Together

This month, the 22nd Olympic Winter Games take place in Russia, and thousands of people from all over the world gather in a celebration of team spirit. More things we can achieve when we work together can be found in 10 gems from our catalog.

Our family is the closest group of people we ever know. In Five Little Peppers and How They Grow, Margaret Sidney tells the story of the Pepper family that, although very poor, goes through life together and meets all adversities with spirit and good humour.

Sometimes however, you need more than one family to accomplish things – raising a barn, for example requires the help of the whole neighbourhood. Read the Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 – 1840 by William Cooper Howells for more insight into neighbourly help and friendship.

Friendship is not all about mutual aid, but also about having fun. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s book of poetry, a group of friends spend the night in a tavern telling each other a number of Tales of a Wayside Inn.

Sometimes, people need to join forces to help those who cannot help themselves. In 1837, An Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women did exactly that, and in An Address to Free Colored Americans they stated their intentions for the abolitionist movement of the time.

Similarly, The Dog Crusoe and His Master and two of their friends take on a journey through the prairies to bring about peace between the White and Red races. Read all about their adventures in the book by R. M. Ballantyne.

Much greater distances and even more nations are covered in The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph. The father of Henry M. Field spent 13 years of his life to connect Europeans and Americans by a cable laid through the ocean, the beginning of a world wide network.

From a connected Earth we move into space – where meeting The Aliens is inevitable. So seems war, but a small accident brings both sides together trying to avoid destruction. Read the story by Murray Leinster and find out whether they will succeed.

Wouldn’t you want to spend as much time as close as possible with your beloved? Imagine a Ten-Foot Chain binding you together for three days and nights – would your love survive that? Four authors have been asked the same question, and each of them came up with another story…

The last two books on this month’s list are two of the most prominent examples of what LibriVox volunteers can achieve together:

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy took almost five years until completion – and 40 readers for all roles of this dramatic reading of the famous spy story set during the French Revolution.

In a similar league is our recently completed second version of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses: More than 80 readers – the majority of them for the dramatized section “Circe” – took on this difficult book and brought it to completion in less than four years.

Enjoy – and read together!