Whoops, while listening to The Fellowship I found that the end of chapter 7 was missing. Dunno what happened there. So I re-recorded the ending and uploaded the file again. Sorry about that!
The truncated file is about 29 minutes long. The fixed file is about 32 minutes long.
Here’s the fixed file: Fellowship1 07 In the House of Tom Bombadil
I just found some very old recordings to share — The Hobbit and book 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring! I must have recorded these when Henry was seven or so. The Fellowship was first and it’s actually my second recording of the book.
When Henry became obsessed with Tolkien at age six I recorded the whole Fellowship (and The Two Towers, I think) onto cassette tapes which then wore out with daily listening, so when Dan gave me my first iBook with a built-in mic I re-recorded The Fellowship digitally. After we did book 1 we decided to do The Hobbit, and I guess after that we branched out to other authors and never got around to book 2. But don’t worry — I want to hear it so I’ll record it soon! Recording quality will be much higher but there won’t be a little person asking questions and reading the poems :)
Links to both books are here: Kayray Reads to You, or you can download directly from my page on archive.org: http://archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou
Happy Easter, everyone! I hope the Bunny brought you some nice treats :)
Here’s a little audio Easter present from me:
The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Wiliams.
And also an English/German recording of the wonderful little picturebook, Guess How Much I Love You/ Weisst du eigentlich wie lieb ich dich hab? (Elli sent the German version to me for Easter!)
My latest LibriVox solo is finished!
http://librivox.org/kayrays-storytime-by-various/
It’s a collection of children’s stories and rhymes, and includes:
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
The Old Woman and her Pig by Sara Cone Bryant
The House that Jack Built by Randolph Caldecott
Mother Goose by Eulalie Osgood Grover
The Old Man’s Bag by T. W. H. Crosland
Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures by Heinrich Hoffmann
Johnny Crow’s Garden by L. Leslie Brooke
Johnny Crow’s Party by L. Leslie Brooke
Book About Animals by Rufus Merrill
‘Twas the Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Androcles and the Lion by Joseph Jacobs
The Master Cat, or Puss In Boots by Charles Perrault
The Little Red Hen by Florence White Williams
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
The Slant Book by Peter Newell
The Rocket Book by Peter Newell
and
The Mythological Zoo by Oliver Herford
They’re almost all picture books (except for a few that are chapters from larger books) and you can find them online at Project Gutenberg if you want to look at the pictures.
Thanks for proof-listening and cataloging, Elli! :)
My LibriVox and “Kayray reads to you” links will not work tomorrow, January 18th. Our file host, The Internet Archive, will be holding a black-out to protest the internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA:
12 Hours Dark: Internet Archive vs. Censorship
The Internet Archive believes that it is critical to protest and raise awareness of pending legislation in the United States: House Bill 3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).
Archive.org is going dark from 6:00 am – 6:00 pm PDT on Wednesday January 18 (14:00 – 02:00 GMT) to drive a message to Washington. We need your help to do this.
Legislation such as this directly affects libraries (pdf) such as the Internet Archive, which collects, preserves, and offers access to cultural materials. Furthermore, these laws can negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive.
These bills would encourage the development of blacklists to censor sites with little recourse or due process. The Internet Archive is already blacklisted in China—let’s prevent the United States from establishing its own blacklist system.
For United States residents, please take action.
For non-US residents: Sorry for dragging you into this, and if you are willing, sign a petition to the State Department to express your concern.
–Internet Archive
For United States residents, please take action.
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
or ->
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
or ->
Here is the Congressional Switchboard Telephone Number:
1-866-220-0044
Be sure you have your ten-digit zip code so the switchboard can direct your call to the correct congressperson who represents you. You can find your ten-digit zip code on any piece of junk mail that reaches your home.
You were just thinking, gee, I wish I could hear a German translation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, weren’t you? Well! Your wish is my command.
Wie der Grinch Weihnachten gestohlen hat:
http://www.archive.org/download/KayrayReadsToYou/dergrinch.mp3
My German isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good :)
Merry Christmas, everyone!
How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss. Read aloud by me with help from Karen the Cat.
Here’s a little present for you – the recording I made last year of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.
http://www.archive.org/download/KayrayReadsToYou/childs_christmas.mp3
I have finally updated my podcast feeds! Took a little hiatus, there. Rough summer.
Anyway, I’ve added “Stories of Great Composers for Children” to the “Kara’s Free Audiobooks” podcast:
Basic feed: http://kayray.org/audiobooks/podcast.xml
iTunes link: itpc://kayray.org/audiobooks/podcast.xml
Or if you can’t wait and want the whole audio book now:
http://librivox.org/stories-of-great-composers-for-children-by-thomas-tapper/
And the “Kayray Reads to You” podcast is still working on “By The Great Horn Spoon”:
Basic feed: http://kayray.org/audiobooks/kayray_reads.xml
iTunes link: itpc://kayray.org/audiobooks/kayray_reads.xml
Or get the whole audio book and many others here:
http://www.archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou
Enjoy!
Forgot to mention that I finished recording another free audiobook. Thanks to Elli for prooflistening and cataloging! :)
The Girl on the Boat, by P.G Wodehouse
Also published as “Three Men and a Maid”. The maid of the title is red-haired, dog-loving Wilhelmina “Billie” Bennet, and the three men are Bream Mortimer, a long-time friend and admirer of Billie, Eustace Hignett, a lily-livered poet who is engaged to Billie at the opening of the tale, and Sam Marlowe, Eustace’s dashing cousin, who falls for Billie at first sight. All four find themselves on an ocean liner headed for England together, along with a capable young woman called Jane Hubbard who is smitten with Eustace, and typically Wodehousian romantic shenanigans ensue.
Hope you like it!
Although in general I’ve been feeling better lately, I still haven’t really felt up to doing much recording. I was scrolling through iTunes one day and realized I have a large number of old recordings, from when Henry was little, that I might as well share with you. I’ve just uploaded my recording of “By The Great Horn Spoon!” by Sid Fleischman.
You can download it from my archive.org page:
http://www.archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou,
or from my “Kayray Reads to You” page here at my blog:
http://kayray.org/kayray-reads/
Blurb from Amazon:
Brimming with riveting adventure, the story is set during the Gold Rush. The fast-moving plot follows the high spirited young Jack and his aunt’s faithful butler, Praiseworthy, as they set out to strike it rich in order to support the financially strapped and beloved Aunt Arabella.
It’s a lot better than that description makes it sound, I promise :) If you like it, please buy a real paper copy!
I’ve wanted to record myself reading a few picture books for a long time now, and since today is Elli’s birthday, and she loves my recordings, I asked Dan for help last night. He set up a tripod and pointed my lovely Olympus PEN E-P2 camera over my shoulder, and made sure everything looked and sounded good. And afterward he even converted the video to a reasonably-sized format that would look good on Elli’s iPad. I’ve just put it up on youtube in case anyone else wants to hear the story too. Happy birthday, Elli! :)
The Little Engine that Could, by Watty Piper:
I read this book 4,728,759,276 times to Henry when he was little, and of course my mom read it to me. I love the illustrations, especially the cheerful food. I don’t know if you can see the illustrations clearly enough, but all the food has happy faces, and the milk bottles are marching along while the spinach dances. I also love it that a jack-knife is included in the list of toys.
Chug chug chug. Puff puff puff!
A couple of weeks ago, Elli found a cute little picture-book biography of J.S. Bach on Project Gutenberg. She showed it to me, and then we noticed that the same author, Thomas Tapper, had written a number of these little biographies, and that Gutenberg has ten of them. So I made them into a collection and recorded them all. Elli did the administrative stuff and the proof-listening. And here they are!
http://librivox.org/stories-of-great-composers-for-children-by-thomas-tapper/
There are links on that catalog page to each little book online, so you can look at the pictures while you listen :)
If you find an online source for any of the other little composer biographies, let me know. I think there around ten more that Gutenberg doesn’t have yet, and I’d be delighted to do a second volume.
More Grammar-Land! Sorry, I forgot to update this since November, but this post will catch you up with the podcast feed and we’ll all be in the same place again.
01 Mr. Noun – 00:10:47
02 Little Article – 00:06:56
03 Mr. Pronoun – 00:11:18
04 Serjeant Parsing’s Visit to Schoolroom-shire
05 Mr. Adjective – 00:10:03
06 Mr. Adjective Tried for Stealing – 00:11:24
Oops :) Forgot! Here’s all the rest of The Apple Stone. Hope you like it!
58 The Apple Stone, Ch. 8: The Muddled Image
59 The Apple Stone, Ch. 9: Stupid as Stone?
60 The Apple Stone, Ch. 10: Big Game
61 The Apple Stone, Ch. 11: Sheep May Safely Graze
62 The Apple Stone, Ch. 12: The Monster
Next up is “The Four-Story Mistake” by Elizabeth Enright.
At least, I hope it’s a treat :)
Here is my recording of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”:
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
This little story is a Christmas tradition in my family. I remember my big sister reading it aloud to me when I was very small, and I remember my parents reading it to us little ones, and then I remember reading it to them when I was bigger. A bit of info from wikipedia:
A Child’s Christmas in Wales is a prose work by the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas. Originally emerging from a piece written for radio, the poem was recorded by Thomas in 1952. The story is an anecdotal retelling of a Christmas from the view of a young child and is a romanticised version of Christmas’ past, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time.
If you like it, may I suggest that you buy a recording of Dylan Thomas reading it himself? It’s on iTunes (though iTunes won’t sell you the single track; you must buy a whole album of Thomas’s poetry for $6) and here is the single track on Amazon for only $.89!
http://www.amazon.com/A-Childs-Christmas-In-Wales/dp/B00491RONM/ It’s a wonderful recording. It’s a permanent part of my “Best Christmas” playlist.
Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you get plenty of Useless Presents. Go ahead and lace your tea with rum; it’s only once a year.
P.S. I worry that the joke of “Snakes and Families” and “Happy Ladders” is lost on Today’s Youth… The real games were called “Snakes and Ladders” (you might know it as “Chutes and Ladders”) and “Happy Families“. Now you know.
The next book in the “Kara’s Free Audiobooks” podcast is a wonderful little thing called “Grammar-Land”:
In this charming 1877 book of grammar instruction for children, we are introduced to the nine parts of speech and learn about the rules that govern them in Grammar-Land.
Judge Grammar is far mightier than any Fairy Queen, for he rules over real kings and queens down here in Matter-of-fact-land. Our kings and queens have all to obey Judge Grammar’s laws, or else they would talk what is called bad grammar; and then, even their own subjects would laugh at them, and would say: “Poor things!
They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all.
Here is the Preface and Introduction:
00 Preface and Introduction
And here is the rest of This Country of Ours, part 3:
31 The Hunt for the Regicides
32 King Philip’s War
33 How the Charter of Connecticut was Saved
34 The Witches of Salem
Elli and I just recorded an adorable little picture book together: My Very First Little German Book. The text is here: http://www.read.gov/books/german.html and the free librivox audiobook is here: http://librivox.org/my-very-first-little-german-book-by-anonymous/. I read the English parts and Elli read the German parts. I edited the whole thing together, and she did the cataloging. So much fun! Here’s a sample page:
Poor little boy!
A few weeks ago, one of the moms on my homeschool email list asked if anyone could find an online text of “Grammar-Land” by M.L. Nesbitt (published in 1877). I had a look and found the text on Google Books: http://books.google.com/, and after I’d glanced through it I decided I had to read it for LibriVox, since, you know, I’m kind of obsessed with grammar and language, and it looked like a really fun little book.
Elli did the proof-listening for me. We both loved the book. It’s utterly charming, and so lively and interesting! The chapters are nice and short, which didn’t hurt either. It’s a lot easier to find time to record a 10-minute chapter than a 45-minute one.
I finished up the book on Wednesday, so here it is:
http://librivox.org/grammar-land-by-m-l-nesbitt/
“They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all.”
Whom do you like best? Elli and I are both quite fond of Dr. Verb, and we dislike the smooth and slimy Adverb. Notice how the author has each character use his own kind of word as much as possible — very clever. :)
