LibrivoxWe are delighted to report that we have been able to recommence the cataloguing of completed audiobooks. Indeed, 29 have been added in the last 24 hours, and there are many more to come.
Most audiobooks have now had their RSS and iTunes links restored. The rest should be added within the next few days.
The New Releases feed had only appeared broken because there was nothing to put in it. It is now full of goodies for your edification and enjoyment.
Have fun!
Schools and universities have started again after summer. Why not use 10 gems of our catalogue to catch up on the vast field of science?
Now…where to start… Well, probably at the beginning: Charles Darwin waited over 10 years before publishing his results on evolution, and his seminal work applying it to humans The Descent of Man caused a great stir among scientists and the general public alike.
Once man climbed down the trees, shed his fur and started to walk upright, new challenges presented themselves: Finding food and shelter, producing clothes and weapons, watching the fire… Follow Ugh-lomi and his tribe as H. G. Wells tells A Story of the Stone Age.
At that time the world must have been an overwhelming sight: Enormous forests, vast grasslands, huge herds of all kinds of animals… Read Robert S. Yard’s Book of the National Parks for a tiny glimpse into that world.
Going Green is considered a good thing to do. Mostly. But… what if it goes too far? In Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore, a green invasion takes place – not of Martians, no, but of grass…
Scientists do have to push the boundaries to gain new insights. And often they have to leave their safe havens and explore unknown lands. This is what a square does when it leaves the realms of Flatland to explore life on a line and in space. Read the delightful novel with a mathematical tinge by Edwin A. Abbott.
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus is a classical story of a scientist yearning for knowledge and engaging the help of the devil to do so. Listen to our production of Christopher Marlowe’s drama
Frankenstein is another classic example of a scientist whose unleashed monsters haunt him for the rest of his life. Nothing more needs to be said about the best know book by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Electricity is the spark standing at the core of our modern world. In 1913, Robert A. Millikan published his famous oildrop experments in On the Elementary Electrical Charge, which won him the Nobel Prize 10 years later.
In our technological world, the majority of people have all they need and even more they want. But what would you do if there was a forseeable end to all the comfort? Check out E. M. Forster’s short novel The Machine Stops and decide for yourself.
Let’s finish with poetry: To Science is contained in a collection of Edgar Allan Poe Poems. Unusual topic you mean? Well, yes, but so are love poems written by the master of horror…
Enjoy – and never stop studying!
Hello, everybody! We have another problem, I’m afraid. Plus ça change, eh? ;)
Further parts of the LibriVox site were migrated last night to a new server, and although it has restored the list of New Releases on the home page, it has unfortunately broken the catalogue pages of some of our new(ish)ly catalogued audiobooks.
If you encounter a LibriVox catalogue page which has no download links, all audio files can be obtained directly from the Internet Archive. Please visit the LibriVox page on the Internet Archive and search for the title in Audio Books & Poetry.
Additionally, you will find all our new releases by going to the LibriVox details page and scrolling down until you see This Just In.
We are hoping this will be fixed very soon.
EDITED TO ADD 10th Oct.: All book catalogue pages should now be complete, except for some which are still missing their RSS and iTunes feeds. We are working on this.
Also, it should not be many days before we can start cataloguing new audiobooks again. Recording has continued apace during this enforced break, so there are a number ready to catalogue. We are champing at the bit to get moving again. :D
Ruth
September 26 is the “European Day of Languages” to promote language learning. We at librivox do that all-year-round with recordings in more than 30 different languages. And we’ll present the following 10 gems from our non-english catalog:
The Ancient Greeks are considered the fathers of Western culture, and at that time, Greek was indeed the lingua franca. No wonder St. Paul would write his letters in this language! Read the Epistole pros Collosaes in the version of the Patriarchike Ekdosi. We also have the English KJV of this text.
A major pillar of Eastern culture are the teachings of 孔子 – Confucius. His 論語 -Analects have been collected after his death, and have been ingrained in daily life until today. Besides the Chinese text, we also have a reading in English.
Egri csillagok by Géza Gárdonyi tells about culture clashes: about the occupation of Buda and the siege of Eger by the Turks in the 16th century. Of course, there is also a love story within this historical novel – the most famous one in Hungarian.
A clash of different sorts is described in the novel Max Havelaar. Multatuli writes about the corrupt government system and the exploitation of the coffee workers by the Dutch on Java from his own experience.
Matsuo Basho also relates his own experiences in his travel diary Oku no Hosomichi. It tells of his journey from Edo to Northern Honshu and back in the late 17th century. Let’s hope it will not take you 156 days to get through our recording in Japanese!
Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire about 200 years later, Franz Kafka wrote mainly short stories, and he himself considered Ein Landarzt to be one of his best. It is contained in a collection of his works in German.
The Finnish novel Rautatie by Juhani Aho is considered his main work. Here, an old couple meets progress in the form of the railroad and finally decide to take their first ride in the horseless carriages.
When from four people in a room three wind up dead, the fourth one has to be the murderer, right? Monsieur Lecoq however, does not think so and embarks on a long investigation to solve the mystery. Enjoy the whole novel by Emile Gaboriau in the original French – or the first part of it in English!
For poetry this time, we present the Spanish collection Simplemente Darío by the father of modernism from Nicaragua, Rubén Darío.
Finally, two men with very different ideas about love think that they contend for the love of a pretty widow in the drama Desencantos. It is one of the early works of famous Brazilian author Machado de Assis, written in Portuguese.
Enjoy – and keep your dictionary handy!