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)