The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. by John Harris

Source: Epic of Gilgamesh podcast (iTunes, Podbay)

Length: About 4.5 hours
Reader: John Harris

The book: The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest pieces of literature ever discovered. The epic poem is a loosely joined series of stories about Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian king, and Enkidu, a savage man sent by the gods to distract Gilgamesh from his kingly excesses. Along the way, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends (or more than friends? There is a possible homosexual relationship, depending on how you interpret the words). Written before the Bible, the poem also includes the earliest account of the Great Flood story, known more familiarly as the Noah story.

I found this book to be a fascinating look at what life was like in the ancient world. From a literary standpoint, I was amazed to see Gilgamesh, the protagonist and a king, portrayed as a bad person that needed intervention from the gods. Long before the modern times, people were looking at the ruler as both a source of trouble and inspiration. As a story, however, the Epic of Gilgamesh can be tough reading (or listening). The writers of the time did not have the same sense of pacing that we have today, plus there are sections missing or partially damaged, leaving out some of parts of the story. Read it to find a different world, not to be entertained by plot and character development.

NOTE: This story contains explicit sexual and violent content. It is not recommended for children.

Rating: 7 /10

The reader: John Harris reads his own prose translation from Sumarian. He includes notes on the text, explaining both the state of the source text and the meaning or relevance of the story. His reading itself is a bit dry and academic, with the pacing a bit on the slow side of my preferences. I listened to the iTunes version, which includes some music between sections, so when I sped up his speech, the music became distorted. At normal speeds, though, the music helps lend some drama to the story and the recording itself of both music and text is clear and clean.

Purchase a text copy of The Epic of Gilgameshat Amazon

"The Wine Breath" by John McGahern

Source: The New Yorker Fiction Podcast (mp3)
Length: 39 minutes
Reader: Yiyun Li

The story: Each year, The Reading Life hosts Irish Short Story week during the week of Saint Patrick's Day. Last year, I listened to stories from two familiar Irish writers, "The Dead" by James Joyce and "My Oedipus Complex" by Frank O'Connor. This year, I'm branching out to an Irish writer I had never encountered before, John McGahern.

This story is a quiet, wistful reflection on the paths a life can take as it travels toward the inevitable death. These types of stories with almost no plot don't usually appeal to me. However, McGahern keeps the story interesting by opening new insights into the life of his main character, a priest, as the narrative jumps from the present to the priest's memories. The absence of any clear plot reinforces the seeming aimlessness of the priest's life, yet the fact that there is a plot, hidden beneath flashbacks and descriptions, hints that we can impose a meaning on our lives whether or not any true meaning exists.

Rating: 8 /10

The reader: Li has a noticeable Chinese accent which can make it difficult to understand individual words. Since I routinely speak with native Chinese speakers on a daily basis, I did not find the accent distracting, but others may dislike this reading. Avoiding this story for the accent alone would be unfortunate, since it's a quite good story and Li otherwise does a decent job of reading it. The conversation with fiction editor Deborah Treisman opened up new ideas for me about the story and inspired me to listen to it a second time.


(photo by bripod via flickr. Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial)

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly

Source: Lit2Go (iTunesU download)
Length: 6.4 hours
Reader: Fadi Tavoukdjian

The book: Frankenstein  is one of those books that's more fun to talk about than it is to read. I rarely felt much excitement or suspense except for chapter in which Victor Frankenstein creates his monster and a few other isolated incidents. The first few chapters after the framing story were particularly dull.

In retrospect, however, it's a great book. The symbolism and thought experiments are classic. This is not just a fable about science overreaching itself; it's a examination of humankind's place in the cosmos. How do we live our lives rightly and well when we're left alone on Earth by our Creator? The religions of the world have attempted to answer this question but even with the wisdom of the Bible, I'm often as confused as the monster as to what to do in some particular situations. Shelly makes the monster more human than his creator, giving us  a stand-in for our sometimes bewildering exploration of our lives.

Rating: 7 / 10

The reader: Fadi (I'm not going to try to spell his last name more than once in this post) is one of the better readers I've heard from Lit2Go. He's got a smooth American accent, but affects his voice for the various narrators. He often speaks too quickly, and this speed sometimes causes him to make minor trips over consonants. There are occasional noises of page turns and bumps, but these may be overlooked.

"Meditation 17" by John Donne

Source: LibriVox (mp3)
Length: 5 minutes
Reader: Shawn Craig Smith

The essay: Donne's "Meditation XVII" is full of famous quotes: "All mankind is of one author and is one volume, ""No man is an island," and "Ask not for whom the bell tolls." As I listened, I found myself waiting for these greatest hits and missing the impact of the piece as a whole, ironically enough for an essay about the importance of the whole of mankind.

The meditation itself is surprising for the time it was written. Donne asserts that every human is a part of the larger brotherhood of mankind, and that we should feel the loss whenever any one dies. This death, he goes on to say, should not be seen as a detriment, but as gain since it reminds the one living to live his life well. Coming from someone in a time when a rigid class structure was in place, this brotherhood of man talk seems downright revolutionary. Of course, I'm not sure if Donne's brotherhood extended to non-white, non-Christian, non-European, or non-male humanity, but read as an all-inclusive embrace of mankind, it's an inspirational message.

Rating: 8 / 10

The reader: Smith is a gifted amateur reader who has the difficult task of breaking the archaic grammar of the 1600s into a speech pattern that is listenable for the modern audience. He largely succeeds at this formidable task, bringing the words of Donne to life. He speaks with a earnest note of pleading that reflects the persuasive tone of the essay. There is a bit of a metallic flatness in the recording, as if the pickup levels were too high, but it's not enough to harm the quality of the reading.

(Photo by Rudy A Giron. Creative Commons by attribution noncommercial share-alike.)

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

Source: LibriVox (zipped mp3s or M4B audiobook)
Length: 6 hours
Reader: Zachary Brewster-Geisz

The book: In turn-of-the-century Europe, anarchists held the equivalent position in the public mind as al Qaeda of today. In The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, the law-abiding poet Gabriel Syme becomes entwined in a debate with his anarchist friend Gregory. Through a series of mistakes and bluffing, Syme rather than Gregory becomes elected to a secretive seven-man council of anarchists, each code-named to a day of the week. Thus begins a madding series of double-agents, intrigue and chases to uncover the secret behind the anarchist plots.

Besides being a fiction writer of books like this and the Father Brown mysteries, Chesterton was one of the leading Christian thinkers of his day. The religious allegory in The Man Who Was Thursday is clear from the beginning, but gradually grows more complex. The ending is notoriously confusing; I don't think I fully grasped what was going on in the last act.

Rating: 7 / 10

The reader: Brewer-Geisz is an excellent amateur reader with a young-sounding American voice.  He brings out the wry humor in Chesterton's writing and varies his pacing to keep the action interesting. For the characters' voices, he affects a British accent, which sounds fine to my ears, though I am not in a position to judge the accent accurately. The recording is well-done and clear.

(Entered in Cym Lowell's Book Review Wednesday. Visit the link for more reviews and a chance to win a $15 Amazon gift card)

"Letter to a Hindu" by Leo Tolstoy

Source: ThoughtAudio.com (part 1 | 2 | 3 )
Length: 39 minutes
Reader: Michael Scott

The story: This open letter, also known as "A Letter to a Hindoo" was written by Tolstoy to Tarak Nath Das for publication in Tarak's newspaper Free Hindustan. Tolstoy was writing in support of India's independance from British rule and advocate nonviolent means of gaining independance. The letter so impressed a young Mohandas Ghandi that he wrote Tolstoy to gain permission to translate and republish it in his own journal.

Tolstoy uses quotations from Hindu relgious texts with remarkable similarity to the Bible, to posit that all true religion is based on love. Both religion and science, he argues, have been perverted by those in power to manufacture rationalization for the rule of the few over the many. The solution to this injustice is for the people of India to no longer recognize the political power of the British and resist their rule by nonviolent disobeyal. This strategy, enlarged and acted upon by Ghandi and others, eventually led to the overthrow of British rule in India, while in Tolstoy's Russia, ironically, violent revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy, only to be replaced by the dictatorship and further bloodshed of Stalin.

Rating: 7 / 10

The reader: Michael Scott has a classic "voice of God" narration style. If you're used to a more natural or dramatic reading, his style may seem a bit stilted, but it works very well for a non-fiction piece like this one. He has a deep, sonorous voice with a slow, measured rhythm to his speech. The recording is professionally produced and free of background noise.

"St. George and the Dragon" by Jacobus de Voragine

Source: Storynory (mp3)
Length: 7 minutes
Reader: Natasha

The story: Saint George's feast day is April 23rd. When I think of the legend of St. George and the dragon, I think of a medieval knight in Europe, like in the picture to the right. Listening to the story again, I learned that the setting was not Europe, but North Africa, the time period was not the Middle Ages, but the Roman Empire, and the hero was not a knight in shining armor but a Roman soldier.

Whatever the background, the story itself had a great hold on people across the Christian world. St. George appears as the patron saint of a number of different cities and nations, including England and Georgia. I think this is because of the appeal of  classic good versus evil conflict stripped down to its most basic form. The dragon poisons the peoples' water supply, spreads diseases and eats their sheep and people. George, and the princess he defends, represent purity, chastity, honor and Christianity. The idea that goodness will unfailingly and quickly triumph over evil is an appealing one, and this type of story is needed for times when reality seems much darker.

Rating: 7 / 10

The reader: Natasha tends to tell a story with heavy emphasis on the drama. While this classic storytelling style could get tedious in a longer reading, it really enlivens a short piece like this. Natasha has a soprano British accent that is cheerful and sunny. Her reading is pitched towards children, so she tends to emphasize words with a kindergarten teacher tone and a singsong delivery.

(Painting by Rogier van der Weyden. No copyright restrictions)

Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace

Source: LibriVox (zipped mp3s)
Length: 23 hours, 22 minutes
Reader: Mark F. Smith

The book: Nowadays, Ben-Hur is mostly known as the basis for the Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Charlton Heston in the title role, usually shown in reruns in this week before Easter. In its own time, the novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was an unprecedented publishing success, spending years atop the best-seller list and sparking an expanded market for novels.

The novel continues to appeal mainly because of its Count of Monte Cristo-like core story of action, romance and revenge in which the title character, a Jew living under Roman rule, is stripped of all his possessions and sentenced to row in the galleys. The subtitle, A Tale of the Christ, refers to the story of Jesus, which intersects Ben-Hur's life. To modern readers, this religious theme seems tacked onto the beginning and the end, but it was an important reason for the novel's success as Victorians dropped their previous views of the immorality of novels and embraced religious fiction.

Part of the appeal of the book was that Wallace applied the best research of his time to put the story of Jesus into historical context. Of course, having done the research, Wallace feels the need to explain it at great length. These long descriptions, along with a tendency to indulge in religious-philosophical debates in King James English tend to drag down the story. Despite these failings, Ben-Hur is still a good book, though not a great one.

Rating: 7 / 10

The reader: I feel like I'm saying this every few months, but Mark Smith is a solid reader. I'll admit I didn't listen to the entire book; I alternated between reading a few chapters on my phone and listening to some chapters in the car. But when I was reading on my own, it was Mark's voice in my head. He's got a wholesome American accent that he modifies for the different characters, but his voices are not overdone or hammy. The sound quality is perfect and although his pacing is a bit slower than I prefer, that's better than being too fast.

(Entered in the Book Review Wednesday contest at Cym Lowell. Follow the link for reviews of other books by various bloggers)

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Source: Ancient Faith Radio (part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 )
Length: Approx. 4.5 hours
Reader: Dr. Chrissi Hart

The book: One of the classics of children's fantasy literature, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was my favorite book as a child. I loved (and still love) the feel of the world of Narnia as a place both magically impossible and plausable, filled with characters that could never exist, but are true enough to be real. I must have read it a dozen times from second grade up to my adult years. Every time I read it, I gain a new perspective on the book. The same book that is a mind-blowing adventure story for a child is also a profound Christian allegory for an adult.

I have some non-Christian friends who think that slipping an extended metaphor for Jesus Christ's death and resurrection into a children's story is some sort of sneaky trick Lewis uses to brainwash children into becoming Christians. However, I think the presence of the allegory is part of the appeal of the story, even if I didn't recognize it as a child. Great fanasty literature puts the reader in a world that has a history and largeness that exceeds even what is shown in the book. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis's imaginary world works on prophesies and rules that have the feel of existing beyond the scope of the book to eternity. What better way to lend a sense of mythic grandeur to a novel than to base it upon the most powerful and deep story in Western culture?

Rating: 10/10

The reader: I'm absolutely amazed that Ancient Faith was able to get permission from HarperCollins and the Lewis estate to podcast this novel. Hart has a pleasing British accent and the confidence of someone who is comfortable in front of a microphone. She makes a couple of repetition errors, but is otherwise flawless. The recording quality is very good, as is befitting such a professionally produced podcast. The other books in The Chronicles of Narnia series are also available for free through the same website, so head on over to collect all seven books.

(Entered in the Book Review Wednesday contest at Cym Lowell. Follow the link for reviews of other books by various bloggers)

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Source: LibriVox (zipped mp3s)
Length: 7 hours, 59 min
Reader: toriasuncle

The book: I chose this book as my reading for Black History Month. Du Bois was a civil rights leader and a professor at Atlanta University in the early 20th century. This work, one of his greatest, lays out his views on a wide range of subjects related to racial inequality in the United States, particularly in the South.

The book consists of a series of poetic essays with subjects ranging from a history of the Freedman's Bureau to a biography of Alexander Crummell, a black priest in the Episcopal Church who was rejected by the white church hierarchy and ignored by the black congregations he tried to reach.  Along the way, Du Bois paints a detailed picture of the black community of the late 1800's and early 1900's, arguing that although some of the stereotypes of the Negro have some element of truth, much of the perceived failings are due to the injustice and hopelessness of his condition. As is fitting for a college professor, he spends a good deal of time on education, rejecting Booker T. Washington's view that blacks should confine their studies to an industrial education and instead advocating the addition of a classical education to train leaders and educators.

For me, the book culminates in the thirteenth chapter, "Of the Coming of John," in which Du Bois tells the fictional story of a the life of a black man who gets a college education then returns to his town only to be rejected by both whites and blacks. The story seems to illustrate all the descriptions and arguments from previous chapters. Du Bois's prose here, as in the rest of the book, sings with melody while stating the most ugly truths.

Rating: 8 /10

The reader:  At first, I was a bit thrown off by description "music performed by toriasuncle," but later I realized that each chapter in the print version is introduced by a short musical passage from a Negro spiritual. The music is unobtrusive and is the perfect audio translation for the way it's presented in the book. The reader himself is superb. He reads with a slow, measured cadence, sounding remarkably similar to President Obama's narration of The Audacity of Hope.  When there is dialog or expressions in dialect, he performs an excellent Southern accent, varied for the race and education level of the speaker. There's a bit of background sound, but in an otherwise excellent reading, that's a minor complaint.

(Entered in the Book Review Wednesday contest at Cym Lowell. Follow the link for reviews of other books by various bloggers)

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Source: Lit2Go
Length: Approx. 20 hours
Reader: Rick Kistner

The book: Even within the lofty lists of Western canon, there are some books that stand above the rest in reputation. Even if you haven't read them, you don't challenge the placement on these lists of books like Ulysses, Moby Dick, or Anna Karenina. Crime and Punishment is one of these classics and up until a few months ago, I had never read it. Then I started to notice references to the book or its protagonist Raskolnikov in articles, books and even in music. Clearly, the universe was telling me what to read next.

It's not an easy read. Raskolnikov is mentally unstable through most of the book and Dostoevsky reflects his character's delirium in dreamlike imagery. To make matters more difficult, the characters are often hiding their true motives, and part of the effort of reading is figuring out how much each character knows about the other and how much each knows the other knows about the first.  The on-again, off-again lucidity of the protagonist, combined with the web of deception make the book a challenging, but rewarding puzzle.

Beneath this puzzle lies a theme that is familiar to many people nowadays: the tyranny of money. Almost every scene in the book concerns who has or doesn't have money, how much they are spending, or how they plan to get enough money to live a few more days. In doing the research for this review, I wasn't surprised to find that Dostoevsky himself was deeply in debt and wrote the book to pay his bills. Of course, there are other themes as well - morality, justice, love, and all the other big themes of human existence - but I find it comforting that this book about poverty is now available to people who can't pay for it.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: Rick Kistner again does an excellent job with this reading. For a full evaluation of his reading style, see my recent review of The Jungle. My problem in the audiobook is not so much with the reader or the recording, but that it's a difficult book to listen to. Several times in the novel, the narrative tends to change direction in a few sentences, so that if you missed a phrase or short sentence, you completely miss the twist. It's a book that requires your full attention and several re-reads of important paragraphs, so listening as an audiobook is perhaps not the best approach to take to this demanding novel.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

Source: The Morning Oil (via Black Market Kidneys) (mp3)
Length: 32 minutes
Reader: Flannery O' Connor

The story: A family in Georgia is heading out for a family vacation to Florida. The situation is familiar to anyone who's taken a family road trip this summer: the kids are bratty, the grandmother tells dotty stories, and the father just wants to get there. On this vacation, though, something goes terribly wrong and the story takes a much darker turn.

This is one of my favorite stories ever written. It seems like every time I read it, I find new details that are funny, disturbing, or that give new insight into the complex characters that inhabit this short piece of fiction. The meaning of the story is also complex. Are people generally good or inherently evil? What makes a good person good and and evil person bad? It's a difficult story to interpret, but I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

Rating: 10/10

The reader: This reading comes from a talk that O'Connor gave at the University of Notre Dame shortly before her death. A couple paragraphs near the beginning of the story get cut out due to a recording skip, but the lost section isn't vital to the story. The sound quality isn't that great, but it's a pleasure to hear O'Connor reading her own work in her Deep South drawl. The combination of the poor sound and the heavy accent may make it difficult for some people to understand, but being a Southerner myself, I had little problem.

The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton

Source: Librivox (Zipped mp3s)
Length: 10 hrs, 23 min
Reader: Brian Roberg

The book: The Father Brown stories, of which this is the first collection, are not always as exciting as a Sherlock Holmes story or as clever as some of the better Agatha Christie tales, but they do have G.K. Chesterton's great humor and intelligence embodied in the series' main detective, a priest by the name of Brown. Father Brown is the opposite of the hardboiled detective. Instead, he is Chesterton's ideal of a priest: clear-headed, non-prejudicial, and above all, forgiving. After catching a criminal, Brown would rather calmly reason with him to change his ways rather than turn him over to the police.

Chesterton wrote a number of non-fiction pieces defending and extolling Catholicism, and his fiction bears the same mark. The Father Brown stories often feature seemingly supernatural occurrences: witchcraft, divine judgment, a ghost, an invisible man. Father Brown reasons his way past surface appearances to a rational solution, implying that his faith in a supernatural God is a rational belief, not mere superstition. Although his stories are wrapped around Catholic teachings, Chesterton never loses sight of writing a good tale. He delivers a satisfying assortment of mysteries with the first Father Brown book and from what I've read of the second, continues in The Wisdom of Father Brown.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: Brian Roberg reads with a measured pace that allows the listener to pick up clues, if they are mentally quick. He has careful pronunciation with a nondescript American accent. Roberg does not act voices for different characters, but he does vary his tone of voice with what is being said. The recording is clear and, as always with Librivox recordings, available in several formats, including two bitrates of mp3 as well as ogg vorbis.

"The Gospel According to Mark" by Jorge Luis Borges

Source: New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Length: 22 minutes
Reader: Paul Theroux

The story: In this short story, Espinosa, an Argentine man, leaves his intellectual life in the city to visit a cousin's ranch. When the cousin leaves for a business trip, the man is left alone with the ranch foreman and his family, the Gutres. A flood cuts off the ranch from the outside world, and left alone, Espinosa passes the time by reading to the Gutres from the Gospel of St. Mark, which they had never heard before. The Gutres understanding of the story of Jesus's life is quite different from what would be expected.

The story is startling in its impact. It's a difficult story to grapple with, especially without giving away any spoilers. I believe Borges is contrasting the simple agrarian lifestyle of his countrymen with the intellectualism of his readers. The focal point for this contrast is the most well-known, heavily analyzed, and retold story in all of Western Culture: the story of Jesus, but in its earliest and simplest written form: the gospel of Mark. Espinosa sees St. Mark's story through both the religious viewpoint of his pious mother and the humanist viewpoint of his atheist father. Paradoxically, with all his intellectual tools for examining the story, he thinks very little about the meaning of Jesus's life as he tells it to the Gutres. On the other hand, the Gutres think deeply about the Bible story and arrive at a surprising conclusion.

Rating: 9/10

The Reader: Paul Theroux is an accomplished writer, but it does not always follow that good writers are good readers. Fortunately, in this case, Theroux delivers a wonderful performance of this piece which he so enthusiastically adores. He varies his pitch, enunciates clearly, and matches the speed of his reading to the action. The recording is part of the New Yorker podcast, in which a current author picks a story from the New Yorker archives, then introduces the story, reads it and discusses the story and author with the New Yorker's fiction editor. I found the discussion to be nearly as entertaining as the story, with Theroux's anecdote about reading to the elderly, blind Borges making the reader feel like he is sharing an experience of listening to a story in common with Borges.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Source: Librivox
Length: 6 hr, 46 min
Reader: rachelellen

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is a book about a man first isolated by his community, then brought back in. Silas is kicked out of the weaver's guild after being wrongly accused of theft. He tries to begin a new life in the hamlet of Raveloe, but his attempts to join the community are regarded with suspicion. He falls in to hoarding the gold he gains from his weaving, and it takes an unlikely series of events to draw him back out again.

Elliot manages to alleviate the pathos of Silas's story by interspersing it with the story of two sons of the village's major landholder. These active personalities lift the resigned mood of the narrative and provide an engine to the plot. Eliot's vivid descriptions of Silas's cottage, of formal dances, and of the people of Raveloe likewise give the story a life it would otherwise lack.

I think the themes of isolation from the community in this story as as relevant today as when they were written. Personally, I know only one of my neighbors well, a few others by name, and most not at all. Although online communities are wonderful things, I believe that George Eliot would still want us to connect to our physical communities.

Rating: 7/10

The reader: Librivox reader rachelellen provides a captivating performance. Her warm alto voice lends life to Eliot's sometimes antiquated prose. She doesn't attempt elaborate characters, but pronounces words distinctly with an American accent. Listening on headphones, I could hear a faint background hiss, but no other noise. This is a good straightforward recording that brings out Eliot's language to its full potential.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Source: Librivox
Length:13 hr, 8 min
Reader: Adrian Praetzellis

The book: Kim by Rudyard Kipling is a meandering voyage with an Anglo-Indian boy and his Tibetan mentor through colonial India. Kipling provides a detailed portrait of India’s diversity of cultures, landscapes, languages, and races comparable to Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children.

Although Kipling is known as a colonialist writer, I found his characterization of the native people to be even with that of the English. Europeans are definitely in control, but the native population is able to get the upper hand through its knowledge of local dialect and customs. Superstition is gently ridiculed, but the Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims are all portrayed more positively than the Anglican clergyman.

The problem with this journey is there is no drive to the narrative. Kipling never seems to instill the sense of danger that the plot calls for. Kim is set during the Great Game, when Russia and England were on the brink of war over Afghanistan. Kim’s story often intersects these larger events, but it never builds the tension reflective of an international conflict. We’re left with a story that promises adventure but delivers a travelogue. The quality of Kipling's characters and the few hints of excitement provide a novel that can be rewarding for those with patience.

Rating: 6/10

The reader: Adrian Praetzellis provides a crystal clear recording punctuated by distinctive voices for each character. This approach is entertaining but forces the listener to adopt the reader’s characterizations. For example, Praetzellis acts the Tibetan Lama as old man with a high-pitched sing-song voice. From the couple of times I’ve seen talks by the Dali Lama , I’d judge it an excellent imitation of a Tibetan holy man. But I wonder if I would have seen the character as less pitiable and more heroic if he had a sonorous rather than wheezy voice. With any text, voice actors, like their film and stage counterparts, must make decisions on their performances. Here, Praetzellis turns in a wonderful performance and makes the book much more entertaining than it would otherwise be.

The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy

Source: Learn out Loud, courtesy of Hovel Audio (direct link)

Length: Approx. 2 hr, 20 min
Reader: Simon Vance

The book: Tolstoy starts his novella The Death Of Ivan Illyich with the title character's funeral. Beginning in the middle or at the end of a story has been common since the time of Homer, but here the device is particularly effective because of the intrusive feeling of attending the funeral for someone we don't know. Many outside viewpoints are given about the life and death of Ivan Illyich, few of them positive.

In the second chapter, the viewpoint switches to Ivan Illyich's and quickly follows him through his life. Like those who attend his funeral out of obligation, Ivan lives life as if it is only something expected of him to do. When he falls ill, he becomes annoyed at those who don't behave as he thinks they should. As Illyich's disease progresses, we see illustrated the classic stages of grief, but Tolstoy also gives insight to the details of dying: the inability to have the doctor tell you what you want to know, the indignity of having someone else attend to your personal hygiene, and the boredom of waiting to die.

Ivan Illyich is one of Tolstoy's later works and the influence of his Christian conversion is evident in the climax. The profound insights into the entire process of dying make it no wonder that this book is often assigned reading for ministers, doctors, and hospice workers. Its short length is an excellent introduction to Tolstoy for those who want to avoid the commitment of his doorstop novels Anna Karena and War and Peace.

Rating: 7/10

The recording: Simon Vance is a professional voice-over actor performing a commercial audiobook that just happens to given away for free. In this edition, The Death of Ivan Illyich is paired with the long story "Master and Man" as the collection Tolstoy on Death. Having already read "Master and Man" in print, I did not listen to it and do not intend to review it here except to say that Ivan Illyich is the greatly superior story.

Note: This recording is indeed free, though Learn Out Loud makes you register in order to download. No financial or personal information is required other than an email. I did not see an increase in spam following registration, but you must uncheck "Receive occasional emails". Be careful when giving personal information and never give credit card information for "free" audiobooks