Yesterday, August 10th 2010, was LibriVox’s 5-year anniversary. I can hardly believe it. We cataloged our very first free, public domain audiobook (The Secret Agent) in September of 2005, and I finished my first solo, The Road to Oz, in October 2005.
We produced a total of 30 audiobooks in 2005, and I remember thinking that someday we might reach 100. As I write this we have 3659 completed audiobooks in our catalog — in 29 different languages! Amazing!
More important to me than numbers, impressive though they are, is our community. We have without doubt one of the friendliest forums on the internet. It’s always so pleasant to browse through our working threads and see the cheerful interaction of our volunteers as we all work together, making audiobooks just for the love of it.
Henry and I went up on the roof last night to see if any of the fireworks were visible from there. We were able to see about ten different displays going off in the distance! Lots of them were partly obscured by trees, but we had a clear view of several, way off in the distance to the south. That was fun!
On Friday Chloe went with me to the fairgrounds for the Home and Hobby awards ceremony, which was adorable. It’s held in the Turf Club up in the top of the grandstands at the fairground. They serve lemonade and cookies, and the dear sweet Home and Hobby women read off the names of the winners, who then run up to the front and get their certificates. This year they showed pictures of the winning entries on a big screen. We recognized nearly all of the items, so it was fun to know which person made them. I got three certificates — a Best of Division and two Donated Awards, all for the fingerless mittens. Here’s what the room looks like:
And then Chloe and Bob came back to our house and we all watched Toy Story 2 and WALL-E. Great movies.
Oh, yesterday I finished my recording of Through the Looking-Glass. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Alice, but it was still fun. It felt more self-conscious than Alice, and less fresh. Still, a classic! Download it here: http://librivox.org/through-the-looking-glass-by-lewis-carroll-3/ or you can always wait till I push it through my podcast feed in a few weeks.
Starting a new audiobook for you today — the third part of This Country of Ours by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, a book of US History stories for kids. If you want to read along and see the pictures, you can buy a lovely thick paperback reprint of this book at mainlesson.com: This Country of Ours. 22 The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers – 00:23:04
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
This book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
This book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
This book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
This book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
This book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
This book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
It’s time for a new book in the “Kayray Reads to You” Podcast! Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, is the second book in the wonderful Bagthorpe Saga. Well, I should qualify that — the first four books in the series are wonderful. After that… well, let’s just say I recommend you stick to the first four ;-)
Please note: I made these recordings around 2002, and the sound quality is not as good as my more recent recordings. But I hope you will not mind the lower quality too much. You’ll probably be too busy laughing to notice, anyway.
Absolute Zero takes place in 1970s England and concerns the eccentric and multi-talented Bagthorpe family. In this book, Uncle Parker wins a contest and sets off a hilarious and chaotic chain of events in which the family’s pudding-footed mongrel dog, Zero, plays an increasingly large role. The humor is dry and very British, so it might not suit all listeners; however, I thought this series was the funniest thing I’d ever read when I discovered them at about age 10, and my son enjoyed the stories at age 6 or so, though he has been said to have “an advanced sense of humor”. This book still makes me laugh aloud every time I read it!
While searching for the right cover art (not easy), I bumped into a good review. Here’s an excerpt, and you might like to read the whole thing.
One of the things I like best about the Bagthorpe books is that the family is neither full of happy supportiveness nor full of abuse and negativity. The kids snipe at each other occasionally, mostly ignore each other, and rally around each other against any attack from the outside. The father screams a lot and is relentlessly sarcastic; the mother is practical but occasionally ineffective and distracted. Cresswell finds humor by exaggerating normal human behavior patterns until they break and throwing on beautifully timed coincidences, avoiding both the sickly-sweet feeling of some children’s books and the over-the-top nastiness of others. It’s very nicely done.
The book is, sadly, out of print in the US. You can find a few used copies on Amazon: Absolute Zero on Amazon. Beware. Every edition after the original 1978 printing has the wrong cover art.
