It’s that time of the year again: the holidays are coming up! To ease your kid’s anxiety (and your own), try the following 10 gems from our catalog.

There is nothing worse than having to stay at school during the holidays! The boring time expected by Gerald, James and Kathleen turns into a series of adventures in The Enchanted Castle, when they find a magical ring… Read the novel by Edith Nesbit to find out more.

Heidi also has lots of places to explore when her aunt brings her to the Swiss mountain hut where she will stay with her grandfather. The story is about how the lives of both Heidi and the Alm-Öhi change with her arrival – and is beautifully told by Johanna Spyri. This book is also available in French.

While Heidi soon settles in, Dorothy will try everything to return to Kansas. To do this, she must see The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and so she starts out on the yellow brick road… Read all about Dorothy and her new found friends in our dramatic reading of L. Frank Baum’s classic for children.

How life was on a station more than 100 years ago is told by Mary Grant Bruce in A Little Bush Maid, which is set in Australia. The daily life and small adventures of Norah are interrupted by an extra enjoyable trip to see the circus…

Many people would certainly pay a lot of money to see My Father’s Dragon. The book by Ruth Stiles Gannett starts when Elmer runs away to rescue a baby dragon from Wild Island. Will he succeed? And what will they be up to next?

Were the people who invented dragons aware of dinosaurs? While they could not breathe fire, those Mighty Animals would rule the Earth for millions of years before the mammals came, an impressive feat detailed in lovely small book by Jennie Irene Mix.

Before the discovery of America, numerous Indian Tribes inhabited the lands. Alexander Charles Eastman tells about their day to day lives of boys and girls in his childhood reminiscences Indian Child Life, when he was called Ohiyesa.

Not only his, but the whole Story of Mankind is highly interesting. Hendrik van Loon explains it all: from prehistoric man to the invention of Hieroglyphs, from the great nation of the Greeks to the crusades, from the reformation to the age of Science.

Jennie Hall picks a small part of that story. Her Viking Tales from Iceland focuses on the great sagas of King Halfdan and his son Harald, and who knows where the grain of truth is hidden there…

Telling the truth is generally a good idea, but somehow, being naughty seems to be more fun. What happens to naughty children is the topic of Heinrich Hoffman’s famous Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures. We also have a recording in the original German.

Enjoy – and Happy Holidays!

Welcome to the sixth and last leg of our World Tour, where we return to the cradle of mankind and make a roundtour with 10 gems from our catalog.

Let’s start our journey in Algeria, where we meet Tartarin of Tarascon who is in search of nothing less than lions. Read the funny novel by Alphonse Daudet about the French show-off – also available in French.

Travelling further along the coast and back in time, we make a brief stop in Egypt at the reign of one of its most famous queens. William Shakespeare gives his view on the well known story of Antony and Cleopatra.

Moving upstream on the Nile into the Sudan, we have a look at the Mahdist War of the late 19th century. We see it through the eyes of Winston Churchill who took part in the battle for Khartoum and wrote The River War.

A river in Uganda is the scene for a war of a different kind: In The Man Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures. John Henry Patterson details the long hunt for two lions that killed more than 108 men who were building a railway bridge across the Tsavo.

Lions and other animals feature prominently in Zanzibar Tales. The ancient tales of animals, some with a feel of 1001 Nights, were told to George W. Bateman by the natives of Tanzania.

Zanzibar is only the starting point in the book by R. M. Ballantyne. His novel Black Ivory tells about the slave trade in East Africa, which was well alive at a time when it was long forbidden on the West coast.

Moving further south, we get to the Zulu Kingdom. H. Rider Haggard tells Black Heart and White Heart, a story of love and betrayal during the time of Cetawayo, the last King of the independent Zulu nation.

These days, Zululand is a part of South Africa, just as the Karoo region, where Olive Schreiner spent part of her life. Her life and ideas form the basis of her best known novel The Story of an African Farm, which expresses some interestingly modern ideas.

Not quite so modern ideas, although they are by now means extinct, are expressed in the short poem The Congo. Although decidedly racist in its contents, it is interesting to note that its author Vachel Lindsay viewed himself as a supporter of African-American culture.

Finally, we get to travel from Sierra Leone to the peak of Cameroon with Mary H. Kingsley. Her book Travels in West Africa is an account of the adventures she had and insights she gained on her voyage of 1893.

Enjoy – and send a postcard!

October 4th is World Animal Day. That’s a perfect excuse to get your critters an extra treat and celebrate with 10 gems from our catalog.

Imagine taking a walk with your partner, and all of a sudden she turns into an animal. This is what happens to Richard Tebrick in David Garnett’s book Lady into Fox. How long will the metamorphosis of his wife last? And will he be able to conceal it?

Living with animals is not always easy. Nor is living with people. Hear all about the household of Kiki-the-Demure and Toby-Dog, or rather that of Colette Willy, in our dramatic reading of Barks and Purrs.

Just as cats and dogs, so can men and animals be friends. In the story Told Under a White Oak Tree, we hear about the tribulations of one of the first movie actors – as told by one of his friends, Bill Hart’s Pinto Pony.

There are many instances where animals work for humans. Details about the production of honey and how to tend to bees can be found in On the Hive and the Honey Bee by L. L. Langstroth, a master bee keeper.

Many more winged creatures, albeit of the feathered kind, are described in The Bird Study Book by Thomas Gilbert Pearson. An absolute must for any (hobby) ornithologist!

When she gets lost in the Australian Bush, little Dot makes her own studies of local, marsupial wild live. Her findings are described in Dot and the Kangaroo, a charming fairytale by Ethel C. Pedley.

In reality, wild animals tend to be less social when it comes to humans. Just like the bear Wahb, who desperately tries to stay out of human reach in The Biography of a Grizzly, noted down by Ernest Thompson Seton.

The clashing of human and animal habitat is one of the reasons for Our Vanishing Wild Life. The book by William T. Hornaday, written in 1913, has never been as hot a topic as nowadays.

Very cold instead it is on Penguin Island. When a short sighted priest mistakes the birds for humans and baptizes them, they begin to establish an almost human society. Read the satirical novel by Anatole France to find out if this was a good or bad thing.

Good and bad are traits only we posess, but we readily ascribe them to animals. This is especially apparent in the Fables for the Frivolous, a modernized variant of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, written in verse by Guy Wetmore Carryl.

Enjoy – and lots of bearhugs to you!

Welcome to the fifth leg of our Librivox World Tour, where we are taking a trip through South America with 10 gems from our catalog.

We are coming from the North into South America, just like the cocoa plant. Chocolate: or An Indian Drinke, our recording of the 17th century book by Antonio Colmenero des Ledesma, sings the praise of the drink of the Gods in a lovely poem at the beginning.

The early men living in The Lost World were probably too busy fighting for survival to sit down and drink chocolate. Read the famous novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, involving dinosaurs and vicious apes, set in Venezuela.

From Venezuela to the forest in Guyana flees Abel, and eventually he takes up residence with an Indian tribe. In a wood that is taboo for them, he finds Rima, and they fall in love, in W. H. Hudson’s novel Green Mansions, a Romance of the Tropical Forest.

However, their luck does not last long, and just like in the story of Adam and Eve, the fall comes oh too quickly. A Drama of Exile by Elizabeth Barrett Browning retells the well known biblical story.

Brazilian Tales contains six lovely short stories by various authors, representative of Brazilian literature at the end of the 19th century.

Brazil was also the endpoint of the 1867 expedition through The Andes and the Amazon. James Orton tells about the journey, starting in Ecuador, going through the mountains and the forest, and producing one of the first maps of equatorial America.

A scientific sensation was the rediscovery of Machu Picchu in summer 1911 by Hiram Bingham. Inca Lands gives a detailed description of the expedition into the Highlands of Peru, as well as of the excavation of the ancient city in 1912.

An interesting discovery is made by Capt. Delano off the shores of Chile, where he finds a Spanish slave ship in distress. Offering help to its captain Benito Cereno, he is to find out that not everything is as it seems on the surface in Herman Melville’s novel…

Thankfully, slavery is Far Away and Long Ago, just like the childhood of W. H. Hudson, who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 19th century, and recounts his memories of the times in this autobiographical book.

A Victorian gentleman stumbles upon a tropical world on Antarctica. He finds there a highly developed society, but can he cope with a complete reversal of his values, where being poor is good? Have fun with James de Mille’s interesting utopian novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.

Enjoy – and send a postcard!