A little poetry to celebrate the New Year … but only three people braved the terrors of quirky verse-structure and poetic voice Rossetti-style.  I rather like it, though.  http://librivox.org/old-and-new-year-ditties-by-christina-rossetti/

Ah, it’s lovely to have archive.org behaving again … all sorts of long-ago recordings of mine are finding their way home, finally.  Like my contribution to A Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens … I read the chapters England Under Richard the Second and England Under Henry the Fourth, Called Bolingbroke last June.  Most of… Read more »

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… Read more »

Hooray — finally, archive.org is behaving itself again, and my next solo is complete. Nine Unlikely Tales for Children by E. Nesbit is a 1901 book I found in the library a while back … and there isn’t an online version of the text, so I thought it would be jolly to scoop a reading of it. … Read more »

The Bird’s Christmas Carol linked below just wasn’t enough.  Additions to the Public Domain for this December now include the following three seasonal sillinesses: A Cornish Christmas Play – recorded during a London LV meet, with four people, two rolling pins, a briefcase, a frying pan and no strict adherence to the script (just as its author intended.)… Read more »

I recently lucked into recording a section of Paradise Lost. I wasn’t planning to get a literature-nerd crush on Milton, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to have to edit “oooooh, cool!” out of the middle of a recording, once I’d finished reading a particular paragraph.  But there’s a lot of unaccountable events in this life,… Read more »

Yes, it is heading towards That Time of Year again … and though I have plans for something of Nesbit’s to celebrate the season (note to self – get that copyright clearance, ASAP!) I rescued a poor little orphan chapter too, part of The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin.  A sweet little children’s… Read more »

LibriVox Volumes 1 and 2 are now available to the public, ten stories in each … and now we’re busy filling up the third. I’ve contributed one story to each so far, and I’ll need to stock up with more readings, since these things tend to go quickly! The strangest thing about my contribution to… Read more »

http://librivox.org/insomnia-collection-vol-1/ I invented this before the Short Non-Fiction Collections came along, so it’s part-filled with people begrudgingly handing over things which THEY thought were really quite interesting, but conceded the rest of the world might find a bit nod-worthy.  I contributed the starting piece of fiction on Shakespeare’s Insomnia … which IS a spoof, even if it does quote… Read more »

I’d never read any of Thomas Hardy’s poetry … it was enough to be forced through an entire novel (FFTMC) during GCSE English, and the bits of prose I’ve dipped into since convinced me to keep my distance.  Thoroughly gloomtastic is our Mr Hardy. But, given the opportunity to actually LOOK at his poetry, I… Read more »