Librivox app my beloved<3 genuinely recommend downloading that app so much, you get access to thousands popular and obscure classics alike, and listening to audiobooks (that you can download!) is so convenient when you have errants to run! Its obviously completely free too! I've been devouring a study in scarlet and some poems because of it this past week :)
i've been listening to the jeeves and wooster stories, among other things. love my librivox!
Where do you read the Sherlock Holmes stories? Do you have all the books? Im really interested in reading them all, should I just bite the bullet and start buying and reading them? Sorry for all the questions your art has just reignited the fire of my Sherlock Holmes obsession again and I can feel it start to take over my body. Btw love your art!!
I DO have all the books (x2 - some paperbacks I picked up on a whim, like someone buying a cursed object they will never be able to put down; also a Baring-Gould annotated edition I got for cheap off ebay) BUT Project Gutenberg and various other websites have all of them to read online for free! Great for when I want to read a few stories side by side and don't wanna flip between volumes, or to find a quick quote.
also if you like being read to, there are many audio book versions on youtube, lixrivox, etc.
is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble getting librivox and internet archive to load this morning (or last night)?
This might be a dumb question but this is my first tumblr read-a-long - what’s the schedule for new installments?
Loved the first email, can’t wait to see more!
What ho, old chap! Sorry about that - I really need to get the calendar together! I’ve been awfully busy and had some trouble with illness in the family, but I will put together a calendar post-haste - and what I can certainly say is that the parts and pieces come in four-day intervals!
spiffing! i have also been tracking them down on librivox and listening to a kind person read them aloud to me.
Aziraphale basically did a Crowley, didn’t he?
He was like- I want a passionate and romantic love confession just like in Jane Austen…
And he got it. Oops.
fortunately for everyone, crowley left out the bit where darcy insults lizzie's class/family, more or less, at least in the way mr darcy does it. unfortunately, that element still sneaks into aziraphale's speech, "you're (hell/demons) the bad guys", lumping crowley in with the rest when he has never really belonged there. but yes, all the passion and agitation and NGK is there.
i just got done listening to both Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice on librivox. there are a handful of versions of each to choose from, i went with the full cast dramatic readings, which was fun. lots of applicability! A tale of two cities is on librivox too, i am going to give that a try next.
Can we talk about Aziraphale being a big fan of Jane Austen and having her books in different editions???
Somehow now I want to have those ones, they look so adorable...
Also Crowley took the Persuasion out of the bookshelf to observe it and I learned somewhere that it's Aziraphale favourite (i'm not crying I swear)
There's two books on the left part then the empty space this one was so it's the third from left to right and it's Persuasion (sorry i'm obsessed writing aboout Crowley reading Jane Austen's novels right now bc he's curious and plot wise also)
They *are* Persuasion lol. Crowley's going to be reading that one in tears in The Bentley all who would've thought the brains behind the 1810 Clerkenwell Diamond Robbery could have written something so romantic...
*giggles*
i just finished listening to persuasion on librivox. there are several versions, i chose the "dramatic reading" one, loved it. i had seen a dvd in the past (the one with ciaran hinds as wentworth) but as usual there is so much more in the book.
Hey, amazing work you are doing <3
This is not a question, but thought I wanted to share this with everyone ^^
As someone who loves to read different kind of books and is always ready for recommendations, I was excited for the books being organized alphabetically in s2ep2. And since there was an X-ray of saying "... Would love for everyone to read these books..."
And I had way too much time so here is the list of those books:
No Woman, No Cry - Rita Marley
The Crow Road - Iain Banks
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time - Mark Haddon
Catch -22 - Joseph Heller
Love in the Time of Cholera - Garriet Garcia Marquez
Nineteen eighty four - Orwell George
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Bible
The Great Gatsby -F. Scott Fitzgerald
The catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Herzog - Saul Bellow
I know I missed one or two, but those are at least there.
Hiya! :) Thank you, made a thing: :) (Added A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath :)<3)
good sleuthing! i listened to treasure island on librivox, after getting the audiobook on cd from the library and finding a few of the discs were a bit skippy. i currently have a tale of two cities on librivox open in a tab. will look up some of the other titles that might be old enough by now.
Hello Mr. Gaiman!
As it stands I am not currently super well-acquainted with the works of Jane Austen (I know, I know)
in the time before GO2, what works should I read to better understand the Austenisms of season 2?
I would suggest watching Pride and Prejudice -- either the 1995 BBC one or the 2005 film. Or any of the adaptations set in the original time period.
Reading the novels is good too.
also available on librivox, with a variety of readers, if you like listening to free audiobooks.
kindle: give us $1.99 for this public domain ebook!
me: *moseys on over to my best friend gutenberg.org*
And if it’s public domain that you want, you can get audiobooks read by volunteers from Librivox! (I’m a particular fan of Karen Savage’s voice for Jane Austen books.)
Do your followers know about Libby? It's an app where, at least in the United States, you can listen to as many professionally recorded audio books as you'd like for FREE, so long as you have a library card. You don't even need to visit the library, you can just borrow the audiobooks from your phone.
I don't know. I hope they do. But perhaps a few more of them will after reading this.
My library is using Hoopla now, which is how I was able to download So Much (for) Stardust for free. Definitely check your local library's website!
This is the only time I have ever been able to truthfully say I love the internet. Thank you, I have so much trouble reading and and absolutely broke and this is really helpful.
Check out Open Library, too!
If you're looking for classics, there's also LibriVox!
Does anyone have book recs for books that make you feel better when you're sad or stressed, or just happy when you read them? I had a wee bit of a mental breakdown over Christmas and am in the process of getting better from that but need books to distract me.
My own personal comfort reads have included The Hobbit, Dealing with Dragons, the Harper Hall trilogy, Discworld, and the Vorkosigan Saga. I would also suggest Howl's Moving Castle, Legends and Lattes, The Goblin Emperor and its offshoots, and anything that falls under "romance novel" or "cozy fantasy". The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes was the last truly fun romance I read, for instance. People We Meet on Vacation also comes to mind.
Oh, and Shaun Bythell's memoirs are pretty cozy and entertaining as well! All about bookselling.
Best of luck and welcome back! I'm sorry you're going through things.
Someone famous once said "It is impossible to be uncheerful while reading Wodehouse. And I've tried." I, not famous, concur with this sentiment. No matter how anxious and distracted I am, the exuberance of Wodehouse's prose and the gentle earnestness of his protagonists serve as a balm.
I also love revisiting the Sherlock Holmes canon. It was James Hilton who said "Sherlock's in Baker Street; all's right with the world." The prose is atmospheric, Watson is a darling, and with Watson at his side (it is both or none), Holmes hears strange secrets and brings peace to troubled souls with the power of friendship, er, the whole science of detection.
i never get tired of the wind in the willows. happy to find it recently on librivox, too! (also the just so stories, and loads of other public domain books)
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
www.Fadedpage.com has most of the Lord Peter Winsey series and thousands of other works!!
Oh goodness, my mother loves Lord Peter Wimsey. She's been rereading the same slowly disintegrating paperbacks since I was tiny.
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
All of this! and a link to LibriVox: https://librivox.org/
i'm so glad people who didn't know already are finding out about online sources of public domain works.
imo there is a deeply defiant thrill in using open culture.
it's not the frugal thrill of getting a good deal, or the spiteful thrill of using a good adblocker on a site that's only free because they want to sell your data to advertisers. and it's not the illusory thrill of getting something for nothing.
it's the thrill of using your right to do something which the capitalists and oligarchs keep trying to take away from you, or (if they can't do that) make you forget you have.
if you want a copy of oscar wilde's the importance of being earnest, or mary shelley's frankenstein, or the complete works of william shakespeare, you can go to project gutenberg and download it.
and you know why?
because it's already yours.
that's what public domain means.
somebody (usually, rightfully, the author) had a monopoly on the right to decide what happened to those books, but that monopoly was temporary, it was always meant to be temporary, long enough to pay the author for their work, maybe provide for their kids or even grandkids... and then that's it. that's enough. the monopoly ran out, and now that book belongs to everyone, it is public property, and nobody (not even disney) gets to keep it to themselves forever. and that's a good thing. monopolies, if they should exist at all, should not last forever. (fuck you, disney)
huge respect to gutenberg donors and volunteers, btw. they are making sure that we can access our collective property, and that is very important.
but yeah. public domain works: a little less arrr yo ho ho, a little more DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
