Stamped Caution
By Raymond Z. Gallun; Read by Gregg Margarite 2 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 1 Hour 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: August 01, 2010 When an alien spacecraft crashes in Missouri a team of army investigators is dispatched. Among the debris they find a Martian infant and decide to raise him in their lab. Is he too strange to form a relationship with humans? Maybe, but he does have cute eye-stalks. First published in the August 1953 issue of Galaxy magazine.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Wrong Box with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. This is the same kid whose drawing had inspired Treasure Island seven years earlier. Interestingly, it was published while Stephenson (age 39), and Osbourne (age 21), were traveling in Polynesia. Here is an 1888 photograph of Lloyd Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson in Tahiti (Osbourne is standing, Stevenson is seated):
Of The Wrong Box, Rudyard Kipling wrote:
“I have got R.L. Stevenson’s [The Wrong Box] and laughed over it dementedly when I read it. That man has only one lung but he makes you laugh with all your whole inside.”
Indeed, as the RLS website describes The Wrong Box as “a humorous tale of misunderstandings, drunkenness, attempted fraud, false identities and other mishaps.” After having watched a scratchy old VHS copy of the movie I discovered this audiobook on LibriVox! I am enjoying it immensely. This enjoyment is assisted by its wonderful narrator. Andy Minter has a very appropriate accent for both the text and the telling.
The Wrong Box
By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne; Read by Andy Minter
1 |M4B|, 16 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 6 Hours 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: September 14, 2008 The Wrong Box is a comedy about the ending of a tontine (a tontine is an arrangement whereby a number of young people subscribe to a fund which is then closed and invested until all but one of the subscribers have died. That last subscriber then receives the whole of the proceeds). The story involves the last two such survivors and their relations, a train crash, missing uncles, surplus dead bodies and innocent bystanders. A farce really.
At 110 years old The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz (aka The Wizard Of Oz), is one of the few children’s classic novels, that children read, and that WAS a children’s novel from the very beginning. Today a tour through the kids literature section of your local big box bookstore will probably turn up a dozen or so “classic novels” that purport to be ‘kid lit’ of some sort. For publishers what makes them ‘children’s classics’ is that they are public domain and they have recognizable titles. Few were written with actual children in mind, and due to the age many can use an English language that’s so archaic as to be hard for many adults to read. Not so with The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. Sure it’s public domain too, but unlike most it was actually written with children wholly and completely in mind, unlike say, The Call Of The Wild, Frankenstein or Dracula.
In a 1975 essay entitled The American Grimm, comics legend Roy Thomas describes L. Frank Baum as the New World’s successor to “Hans Christian Anderson” and “The Brothers Grimm”. Writes Thomas:
“After trying his, hand at both acting and journalism, Lyman Frank Baum decided to create a unique Americcan fairy tale which did not owe its entire existence and background to the European tradition of goblins, witches, elves and the like. To do this, he set the beginning and ending of his story (which was originally called simply The Emerald City and at one point even From Kansas To Fairyland) in the heart of the American prairie. Of course. he didn’t completely keep out the witches.”
The Free Listens blog rates LibriVox’s audiobook version, as narrated by J. Hall, rather highly! Consider:
“J. Hall narrates the book with a pleasant American accent that would be at home at NPR. This isn’t a professional reading; Hall has several minor stumbles and he doesn’t attempt distinguishing voices for the characters. However, these minor faults can be easily overlooked when one considers the excellent pacing and emphasis with which Hall reads. The recording is free of any background sound, but has a compressed sound when played at higher volumes, perhaps due to noise filtering. All in all, this is a excellent choice if you’re looking for a recording of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz that comes without silly voices or overacting.”
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz
By L. Frank Baum; Read by J. Hall
1 |M4B| File, 25 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 3 Hours 45 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 10, 2007 The timeless story of the Wizard Of Oz. Follow Dorothy as she leaves Kansas for Oz on a cyclone. She meets many strange, and wonderful people and creatures along the way. Enjoy it again with your children and family.
The Iron Heel, one of the books from our 4th Annual SFFaudio Challenge. It is now complete and available free from LibriVox! Narrator Matt Soar sez:
I have just this afternoon finally finished the last chapter of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. Phew! It’s been quite an experience – begun in Montreal, completed in France, six months in the making.
He actually wrote that two months ago. See, Matt decided to make a planned creative commons release release PUBLIC DOMAIN! Woohoo! It’s on LibriVox and it has now been catalogued!
And, over in the “about” section of Matt’s site, TheIronHeel.net Matt wrote:
The entire experience has been intriguing, if not uncanny: The story, about an overbearing, immoral government characterized by deception, torture, and warmongering, against a background of civilian exploitation and religious zealotry, is mainly remarkable for the fact that it was written a hundred years ago — rather than, say, five.
Perhaps the only aspects of The Iron Heel that really age it are its breathlessly romantic heroine, occasionally prosaic language, and the author’s fleeting use of dubious terms to describe ethnic minorities. These quibbles aside, I’m really glad I took the time to record it, and hope you enjoy it too.
The Iron Heel
By Jack London; Read by Matt Soar 26 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 8 Hours 18 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox / TheIronHeel.net
Published: July 16, 2010 Generally considered to be the earliest of the modern dystopian novels, The Iron Heel chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London’s socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of “soft science fiction” novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.
The book: Not to be confused with the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is an unbelievable adventure, in both senses of “unbelievable”. Like Watson in Conan Doyle’s more famous Sherlock Holmes series, the narrator, Edward Malone, is a tag-along to the real main character of the book, the conceited and quarrelsome Professor Challenger. Malone, a newspaper reporter, accompanies Challenger on an expedition to a plateau in the jungles of South America, where dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts are rumored to live.
Although the premise for the book can now be seen as impossible, Challenger’s assertion of living dinosaurs is met with extreme skepticism by his colleagues in the novel, effectively removing the reader’s ability to criticize it. The story proceeds at a gallop, with new adventures happening every chapter. This book is fast and fun, making it a great light read for the summertime.
Rating: 8/10
The reader: You probably know by now that Mark F. Smith is one of LibriVox’s best readers. He’s done a wide range of books, and I can’t think of any of them that is bad. Smith’s dialog puts the listener into the story and his narration carries a bit of sarcasm at the right places, to help the listener see the wittiness in Conan Doyle’s writing. The recording, as always with Smith, is beautifully done.
It’s kind of a shame that this LibriVox edition of At The Back Of The North Wind is not wholly narrated by Meredith Hughes. She only reads the first three chapters. They are wonderfully narrated.
I happened across this audiobook whilst researching a stack of old hardcovers that I inherited from my grandmother. I must have read it at some point as the story is entirely familiar. But now, looking at it with adult eyes, the ideological argument it makes seems more quaint than persuasive. See, At The Back Of The North Wind is a theodicean Fantasy. It uses the personification of the “North Wind” to explain why evil exists in the world. As such it belongs on the bookshelf between two of C.S. Lewis’ books, The Problem Of Pain and The Lion,The Witch And The Wardrobe.
If you’re looking to get into some late 19th allegorical Fantasy, you probably couldn’t do much better than this wholesome story of what is essentially a gray witch and the good little boy she takes on a series of adventures.
Here’s the color plate from my paperbook edition (it depicts the Diamond, the little boy protagonist, and the North Wind (in the guise of a little girl):
At The Back Of The North Wind
By George MacDonald; Read by various 38 Zipped MP3 Files – Approx. 8 Hours 57 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 24, 2007 Diamond the little boy sleeps in the hayloft above the stall of Diamond the horse. The loft is snug but drafty, and after plugging a hole in the wall one night, Diamond is scolded by the beautiful Lady North Wind for closing her “window” into his room. Thus begins their friendship. Spirited away by the North Wind, Diamond embarks on a series of adventures both near to and far from his home. His pure heart and his simple, loving spirit guide him as he journeys to the back of the North Wind and home again. Originally serialized in 1868, beginning with the first issue of “Good Words For The Young” magazine.
Stamped Caution
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Wrong Box with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. This is the same kid whose 
