To Posterity -- and Beyond! » Book Reviews

Frankenstein post 1 – oh my!

Cori — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:38:28 +0000

So, I’ve recorded one book for Iambik Audio (the lengthy and wonderful Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet) and I have a second lined up, which I am genuinely very excited about. It’s a huge change from OPRH, different genre, totally different narration style, and likely a different audience. I’ve been doing practice reads and working out how I want it to sound, because it’s very distinctive (in my imagination, at least.)

But the problem is, Frankenstein has GOT me. I’ve been thinking about making a free public domain recording of it for more than a year now, and the other day, I thought I’d just try out a sample recording, as a warm-up, you know. Two weeks and nine sections later, I am still largely in denial about this activity. The deadline for $newBook is April and that’s a while away still. And in the meantime, Frankenstein, which is NOT officially being read, I haven’t started a thread for it at LibriVox or anything … is somehow sneaking into files on my computer.

I’m not reading from the 1818 edition, which is rather less flowery than the 1831 “gosh, people like my book, I’d better revise it to make it more suitable for a wider audience” version. I’m not agonising over whether the Preface should be file 00, or considered an integral part of the book and numbered 01. I’m not wondering at all whether I might sound anything like Mary Shelley, and I definitely haven’t looked around online to see if any other women have ever recorded it (couldn’t find any.) I’ve not listened to Simon Vance’s widely available and very excellent version nor subsequently thought about how I myself would have approached those accents and voices.

Really, I’m only trying to fool myself, and I’m not even doing a good job of that. This book has completely gripped me, and I am enjoying recording it hugely. Last time I read the paper version, it was the 1831 one, and that seemed to drag … I’m not even sure I finished it. 1818 is (relatively!) punchy, and different in many ways (according to various comparisons and discussion online) that I approve of. (See also this listing of the 1823 edition’s changes.) A key aspect is the importance of free will in this version, vs. fatalism in the later edition. It’s less conventional — by the standards of the Nineteenth Century, at least. It’s a great book.

Mrs. Beeton’s – an unlikely audiobook?

Cori — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:38:12 +0000

Well, if it’s out of copyright, LibriVox is going to record it sooner or later … but I’m not at all convinced anyone’ll listen to the whole of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, now that it’s finished. It’s a 58 hour behemoth, and it’s hard to imagine anyone sitting down to quite so many hours of recipes. The fun is likely to come from dipping into random sections, especially the very dated chapters on the “Rearing and Management of Children” (recommending leeches for measles and laudanum for whooping cough and noting eating unripe plums causes cholera) and “Domestic Servants”.

I did contribute a chapter, on General Cookery, but mostly it was a giant glossary of French cooking terms, so I’ll spare you the horror of my Franglais here, and if you’re truly curious you can click through.

http://librivox.org/the-book-of-household-management-by-isabella-beeton/

On the plus side, this IS a very big deal as books go, as it was a “household-bible” for many, many years (in the UK at least) and sold like the hot cakes it taught you to bake. LibriVox doesn’t hesitate to tackle large books (c.f. Decline & Fall!) and the proof is in the pudding … this took just over two years! One surprising thing, that I’ve just noticed, is that only 33 people read for the project. It feels like it ought to have been so many more, but those recipe chapters were lengthy …

New solo complete: Royal Children of English History

Cori — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:31:56 +0000

I came across this lovely book about a month ago. Shortly after, a partner-in-crime whizzed it through Distributed Proofreaders in most accomplished style, and it was stored at Project Gutenberg. Preserving all its charming illustrations, and quite a bit of the book’s layout, I might add!

And then I took a holiday and recorded it, and now, here’s the free audiobook version of Royal Children of English History by E. Nesbit.

Download audio file (royalchildren_1_nesbit.mp3)
(First section, 12MB, 12:37min)

It’s a retelling of the stories of a number of kings and queens of English history, in full Nesbit style. Aimed at older children (there’s a scene of quite grim threat/peril in “Prince Arthur” and there’s a number of battles / wars described,) she’s attempting to make the “people behind the headlines” real. Not to mention that these were the headlines of the day, which, as she sort of says at the start, is a helpful way to think about History when the names and dates threaten to overwhelm. Fun stuff!

http://librivox.org/royal-children-of-english-history-by-e-nesbit/

Esther Waters by George Moore – new free audiobook

Cori — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:24:17 +0000

Esther Waters is a book I saw recommended somewhere online a long time ago, bought in hard copy from the dingy basement of a London bookshop a year ago, and have now contributed two chapters to its audiobook incarnation. It’s a realist novel about a housemaid whose virtue is lost – outside the sanctity of marriage – to a roguish young man and the consequences of that action. It’s unusual for the period in that the world doesn’t end with a woman’s fall … things go on, and they are Victorianly grim, but also quite vivid and imaginable. It’s a long listen, at 14 hrs, but I reckon well worth it.

Download individual files or the whole thing in a zipped folder from:
http://librivox.org/esther-waters-by-george-moore/

Listen to me starting off the book:

Download audio file (estherwaters_01_moore.mp3)
(17:07)

The Moving Picture Girls – that’s a wrap!

Cori — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:42:48 +0000

My newest solo has been released at LibriVox. I needed a bit of light relief after the splendidly wordy William Morris, so the Moving Picture Girls by Laura Lee Hope, seemed like a good choice. It’s set in early 20th century New York city, the home of a burgeoning movie industry, and is a very family-friendly fictional account of how a reputable theatre actor and his two daughters make their way into the business. I particularly like it for its description of how a movie is made and for a perspective on how movies were initially looked down on by “legitimate” actors — this is fictional, but not too far from the truth, I think.

There are no swear words of even the mildest sort, no sex (not even kissing, just some blushing & giggling romance), and the closest we get to violence is a light scuffle in an apartment building. It’s 7 hours of the cleanest fun!

Listen to chapter 1 below, download the book from this page, or visit archive.org to stream the whole thing.
Download audio file (movingpicturegirls_01_hope_64kb.mp3)
12:06min, 64kbps]

Mary Shelley’s Mathilda

Cori — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:40:19 +0000

My latest solo work is finished. I post-processed Mathilda, by Mary Shelley, for Project Gutenberg (that is, smoothed the proofread pages into a single document, both plaintext and HTML) so was very familiar with it (and with Mary’s quirky spelling which I tried to keep intact in the final work.) I actually started reading this about a year ago, and recorded the second half of it last month — but I really wasn’t happy with the shift in quality, since I’d upgraded my microphone in the intervening time, and learnt to be a bit more patient in reading speed. So, here we go … a mournful tragedy:

http://librivox.org/mathilda-by-mary-shelley/

Two things to note — although this story is about an incestuous relationship, it’s not salacious. If it were a musical, it’d be seriously Emo. Or, my grandmother could have listened to it without her hair curling. Second, anytime Mary writes “I will be brief”, you can be sure she’s about to be anything BUT brief. The runtime is somehow only 4hrs, though.

Audio for Chapter 1: Download audio file (mathilda_01_shelley_64kb.mp3)

Audio: A Jury of her Peers by Susan Glaspell

Cori — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:50:02 +0000

So, Mystery Story Collection Vol. 1 is now catalogued, and ready for the world’s listening pleasure, and my contribution to it is the rather long short-story, A Jury of her Peers by Susan Glaspell. It is, apparently, a ‘cosy/cozy’ mystery for those who discriminate, and for those who don’t, I can tell you that the lead characters are female and the action takes place in a kitchen. A man is strangled in his own bed, but whodunnit — and why?

I *LOVED* recording this story. It’s been on my To Do list for months, ever since the first time I read it — and cried too, it packed a punch for me. When Gesine invented the Mystery Collection, it was a natural fit, and so, I link here my free audio recording of:

A Jury of her Peers by Susan Glaspell – 53 min 26 sec
Source: E-text
[mp3@64kbps - 25.6MB]
[mp3@128kbps - 51.3MB]
[ogg vorbis - 26.8MB]

Download audio file (juryofherpeers_glaspell_cs_64kb.mp3)

I’ve also found a variant text as a play, which is retitled Trifles … same author, same plot, similar dialogue. Good stuff!

Now to download the other stories in this collection …

Antarctic jollies (no elephants)

Cori — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 23:02:07 +0000

South! The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917

I finished my chapter of South! just moments before the LibriVox deadline — and what a great chapter it is! I have not however, found out why the Antarctic explorers’ place of refuge had been named Elephant Island. I probably just need to listen to the rest of the book to find out how terrified the trunked ones were on seeing these hairy, smelly men arriving, and that they exited the island en masse like giant bald lemmings.

Shackleton’s not a wonderful writer — he repeats himself, jumps about in his story’s chronology, and butchers any chance of tension by informing his readers in the first few lines of the chapter that no-one died, despite heroic attempts by people with heart-failure and bronchitis. However, he was writing at the time of Sugar Rationing The First, and perhaps folks just didn’t want that kind of anxious ambiguity in their adventure reading.

That said, it’s an innately exciting story, carefully described, and — my chapter was, at least — unexpectedly wry in several places.

“Now that Wild’s window allows a shaft of light to enter our hut, one can begin to ‘see’ things inside. Previously one relied upon one’s sense of touch, assisted by the remarks from those whose faces were inadvertently trodden on, to guide one to the door.”

Kafka, anorexia and the sadism of the audience

Cori — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:25:32 +0000

My reading of the short story A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, translated by Ian Johnston, has just been catalogued. Hunger artists are, of course, people who starve publically — in a performance sense, not a documentary-on-countries-with-famine sense. Linking getting thinner with getting the public’s attention has media-anorexia overtones, though masochism and traditional views of Starving Artists come into play too. Before recording, I read around the web a bit, and found this particularly good study guide. If you have a spare hour, the interest and some brain energy available, I’d recommend it. I ended up being particularly struck by the sadism of the voyeurs/audience who encourage the starving artist, but there are a lot of other ways to interpret the story, depending on your own world view.

One other thing, this is where people adding to the public domain are doing such an amazing service. The translator here has produced various other Kafka stories too (mostly also in the LibriVox catalogue) and they’re recent translations which makes them very readable and accessible. Without him, I’d know nothing about this story, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to read it into the public domain myself. Many thanks, Ian.

Listen below … or visit the link above to download a higher-quality recording.
Download audio file (hunger_artist_kafka_cs_64kb.mp3)
64kbps, 29mins

Water-Babies: done.

Cori — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:01:56 +0000

http://librivox.org/the-water-babies-by-charles-kingsley/

Seven whole hours of me. And a minute or so of Berlioz. Recording an entire book is quite a task … this has taken since June, but I’m happy with how it turned out — and I’ve learned a lot to apply to future recordings.

It’s funny how little of the book was *in* the version I’d read as a child … many characters left out, all the sidetracks and rambles left out. This is the unedited story (hopefully, anyway, because it can be hard to know with the earlier Project Gutenberg texts) and I love how sensible it is for the most part. Sure, there are some very dated references to people of various nationalities which I could have lived without reading, but the balancing of Science and Wonder, without discrediting either, is really nicely done.