The year draws to a close, and many people use this time for retro- and introspection. Maybe the folllowing 10 gems from our catalog will help you on your spiritual journey.

Let’s start with the obvious: Christmas! You know the story: Bethlehem, manger, shepherds, star, three wise men,… Well, there is also the Story of the other Wise Man, who got lost on the way… Listen to the story by Henry van Dyke to find out if he reached his goal in the end.

Great similarities there are between the story of Jesus and that of John the Baptist. His life starts around the same time, and ends almost equally tragic: through the sheer stubbornness of Salome. Listen to our dramatic production of Oscar Wilde’s play.

Henryk Sienkiewicz tells about the burning of Rome by Emperor Nero, and the love that blossoms in its ruins between the Roman Marcus Vinicius and the Christian Lygia, in his famous book Quo Vadis.

“Where are you going?” is also asked of Evan McIan and James Turnbull. The devout Catholic and convinced atheist wander about to find a good spot for their duel. Whether the former gains satisfaction from the latter for insulting the Virgin Mary can be read in G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Ball and the Cross.

Seeking satisfaction and revenge was the cause for the War between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The big battle shall start tomorrow, but the warrior Arjuna has doubts over the killing. This is when Krishna takes him aside and their talk is recorded as the Bhagavad Gita, the central text of Hindu theology. This recording is also available in German.

Buddhism is the other important Eastern religion, and it goes back to the prince Gautama Buddha, who left his palace to seek enlightenment. Read the famous Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse to delve deeper into the life of Buddha.

The prophet Mohammed is considered the founder of Islam, as its most sacred text has been written down by him. Since then, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran has been sought for by countless people. This specific translation is by Mohammed M. Pickthall.

Mary Antin’s family left their Jewish traditions behind in Russia, when they emigrated to America. Read Mary’s touching accout of their new life in The Promised Land where they hoped to find peace and acceptance.

The ancestors of Charles Alexander Eastman, also known as Ohiyesa, emigrated also to North America, albeit thousands of years ago. Read The Soul of the Indian for an in depth view of their unique religion.

Let’s get back to where we started: Christmas. If baking cookies, wrapping presents and other holiday activities contribute to a heightened feeling of stress rather than spirituality, take a break with the first volume of our Hymn Collection.

Happy holidays to people of all faiths!

November makes the last leaves fall as well as the temperature – a great time to stay at home and get in touch with friends… To get you in the write mood, we present 10 corresponding gems from our catalog.

The Cathay poems, written by Ezra Pound, or rather, tranlated from the Japanese and Chinese, contain Exile’s Letter by the Chinese poet Li Po. Enjoy also the other poems, most of them with travel as theme.

Another travel narrative are the 25 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft. She went there to restore a failing relationship, and ended up writing her most popular book – composed of her letters and journal entries.

Squire Bramble’s family is travelling through England, and the letters to their friends tell about The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, the adventures of one of their ostlers. Interesting is that none of the letters in Tobias Smollett’s funniest work is written by Humphrey himself…

On the other extreme are the 320 Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman that Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, wrote during his lifetime, an enormous manual on self-improvement.

The improvement of the life of a fatherless child was the main motivation behind the letters – and the money sent – of an American boy to his Deer Godchild in France of World War I. The letters were put together by Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell.

Daddy Long Legs is the name a young orphan girl gives to her benefactor who pays her college education to become a writer. In return he expects regular letters to see how much she has learned. Find out if the money was well invested in Jean Webster’s well known novel.

Carl Stanton invested his money in an agency to have romantic letters written to him. After all, he is chained to his bed with bad rheumatism, and his girlfriend is not really into letter writing. In the end, however, he gets more than he paid for in Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s novel Molly Make Believe.

Another romantic story unfolds in the letters of Pamela to her parents. In this epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, the long resistance of the teenage housemaid is finally rewarded when her master proposes to her.

Letters of Two Brides, namely Louise de Chaulieur and Renée de Maucombe, describes the lives of two young women, starting from the time when they left the convent where they first met. Honoré de Balzac takes you on a journey spanning 17 years and 56 letters.

You know me, Al, by Ring Lardner tells two years of baseball history in a fictional setting: A typical men’s friendship where Chicago White Sox pitcher Jack Keefe keeps writing letters to his old friend Al at home.

Enjoy – and don’t forget to write!

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!