The Wood Beyond the World – William Morris

Soooo, almost a year after I started working on it, and several months after Mandarine agreed to take on the huge task of editing this lovely-crazy book, ’tis done. The Wood Beyond the World, by William Morris, is available as a LibriVox audiobook.

http://librivox.org/the-wood-beyond-the-world-by-william-morris/
(Or stream each section through the online player here: http://www.archive.org/details/woodbeyondtheworld_0810_librivox )

It’s a great fantasy story, with interesting characters and strange plots, and it was splendid fun to read the pseudo-archaic language, even if I was tearing my hair out over it at times. Annoyingly, I think the archive.org counter has broken again, it still registers only 197 downloads so far, or else no-one’s downloaded it since the first day it was released — which is possible! SFFaudio set the original challenge and gave the book a good mention in their (excellent) recent podcast, but unfortunately, they DID refer to me as a ‘he’ throughout, so perhaps this is one of those books it’s better to read about than to read/hear. Or else they’d gotten confused with the other semi-freely available recording of the book, which can be found at AudioBooksForFree and runs a whole 10 mins longer than mine (a slower pace, not any deficiency of text, I hasten to note!) Read with a lovely British male accent, but only the lowest audioquality is available for free.

Here’s the first part — all about the lovely Golden Walter.
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/woodbeyondtheworld_0810_librivox/woodbeyondworld_01_morris_64kb.mp3] (11MB, 22:56min)




2 Comments

  • I subscribed at $100/year to AudioBooks before I found Librivox.

    I don’t know if we’re talking about the same gentleman, but the AudioBooks reader of “A Legend of the Rhine” (by Thackeray) is inspired. He did all of the many voices and did them brilliantly. I couldn’t stop laughing. (The work is a parody of Dumas.)

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