you can download an MP3 of the great and powerful Oz reading "William Wei" by Annie Barrodale.
  • If the English send you weak at the knees then you can opt for the ever popular "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, as read by Sir Anthony Hopkins.
  • If this is something you want to share with the kids, you can also view the likes of Sean Astin and Elijah Wood reading children's stories for the Screen Actors Guild project Storyline Online, which is much like the CBeebies bedtime hour stories with Freema Agyeman and David Tennant.