Great Classic Stories read by Derek Jacobi, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Fry

 Great Classic Stories read by Derek Jacobi, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Fry


 

Most of the stories included here have been reviewed separately and they are great: Mad, The Sphinx without a Secret, The Monkey’s Paw, the Girl from Arles and more. The great discovery I made some years ago was the audio book. It was in the British Library that I could enjoy books on tape for the first time: Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle and C. S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters, read by John Cleese, of Monty Python fame. In fact you can now listen to almost any comedy, or show: Little Britain, Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It used to be audio tapes, now it is mp3, wma, etc.

I got the habit of recording the plays broadcast on the radio and even now I have some of those in the attic, even though they are obsolete. Because there is little chance that they will ever be played again, in the absence, years from now, of the means (tape recorder, player) to play it, I decided to give those precious memories to my macaws. They enjoy them, not the voices, alas, but the tapes as toys to be destroyed and played with little wheels, screws and all.

Fortunately, there are quite a few major projects which provide you with the chance to download for free audio books and under legal circumstances. Many excellent books no longer have the initial copyright protection. Quite a few never had one to start with. At issue are not printed editions, which we obviously cannot Xerox. But the copyrights for Medeea, Oedipus, Plato’s works and many more cannot be claimed, if you go to Livrivox.com or Audio BooksforFree.com, where a bunch of enthusiasts have volunteered and read many of the major works of humanity. I have downloaded recently Gargantua and Pantagruel. They have War and peace, Madame Bovary and many more. Check it out.

 

You can also try the eBook version at the Gutenberg project, which may be .org, but I am not sure and as I come to think of it, I am not sure for Livrivox or Audiobooksfor free, what the end is: whether .com, org or something else. You Google them and find out.

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