I'm back!

Yeah, I know I haven't published anything in almost 3 years. I had given this blog up, since I had changed jobs, changed my commute, and didn't have as much time for audiobooks or blogging anymore. This summer, I'll have a bit more time, so I'll be posting occasionally.

The first big announcement for the summer is that SYNC audio is back! Sync gives away free audiobooks to everyone, though the program is designed to get young people interested in reading. No credit card is required, just a name, an email and a free download of the Overdrive software for your computer or portable device. They offer 2 different titles each week. This week, they're offering Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Beautiful Creatures by  Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. Both books have excellent reviews and I've heard great word-of-mouth on both, though I haven't read either. These free books are only available for download until May 12, so go grab them now.

Sync will be back each week though the summer with new titles for download. I'll update as they're released.

Happy New Year

I've been meaning to post here, but since the new semester started, things have been busy and don't show signs of letting up. Therefore, I'll probably be posting much less on Free Listens. You'll still see an occasional review, but I'll not be posting every week like in months past.

Merry Christmas

I'll not be posting any new reviews for the next few weeks while I'm on vacation for the Christmas and New Years' holidays. Until then, check out these seasonal free audiobooks and stories from years past:

"The Dead" by James Joyce
"Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement C. Moore
"A Kidnapped Santa Claus" by L. Frank Baum
"The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry
"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens

Internet censorship day

I usually don't post political issues here, but there's currently a pair of bills in the U.S. Congress that directly relate to Free Listens. If you're not in the United States, feel free to skip this post. The SOPA bill in the U.S. House and the Protect IP Piracy bill in the Senate have good intentions, but I'm concerned that they will result in an overreach of censorship upon many to protect the property rights of a few.

The bills, as I understand them, would block websites to users in the U.S. if a property rights holder complains that there is any copyright violation on the website. So, if I link to a legally free audiobook or story on a website and there is another audiobook or story on that website that might violate copyright in the U.S., then access to that website is blocked.

As I read it, there doesn't even need to be any laws broken for this law to censor a website. For example: I link to a free Creative-Commons licensed audio version of the public domain book "Call of the Wild" at an Australian website. The same website has a free version of "Gone With the Wind" that I don't link to. Because of a difference in the length of copyright in the two countries, "Gone with the Wind" is public domain in Australia, so no laws are being broken, but access to the entire website is blocked!

The legislation has even worse consequences for sites that contain user-generated content, since if one user violates copyright, all are blocked. My blog is hosted on Blogger, so when any of the hundreds of thousands of blogs on Blogger posts a copyright violation, it all goes down. This is clearly unworkable.

Google, Yahoo!, Mozilla, Twitter, Wikimedia, Facebook, and eBay all oppose this legislation. Please read more extensively on this subject, educate yourself, then visit http://americancensorship.org/ to write your Congressperson on this subject.

No new reviews this week

I'll be skipping a week of reviews due to quarter-term exams in the classes I'm teaching. Next week, I'll be back with another free audiobook and free audio story review.

Book Blogger Appreciation Week update

I've made the short list for the Best Audiobook Blog niche at Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Thanks to mel u at The Reading Life who nominated me and to everybody who voted for me.

You can vote by visiting BBAW and logging in with your Google or Twitter username at the bottom of the page. While you're voting for the audiobook blog category, be sure to keep going to the Best Speculative Fiction Blog category and vote for Fantasy Literature, where I write an occasional column.

Book blogger appreciation week nominee

I've been listed on the Long List for an award as Best Audiobook Blog for Book Blogger Appreciation Week. You can see all the nominees here. It's a great list! There are several of my favorite audiobook blogs listed too.

High School reading list: Short stories

Continuing the post from Tuesday, here's some of the short stories I see most often in high school literature syllabi. There's some overlap with the middle school stories I'll be posting next week, so check back later for more.

"An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce
"The Swimmer" by John Cheever
"The Bet" by Anton Chekhov
"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane
"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"A Jury of her Peers" by Susan Glaspell
"The Outcasts of Poker Flats" by Bret Harte
"Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
"Araby" by James Joyce
"The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
"The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield
"The Open Window" by Saki
"Junius Maltby" by John Steinbeck

High school reading list

With school starting this week, I'm afraid I won't be able to post a new review. However, since it's the beginning of the school year, I'm posting a list of free audiobooks that are often in assigned reading for literature classes. I'm intending this to be a service for both students and teachers, so they can read and assign some audiobooks without worrying about the ability to pay.

Today, I'll have a list of audiobooks for the high school students; Thursday will be short stories for the high school crowd. If I'm still busy next week, I'll post a list of free audiobooks for the middle school and elementary school classes.

Alphabetical by author's last name:
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Howards End by E.M. Forster
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

A Picture Is Worth a 1000 Spoken Words

I usually try to illustrate my reviews with the images provided by the publisher of the audiobook. LibriVox volunteers in particular have done a great job at designing covers for their public domain audiobooks. Sometimes, there is no cover image for the book, especially when I'm reviewing a short story or poem. In these cases, I have to search for a Creative Commons or public domain image to use instead.  These searches often turn up with great images. I've included a few of my favorites below. You can find the license and credits by clicking on the story links.

Free Listens Summer

No post this week because it's beautiful outside! I'd much rather be enjoying the weather than writing a blog post. So come back next week and I'll have a great new free audiobook for you - I promise!

Free Listens on Vacation

I'll be taking a two week break from posting new reviews while I'm on vacation. So, no reviews this week, and no reviews next week. In the meantime, check out these other audiobook review blogs:

• Audiosync May Roundup: Audiobooks reviewed by bloggers in the month of May.
• Free Audio Review: a very similar site to Free Listens.
• My Librivox List: numerical reviews of Librivox books and narrators.
• Reading with My Ears: reviews of commercial audiobooks.
• SFFaudio.com: reviews of science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.

Free Audiobooks for Memorial Day

Every Memorial Day Weekend, thousands of Americans take to the roads for a vacation over the long weekend. Since the price of gasoline is so high, vacationers might want to take advantage of these free audiobooks about travel. These books were chosen to be fun, well-produced, and short, so go ahead and download more than one.

1. Traveling with children: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. It may be too warm to travel by sled, but this classic about children traveling to a magical world by way of a wardrobe is sure to keep both you and the kids entertained.
2. Traveling to a foreign nation: The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. When I visit another country, I want to spend time among the people, not just snap pictures as an outsider. The protagonist of Prisoner of Zenda takes this philosophy a little too far when switches places as a lookalike of the king of the fictional European nation of Ruritania. 
3. Traveling to get away: The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. A South African man visits England, but finds London boring. When his chance involvement in a counter-espionage plot goes wrong, he must escape across the British countryside.
4. Traveling to a family reunion: Thousandth Night by Alastair Reynolds. In the distant future, humankind can travel across the galaxy and clone themselves into a thousand copies. As one group of clones meets up to share their experiences, a plot is underfoot that could either save or harm the galaxy.
5. Traveling through time: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Going on a long car trip only seems like it takes thousands of years. In H.G. Wells' classic story, a man actually does travel thousands of years into the future and discovers what humanity has become.

(photo "Road Trip!" by Snugg via flickr. Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-Alike)

Most Popular Free Audio Stories

As promised, here's the most popular free audio short stories, as determined by average number of hits.

1. "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
2. "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane
3. "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
4. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
6. "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury
7. "The Lady or the Tiger?" by Frank R. Stockton
8. "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway
9. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain
10. "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte

Good stories, no doubt, but I suspect that most of these hits are students looking for help on their reading for English class. I'm sure that some of them are just looking for a quick summary of the story to get out of some schoolwork, thereby cheating themselves out of hearing some excellent literature. My hope is that the majority will actually listen to the stories and get a sense of how entertaining a well-written short story can be.

Most Popular Free Audiobooks

I won't be posting a new review this week, since I'm trying to catch up on work after the long Presidents' Day weekend. Instead, I'm posting the Top 10 most popular free audiobook reviews at Free Listens, as determined by the number of page visits. On Thursday or Friday, I'll do the same for short stories.

1. The Tragedy of MacBeth by William Shakespeare
2. The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
3. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
5. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
6. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. Jeeves in the Morning by P.G. Woodehouse
9. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
10. King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard 

Click on any of the book titles above to go to my review and download the audiobook.

Some other audiobook challenges

Besides the "52 Free Audiobooks in 2011" list here, there's a few other audiobook listening challenges out on the web

• "Whisper Stories in My Ear" at Bewitched Bookworms. Read twelve audiobooks in the year and enter contests for monthly prizes.
• 2011 Audiobooks Challenge at Theresa's Reading Corner. Chose a level and read 3, 6, 12, or 20 audiobooks in a year.
• There's still a few books open in the 5th Annual SFFaudio Challenge. In this one, you record rather than listen to any of the books from a list of science fiction, fantasy, or noir novels in the public domain. Winners get their choice of a selection of audiobooks as a prize.

I'm joining the Whisper Stories in My Ear and the 2011 Audiobooks challenge. As you can guess, it's no big deal for me to listen to over 12 audiobooks in the course of a year. I'm not doing the SFFaudio Challenge - I've recorded a few chapters for LibriVox before, but recording books is tough and takes a lot of time! I have so much respect for the volunteers at LibriVox. I may record a few more chapters or short stories this summer when I have more time, but for now I'll have to stick to listening and reviewing.

Literary Book Blog Hop: How did I get into literature?

Every week the Literary Book Blog Hop, hosted by the Blue Bookcase, asks participants to answer a question, then read other participants' responses. Here's this week's question:

How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction?

You may have noticed that many of the books I tend to review are classics. This is mainly due to the fact that I'm limited to free audiobooks for this blog, and most of the free audiobooks are novels that have fallen into the public domain and then recorded by LibriVox or other organisations. But  I wouldn't be reviewing these classics at all if I didn't enjoy reading them.

I suppose my love of literary fiction originates with my lists. If I see a list of book suggestions, be it an assigned reading list for a class or a list of best books of 2011 posted at the library, I want to be able to check them off. The other big influence on my love of literature comes from the classes I've taken in high school and college. My teachers in these classes taught me how to investigate a book, rather than just be a passive observer. This approach appeals to my inquisitive nature and helps me to cut through difficult language to get to the author's intent.

52 free audiobooks to read in 2011

It's the beginning of the year; time to make New Year's resolutions! I've seen many fellow book bloggers tackling some impressive lists of books, like the dubious 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (from a book by Peter Baxter) and the somewhat better 1000 Books Everyone Must Read from the Guardian newspaper.

 So on a lark (and with nothing better to publish this week), I've come up with a list of my own: 52 Free Audiobooks and Short Stories You May or May Not Want to Read in 2011. I tried to keep all selections under 10 hours and include plenty of diversity in terms of authors, narrators, source websites, and age of the books. I've broken it into sections of five books from the same genre plus a dozen assorted short stories. I don't seriously expect anyone to complete this list, but if you do, let me know and I'll feature you in a post.

Poetry month at Free Listens

I was reading a newspaper article the other day and came across an interview with poet laurate of the United States W.S. Merwin:

"Most people you bump into on the street will tell you they never read poetry, and if you ask him why they'll say they don't understand it. I tell them, don't worry about understanding it, listen to it for pleasure. Very often all people have to do is hear it -- if they hear poetry, they'll get it."

Like the people Merwin bumps into on the street, I don't read (or listen to) much poetry.  I like poetry, I just tend to overlook poems when deciding what to read. This month, I'm making a conscious effort to change that by reading and reviewing more poetry. For the rest of November, I'll be reviewing two poems a week.

This focus on shorter works will also give me the chance to get caught up on some listening for books that I'll be reviewing in December and January. So, if you're not interested in audio poems, check out the archives or come back in December - I'll have some really great books to point out to you!

Other audiobook sites

I'm not posting a review this week - too many things to do. If you're looking for an audiobook review fix, try one of these other fine blogs:

• Audible Candy: reviews mostly commercial audiobooks
• Devourer of Books: reviews both print and audio, but made the list for hosting audiobook week
• Free Audio Review: what it says on the box, with a preference for science fiction
• SFFaudio: Reviews commercial and free science fiction, fantasy, noir, and horror. I occasionally guest post.
• Reading with my ears: audiobook reviews with a preference toward the Young Adult genre

I'm sure I've missed plenty of audiobook-dedicated sites and regular book review sites that have occasional audiobook reviews. If you have any you'd like to suggest, link to them in the comment section.