Audiobooks: Fiction, Poetry, & Drama
I am a believer in the beauty and utility of audiobooks. (It helps that I drive about an hour a day.) Humans spoke and told stories before they wrote. Homer sang or chanted. Your experience of a story may be enhanced or transformed by listening to a skilled artist bring to life. I cannot imagine reading Alexander McCall Smith's wonderful No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, because the amazing Lisette Lecat, a South African actress, has given them life inside my head with her singular readings. If you love the experience of being read to, here are some of our carefully chosen titles. If you want books to be delivered in an old and an always new way, try an audiobook soon. (Success and technological parameters have driven me to divide our audiobooks into two pages. Be sure to browse our audiobook-nonfiction as well.)
The Great Poets -- John Clare
The Great Poets -- John Clare
John Clare was the forgotten Romantic poet, until the late twentieth century. Known by his contemporaries as the ‘Peasant Poet’ he recorded in his poems the natural landscape of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. His poems rival Wordsworth’s for their sensitivity to nature and pantheism: ‘I feel a beautiful providence ever about me,’ Clare wrote. But his life was a long struggle against poverty and mental collapse. Some of his finest poems were written in the local asylum. 1 CD. Read by David Shaw-Parker.