All three of my Susan Cooper novels have their own podcast feeds now:
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/darkisrising.xml
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/greenwitch.xml
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/thegreyking.xml
Copy and paste those links into the podcast app of your choice and enjoy these beautiful books!
I’m working down the list on Kayray Reads to You, so Helen Cresswell is next :)
Click the Kayray Reads to You link at the top of this page, then scroll down to P.L. Travers :)
Or if you’re in a hurry and want it RIGHT NOW, copy and paste this RSS link into your favorite podcast app:
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/marypoppins.xml
I’ve finally finished reorganizing Kayray Reads to You!
Everything is ordered alphabetically by author, with picture books having their own page.
Next step: every book gets its own podcast feed for easy downloading. Maybe I should have one podcast feed just for the picture books?
Also, I MUST finish recording “Betsy and Tacy go Downtown” and a few books about a certain British nanny which I’ve started reading to Em…
Kick my butt if I don’t get those finished and posted soon. No matter how rough I feel I should be able to knock out a chapter a day of those dear wonderful books, especially since I don’t edit my recordings… it’s getting started that takes the effort.
OMG two posts in one day
I realized that Time has Marched On — and that it’s easier now for most people to subscribe to a podcast than to download files and sync them to phones or whatever, so I am embarking on the large project of making podcast feeds for all of my “Kayray Reads to You” books.
(all librivox books already have podcast feeds — click the green RSS button on the catalog page, copy, and paste into your podcast app)
Tolkien was first, of course. You can find the feeds by clicking “Kayray Reads To You” (above) and then the link to the page of Tolkien books. I’ll put ’em here, too:
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/tolkien-hobbit.xml
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/tolkien-fellowship.xml
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/tolkien-twotowers.xml
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/tolkien-returnoftheking.xml
Normal-clicking these links will probably not do anything useful: you need to right click (or control-click, or press-and-hold), copy, and then paste into your podcast app. Most podcast apps have a place for you to paste in an RSS link — that’s where to put these.
I don’t really feel like testing to make sure all of the files are properly named and will download correctly, so if you find an error please let me know :)
Oops. Time passed.
Yeah I’m still alive! Sorry if you were worried.
Things have been basically ok. I’m in a bit of a depression right now but I know I’ll come out of it someday.
Um.. what’s been happening… I had another great Amtrak journey at the end of September to visit my dear cousin in San Diego, had a great time just chilling and knitting and watching Queer Eye with her and her husband and cats :)
Reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch which is SO GOOD and you should read it.
I finally got an IHSS worker! (In Home Support Services). Her name is Malynda and she’s great. She cleans my bathroom and changes my sheets and runs errands and does laundry etc. She even drove me to San Francisco for a doctor appointment! She does all the stuff that’s getting harder and harder for me to do on my own. She’s smart and reliable and she likes her job. It was a GIANT PAIN IN THE BUTT to wade through all the county bureaucracy and get approved but it was worth it in the end.
I’ve been playing a lot of Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch. Love it. I’m not paying much attention to the main quest line — mostly just exploring, looking for Shrines and Towers and Korok seeds. I like running around and riding my horses in the big open world! The Switch controllers have bad stick-drift so I just sent them in for repair. Hope they come back soon. Also played Untitled Goose Game which was everything I was hoping for. HONK!
My little friend Tobi (age 3.5) in Austria sent me this picture book for my birthday. Leo doesn’t want to eat his nice carrot soup and Mama starts to lose her patience, but Hops the Grasshopper tells Leo he should be glad that he has such a nice Mama to make him good food, and Leo learns an important lesson :) (Sorry for the few little mispronunciations)
Time for a post that isn’t about quilts and my health :) I need to tell you something amazing I discovered a few weeks ago!
There’s an app called Libby. https://meet.libbyapp.com
Install, help it find your library, and enter your library card info.
And then BOOM you can check out ebooks and audiobooks right there, instantly. You can listen to the audiobooks right in the app, with a well-designed little player whose features include offline play, bookmarks, easy scrubbing forward and back through the book, and a sleep timer.
If you want to read with your eyeballs, you can read in the app or — get this — you can have your book DELIVERED TO YOUR KINDLE INSTANTLY. I don’t like reading on my phone, which is what has stopped me from checking out library ebooks in the past, so this is thrilling to me!
The Libby app lets you filter your search in sensible ways. You can search by genre. You can search for audiobooks, ebooks, or both. You can search for titles that are available to check out instantly, or ones which are already checked out to someone else, in which case you can put a hold on the item and it will be checked out for you automatically (with an email notification) when the item becomes available.
I tell you, it is such luxury to think, hmm, I’d like to listen to a new crime thriller, let’s see what there is… and then 3 minutes later I’m listening while I sew. Or thinking, hmm, I’ve never read “The Devil Wears Prada”, I wonder if it’s on Libby? And then three minutes later I’m reading it on my kindle.
I installed the app on 6yo Em’s iPad and helped her to find picture books to read and kids’ audiobooks to listen to.
Of course, the selection is limited. It’s not EVERYTHING you can get physically at your library. But I don’t check out physical audiobooks at all, because I don’t own any kind of cd player, so this is the only way I’ve found to get free modern audiobooks. Librivox is awesome but sometimes you want to hear something that was published later than 1923 :)
Through Libby I discovered a fantastic police procedural series by Elizabeth George, starring Inspector Lynley and his pals. I’ve been listening to them non-stop for weeks :) They’re well-written, and very long (like, around 25 hours of audio each). They are perfect for bedtime listening too — not gory or scary, interesting without being too exciting. Just right to help my tired brain fall asleep, and of course I drop a bookmark when I go to bed, so in the morning I can back up to that point and not miss anything. There are 20 novels in the series so far, so if you like ’em as much as I do you’re set for a long time. I prefer the ones narrated by Donada Peters, which is most of them.
Oh! Also I recently listened to “Heartburn” by Nora Ephron. I think I found it on the “humor” shelf. It was read by Meryl Streep!!! She is an absolutely amazing narrator, and the book was great too. While I was listening, I thought, huh, this dialogue really reminds me of When Harry Met Sally. And then I found out that Nora Ephron wrote When Harry Met Sally :)
Brand new, and full of cheerful family noise :)
You can subscribe to this book as a podcast and download all the chapters at once. Copy this rss link and paste it into your podcatcher:
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/lion_witch_wardrobe.xml
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
You can stream these chapters non-stop from here:
https://archive.org/details/kayrayreadstoyou6
01 Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe
02 What Lucy Found There
03 Edmund and the Wardrobe
04 Turkish Delight
05 Back on This Side of the Door
06 Into the Forest
07 A Day with the Beavers
08 What Happened After Dinner
09 In the Witch’s House
10 The Spell Begins to Break
11 Aslan is Nearer
12 Peter’s First Battle
13 Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time
14 The Triumph of the Witch
15 Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time
16 What Happened about the Statues
17 The Hunting of the White Stag
A new recording for you! Lots of cheerful family noise in this one, folks :)
Here’s a brand-new feature: you can subscribe to this book as a podcast and download all the chapters at once. Copy this rss link and paste it into your podcatcher:
http://kayray.org/audiobooks/beezus_and_ramona.xml
Beezus and Ramona, by Beverly Cleary
01 Beezus and Her Little Sister
02 Beezus and Her Imagination
03 Ramona and Ribsy
04 Ramona and the Apples
05 A Party at the Quimbys’
06 Beezus’ Birthday
Here’s a 5-minute recording of a children’s picture book in German. Can you guess what it is? I think you’ll recognize it by the time you get all the way to the end even if you don’t speak a word of German :)
No googling, now!
I have also created a page just for my recordings of picture books.
http://kayray.org/picture-books/
The pictures are half the fun, so please try to buy or borrow copies of these books so that you can look at the pictures while I read to you. :)
I just found a very old recording of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader! I probably recorded it in… 2003, maybe? You can hear Henry’s little voice sometimes, and I’m guessing he was about eight. Enjoy :)
(all chapters can be streamed here sequentially:
https://archive.org/details/kayrayreadstoyou6)
01 The Picture in the Bedroom
02 On Board the Dawn Treader
03 The Lone Islands
04 What Caspian Did There
05 The Storm and What Came of It
06 The Adventures of Eustace
07 How the Adventure Ended
08 Two Narrow Escapes
09 The Island of the Voices
10 The Magician’s Book
11 The Dufflepuds Made Happy
12 The Dark Island
13 The Three Sleepers
14 The Beginning of the End of the World
15 The Wonders of the Last Sea
16 The Very End of the World
I got frustrated by the disorganized pile of audiobooks on my “Kayray Reads to You” page so I started making sub-pages by author. I’m not finished yet, but here’s a start:
Susan Cooper:
-The Dark is Rising
-Greenwitch
-The Grey King
Marjorie Flack:
-Walter the Lazy Mouse
Maud Hart Lovelace
-Betsy-Tacy
-Betsy-Tacy and Tib
-Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill
J.R.R. Tolkien:
-The Hobbit
-The Fellowship of the Ring
-The Two Towers
-The Return of the King
E.B. White
-The Trumpet of the Swan
*****************
There are a few books that don’t have their own page yet but I’ll get them done soon. I also plan to make a podcast feed for each author so that the books are even easier to download into your smart phone.
A librivox Weekly Poem: 17 readings of “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, the poem on the Statue of Liberty
https://librivox.org/the-new-colossus-version-2-by-emma-lazarus/
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbour that twin cities frame.“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!†cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!â€
Youtube closed down my main account a few months ago. (I was bad; I shared The Great British Bake-Off — but still, they could have given me some warning…) I thought that these two storytime videos were lost, but my nephew pointed out that there were copies on https://archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou! (I’ve recorded so much stuff, I can’t keep track of it all, hahahah) So here they are, on my new youtube account. Quick, watch them before youtube gets mad at me again! :)
How The Grinch Stole Christmas
The Little Engine That Could
A kind listener just emailed to ask if I was planning to record RotK book 2 and I had a panicky moment — did I never finish LotR? Did I only imagine that I had finished? I’m pretty sure I finished the entire trilogy; I have no clear memories of recording that book, but that’s par for the course…
So I did a search of my own audiobook archive, and there were the files. *Whew*. Checked my various collections on archive.org and found that I had indeed uploaded the files when I finished the book. *Whew* again. Looks like I just forgot to post the links on http://kayray.org/kayray-reads/. The links are now there.:) Thanks, Arnold R.!
Edit: oops, the links were bad. I’ve fixed ’em. :)
I think this one took me about a year. The last time I posted a new “Kayray Reads to You” recording was September 2015. Oof. It’s been a hard year.
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: the third book in the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. The series is based on the author’s life; her family and friends have been renamed, but they really were just like the the people in the books! In this book, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib all turn ten years old, and they’re obsessed with Kings and Queens.
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 01 Getting to be Ten
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 02 Ten Years old
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 03 The King of Spain
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 04 Naifi
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 05 The School Entertainment
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 06 A Quarrel
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 07 Out For Votes
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 08 Little Syria
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 09 The Quarrel Again
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 10 A Princess
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 11 A Queen
Ok guys, I’ll probably be feeling well enough to do some recording soon, knock on wood. I’m still working on Betsy-Tacy for “Kayray Reads to You” but I need to choose a new solo for LibriVox.
I want to do a kids’ book. It must be in the Public Domain (published before 1923), beautifully written, and one I haven’t done yet — see http://kayray.org/my-recordings/.
I’m thinking of A Wind in the Willows, but I haven’t quite decided. Any suggestions? No matter what I choose now, I’ll be glad to have a list for the future!
Librivox’s 11th anniversary is today, August 10th 2016! We had a 6-week drive to finish nearly 200 books in order to reach 10,000 books by our anniversary, and we not only reached that goal easily but we surpassed it by 22 books. We now have 10,022 free audiobooks in our catalog!
Have a look at this thread:
https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=61402
Everyone pitched in — book coordinators chased down languishing chapter claims, narrators helped out with books that were lingering unfinished, proof-listeners took on extra work, admins cataloged the finished books, our cover team made cover art for all these extra books, and many soloists put in an extra effort to finish up those solos that were close to completion.
That’s what I did. I wasn’t planning to finish Dracula till December, but I really pushed myself in those few hours when I felt ok (and the house was relatively quiet) and got it done in time to be part of the 10,000! My proof-listener, Mark, managed to get all those long chapters proofed when he wasn’t playing with his grandkids, and Ann cataloged it swiftly.
And here it is, complete with beautiful cover art made by Annise:
https://librivox.org/dracula-by-bram-stoker-2/
Happy listening! Have your brandy and garlic at hand in case you feel faint or you notice a strange mist pouring in over your windowsill…
Hey I finished my solo recording of Treasure Island:
https://librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevenson-5/
It’s a great story. Enjoy!
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: the second book in the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. The series is based on the author’s life; her family and friends have been renamed, but they really were just like the the people in the books! In this book, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, who are now eight years old, play just as well together as Betsy and Tacy did, and they never quarrel. They get into a little more trouble in this book, though!
You can find out more at the Betsy-Tacy Society:
http://www.betsy-tacysociety.org/betsy-tacybooks
I’m going to post the whole book here all at once; the chapters will be in my podcast feed three times a week, as usual, but I don’t feel like scheduling individual posts here to match.
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 01 Begging at Mrs. Ekstrom’s
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 02 Learning to Fly
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 03 The Flying Lady
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 04 The House in Tib’s Basement
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 05 Everything Pudding
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 06 The Mirror Palace
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 07 Red Hair, Yellow Hair, and Brown
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 08 Being Good
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 09 The Secret Lane
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 10 Aunt Dolly
Bet you didn’t think this day would ever come. I sure didn’t. Eight years it took me to record this book! Jeepers.
This Country of Ours, Part 7:
https://librivox.org/this-country-of-ours-part-7-by-henrietta-elizabeth-marshall/
Links to the other 6 parts on that page, or here:
https://librivox.org/group/208
My next LibriVox solo will be Treasure Island, yay! Pirates and parrots and adventure! I’ve got the first four chapters done already. It won’t take eight years this time ;-) Although my beloved but elderly laptop (mid-2011 Macbook Air) is having Serious Issues and it’s going into the shop on Wednesday so I won’t be able to get any recording done for a while. Boo.
Mood: up, down, up, down. Saturday was horrific. Sunday was ok; today was pretty good. Reading lots of Marian Keyes’s Walsh Family novels. Playing Capitals on iPhone. Listening to podcasts. Discovered a band called The Decemberists and I think I might be developing an unhealthy obsession for their song “The Infanta”.
The lyrics tell a story which is incredibly vivid in my mind. A vast slow-moving procession of nobles on elephants and camels. It’s hot, there are bright flags and sidelong glances, trumpet fanfares, cannon salutes, intrigue.
Meanwhile the little princess, the unwitting cause of all the commotion, is dreaming of a peaceful quiet lake.
Here she comes in her palanquin
On the back of an elephant
On a bed made of linen and sequins and silk
All astride on her father’s line
With the king and his concubines
And her nurse with her pitchers of liquors and milk
And we’ll all come praise the infanta
And we’ll all come praise the infantaAmong five score pachyderm
Each canopied and passengered
Sit the duke and the duchess’ luscious young girls
Within sight of the baronness
Seething spite for this live largesse
By her side sits the baron
Her barrenness barbs her
And we’ll all come praise the infanta
And we’ll all come praise the infantaA phalanx on camelback
Thirty ranks on a forward tack
Followed close, their shiny bright standards a-waving
While behind in their coach, in fours
Ride the wives of the king of Moors
And the veiled young virgin, the prince’s betrothed
And we’ll all come praise the infanta
And we’ll all come praise the infantaAnd as she sits upon her place
Her innocence laid on her face
From all atop the parapets blow a multitude of coronets
Melodies rhapsodical and fair
And all our hearts afire
The sky ablaze with cannon fire
We all raise our voices to the air
To the air…And above all this falderal
On a bed made of chaparral
She is laid, a coronal placed on her brow
And the babe, all in slumber dreams
Of a place filled with quiet streams
And the lake where her cradle was pulled from the water
And we’ll all come praise the infanta
And we’ll all come praise the infanta
I even forgive them their mispronunciation of “infanta”.
If you’re obsessed with Mad Men, you’ll recognize the song from the opening montage in “Maidenform”, s02e06. Which is of course how I discovered it in the first place.
