Abelard and Heloise are a medieval couple famous for their Love Letters. Starting out as teacher and pupil, they became lovers, were brutally separated and ended in monasteries, where they relive their love in their correspondence.

The next book by an unknown author, where a young knight falls in love with a former slave girl is not quite so tragic. Obviously his father is not happy with the match, and so begins a long period of trials for Aucassin and Nicolette – will they get their happy ending?

As an anonymous writer find out after the wedding, it’s better to marry a woman without family. This way, there will be no intrusions on happiness as That Mother in Law of Mine is doing during his honeymoon.

Not much longer lasts the happiness of Gwendolyn, who must marry because she lost her fortune. Her husband is cold and abusive, and Daniel Deronda is the only one she can reach out to – but he is in love with somebody else… Read about their fate in the famous novel by George Eliot.

A young woman falls for a vampire – not an unusual story these days, but at the time Joseph Sheridan LeFanu published his book, the shock was great – because the vampire is a woman called Carmilla.

Sex is still a taboo topic for many people. Clearly there must be a way to change this, thought Henry Stanton 90 years ago and he wrote Sex – Avoided Subjects Discussed in Plain English, where he discusses sex for all ages, from the young to the old.

No inhibitions whatsoever plague Kate Percival whose “autobiography” The Life and Amours of the Beautiful and Dashing Kate Pericival caused a mixture of embarrassment and mirth in the readers of our dramatic version.

No fun at all in her marriage has Rosalie. When her sister Bettina comes to visit her years later, she sets out to save Rosalie from her husband, but that is not as easy as she thought. Find out the details in The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The Pastor’s Wife is finally freed from her family life and now goes on to search out all things feminist. Written at the onset of WW I, the book by Elizabeth von Arnim may just as well be autobiographical.

What about you – still looking for somebody despite those warnings? To help you in your search, read The Spinster Book by Myrtle Reed who offers advice on how not to become a spinster yourself.

Enjoy – and go get your own happy ending!

No feat(ure) of nature is so widely discussed, praised and condemmed as – the weather. J. G. M’Pherson explains all its details in his 1905 science book Meteorology.

Mostly monotone weather is expected by Mary, who spends her Christmas vacation in dry Arizona. But she’s up for a surprise in Ethel Twycross Foster’s charming children’s book Little Tales of the Desert.

Another lovely read for children is The Book of Nature Myths, where Florence Holbrook collected stories told by the North American Indians to explain the secrets of nature and her animals.

A similar goal on a much higher level was Charles Darwin’s when he wrote his seminal book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Simply a must read!

Not quite so natural is the selection a gardener has to make to guarantee a satisfying outcome. In Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim, the protagonist learns gardening – and writes a diary about it.

But what to do with all the things you don’t want in your garden? Mother Nature will take care of it in The World’s Lumber Room. Selina Gaye wrote what can be seen as the story of the world’s rubbish – and it is fascinating!

None of those issues worry little Mary Lennox who is simply delighted about the Secret Garden she finds at her uncle’s place. This is our brand new dramatic reading of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic.

Freckles, the orphan, is not so lucky – he finds himself in Limberlost Swamp as guard for timber. But he soon begins to love the harsh environment in the novel by Gene Stratton-Porter.

Stewart Edward White tells a similar story about early lumbermen in Michigan. While focusing on the life of newcomer Harry Thorpe, the vanishing wilderness also plays a major part in The Blazed Trail.

The River Duddon once formed the boundary between Lancashire and Cumberland in north-west England. This is a collection of more than 40 Sonnets written about it by William Wordsworth.

Enjoy – and go outdoors!

However, the article failed to state that he makes NO MONEY from his recordings at LibriVox, where every recording is made by volunteers completely without payment.

We have asked the New York Times to amend the online version of the article, to correct this misapprehension. (EDITED TO ADD: They have now done so – thanks NYT.)

This confusion, which has caused John considerable dismay, has arisen because he now also makes paid recordings for Iambik Audiobooks. You can find John’s commercial Iambik recordings here.

John has been a LibriVox volunteer reader for over seven years, and has dedicated himself to recording for LibriVox just about everything Mark Twain ever wrote. You can find all his free LibriVox recordings on his catalogue page here.

So, just to clarify: all LibriVox narrators, proof-listeners and administrators are completely unpaid volunteers, and make audiobooks just for the love of books and the public domain. There are now 6469 available for free download, and new recordings are being released at a rate of about 3 a day. Most recordings are in English, but we also have hundreds of recordings in other languages.

All volunteers are made most welcome at our friendly and helpful forum, so if you would like to join us, please register on our forum, and discover the joy of recording audiobooks.

If you would like to listen to some of our recordings, our catalogue can be searched by author, book title, genre, language or reader here.

Ruth

Check the Grand Countdown for information about your own timezone.

Q&A

? Will anyone be able to use the site while it’s being upgraded?
= NO, everything will be down. It’ll be like when we moved servers, only in hours rather than days.

? How will we know what’s happening if the site’s down?
= We’ll try to use Twitter and Facebook … and or just hit page-refresh occasionally until we come back.

? Does this affect our files at archive.org?
= No, they’ll be accessible as normal; but people won’t be able to use our catalogue to get to them.

? How long will it take?
= Depends on how much coffee our sysadmin has for breakfast. He’s asked for a 3hr window, so that’s the current estimate.

? Seriously, are there no changes in the software?
= Well, the new wiki search is much better! I don’t remember seeing anything different about the forum when I was testing (writes Cori.) For the most part, these updates are for stability and security, not functionality (that’s coming Real Soon Now. ;)

Photogen is a boy who never saw the moon. Nycteris is a girl who never saw the sun. Find out what happens when The Day Boy and the Night Girl overstep their boundaries set by the witch Watho and meet – in the lovely novel by George MacDonald.

Also like day and night, or rather like Tempest and Sunshine are the two sisters Fanny and Julia. Mary Jane Holmes weaves her story of the life of the different siblings in the pre-civil war South of the US.

The South of England is the home of Margaret, but circumstances force her family to move to an industry town in the North. Elizabeth Gaskell’s second social novel North and South focuses on the views of the employers.

All of Charles Dickens‘ novels can be considered as social critiques. So is The Old Curiosity Shop, where young Nell lives with her old grandfather until they lose all their money and are foced to live as beggars. We also have a Dutch version of this book.

Had Robin Hood been around, he would certainly have provided for them – with money stolen from the rich. Read J. Walker McSpadden’s book about the hero from Sherwood and decide for yourself whether he was a real person.

But money is not everything, as Gwendolyn already knows in the novel by Eleanor Gates. Left by her rich parents in the care of negligent servants, The Poor Little Rich Girl takes the wrong medicine – and promptly finds herself in a strange world…

From rags to riches only works if the outside appearance is matched by the speech of the person. At least that’s what Prof. Higgins believes in George Bernard Shaw’s famous play Pygmalion, as he tries to have poor Eliza pass as lady of society.

Mark Twain, with his sharp wits had a great time commenting – in disguised literary form – on current events. Sketches new and Old is a collection of his shorter writings.

Always old and always new – every religion is reinterpreted by every generation. In Henry Scougal’s letter The Life of God in the Soul of Man he dwells on his definition of true religion.

The English poet William Blake had his own view on religion. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he describes a visit to hell, which he sees as source of energy, as opposed to a more regulated vision of heaven.

Enjoy the attraction of the opposites!

Clotel, the President’s Daughter, lived a quite comfortable life – until the death of her father. Still legally a slave, she and her mother and sister end up at a slave auction. What happened to the three of them is described in the novel by William Wells Brown – based on the life of the alleged children of Thomas Jefferson.

Joel Chandler Harris was an American folklorist who collected the stories of plantation slaves. The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus is a collection of 26 stories put in verse. It’s certainly not politically correct these days, but an important testimony of times that should not be forgotten.

Plenty of whites were not happy with the abolishment and tried their best to undermine it. Charles W. Chesnutt writes about the rise of the white supremacist movement – and how they tried to take political control over the town of Wellington – in his novel The Marrow of Tradition.

Not only in America, but also in the Caribbean, slaves demanded their freedom. Toussaint L’Ouverture was a main part of it: Born in slavery, he led the uprising and saw the foundation of the Independent State of Haiti. Eventually, he became govenor of the island, but was imprisoned by the French and died in France. Read his fascinating biography by John Relly Beard.

Henry Ossian Flipper was also a slave who rose to fame. Although not the only one, he was the first Colored Cadet at West Point who eventually graduated – as 2nd lieutenant in 1877. Read about his experiences at the most famous of all military schools in the US in his autobiography.

Another first – the first black woman political writer – was Maria W. Stewart. Her book Meditions from the Pen is a collection of various of her works. Part memoir, it also contains four of her speeches on women and slavery, as well as her meditations and prayers.

Two women are at the center of Nella Larsen’s novel. Though of mixed race, both are Passing as white, but their lives are as different as they can be: Irene marries a black man and Clare a white one. Their meeting years later leads to painful consequences.

Painful consequences is exactly what Iago has in mind when he seeks to destroy the loving marriage of Othello and Desdemona. An expert in sowing distrust – will he succeed in our production of Shakespeare’s drama?

A butler who is not trusted, has no place in a household. This is what Barry Hamilton has to find out after a large sum of money disappears. So, he takes his family to New York to find new employment. But things go from bad to worse in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s novel The Sport of the Gods.

New York is also the scene of our last book by Irvin S. Cobb. J. Poindexter, Colored, is the personal assistant of Judge Priest, who is currently on holidays abroad. So, Jefferson has time to roam the city – and has plenty of (humorous) adventures…

Enjoy – but don’t forget!

You can find the latest information on our Forum Thread, including links to the latest documentation:
https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=44129

Thanks!

Aaron was a programmer, a campaigner for social justice, and a believer that the public domain truly belongs to the public. He helped create Reddit, was a chief architect of the Open Library and Creative Commons, was a founder of Demand Progress, which helped defeat SOPA, and kept the Internet open, safe for projects such as LibriVox.

Aaron, who had written publicly about past experience with depression, killed himself two years after he was arrested for downloading, at MIT, millions of academic journal articles (many in the public domain) from JSTOR, a non-profit journal repository. The authorities were seeking punishment of 35 years in jail, $1 million in fines. It’s been estimated that his defense would have cost $1.5 million in legal fees.

It’s hard to express the scale of loss to all of us, the community of the Internet. I met Aaron only once, but I’ve admired his work for years. By 26, he had done more than most of us will ever do in our lifetimes, driven by his vision of the public good. While it is always shocking when someone we have met dies, the greatest pain is contemplating everything that Aaron Swartz would have done for the world, which he will never get the chance to do.

And so, those of us who were inspired by Aaron’s vision of the world — perhaps some of you who are just now discovering what Aaron stood for — are left to contemplate a future where it is up to us, without Aaron’s help, to make the world a better place. I hope we don’t let him down.

– Hugh

***
If you’d like to read a bit more about Aaron:

• The Swartz Family Statement
• Brewster Kahle: Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies
• Larry Lessig: Prosecutor as Bully
• Cory Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz
• Matt Stoller: Aaron Swartz’ Politics

The major problem of people predicting the End of the World is that hardly anyone believes them. This happens in H. Beam Piper’s novel The Edge of the Knife: A man sees a nuclear war, the rise of the Terran Federation and, finally, the start of space travel.

If you do meet alien peoples – not necessarily from outer space – being able to communicate is essential. Wouldn’t a language designed for easy learning be perfect for the purpose? Take a class with Helen Fryer, The Esperanto Teacher.

Although uninhabited, comets certainly come from outer space, and the one in Camille Flammarion’s novel is going to hit. Read Omega: The Last Days of the World and see how the world is coping with imminent destruction.

The most popular strategy in such cases is to run and hide. This is what the protagonists in the Decameron do, they flee from a plague to the countryside. To escape boredom they tell each other stories in Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, which we have staged as dramatic reading.

When a plague strikes, you’ll have a lot of sick people to care for. For a manual on how to do this lovingly and efficiently, read Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale, regarded as the founder of modern nursing.

But what if all treatment fails? In the novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Lionel Varney is the only one immune to a violent illness that slowly but surely kills all mankind except him. Find out how he deals with being The Last Man.

At least Adam is not completely alone after natural desaster strikes – luckily he has Robin. How the two strive to learn everything they need to survive is described in The Master Knot of Human Fate by Ellis Meredith.

Food is the primary ingredient to successful survival – but what if the ingredients are scarce? Dr. Albert P. Sy, a professor of chemistry, wrote the WWI pamphlet Food Preparedness about how to get maximum nutrition out of minimum supply.

Avis Everhard witnesses the rise of an oligarchic tyrannny in the US. 700 years later, her diary is published with correcting commentary by Anthony Meredith. Read The Iron Heel by Jack London, only one of many scenarios for a dystopic future.

Judgement day will come for all of us, at least if you are religious. Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy gives a glimpse of the afterlife awaiting us. This book is also available in German and in the original Italian.

Enjoy – and get prepared!

Байки Леонiда Глiбова by Глiбов Леонiд