My friend introduced this to me and it is a treasure. My attention span is pretty terrible so I find it hard to finish most books (I am like this with games and everything else too) but if I ‘read’ as I walk/work this is a non-issue
Been listening to Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany and assorted others and have Kafka, Chaucer, Don Quixote, the bible and a ton of other crap coming up. If anybody has any general recommendations of classics, lemme know. Any old thing will do, I haven’t read a ton of greats so don’t hold back mentioning something cos it’s too much of a safe bet that I’ve already read it.
This is an admirable project, and I plan to give some more of these a try. But the first two I tried were apparently read by non-english speakers, or perhaps just bad readers. There’s no way I could get through an entire Russian novel listening to that guy reading it.
I’ve been lucky so far mostly, but there have been a couple of real duds. One from someone with a really thick accent I didn’t recognise and one from a guy who pronounced all his r’s as w’s. Though that was pretty appropriate for the story he was reading (one of the Dunsany-esque Lovecraft shorts).
I discovered them a few years ago and it is a gem of a website. One of my favourites was Arnold Rennet’s comedy ‘The Card’ (filmed, starring a young Alec Guinness, back in the '50s), which was very well read by a single contributor.
Although some of the multiple contributions can be a bit hit an miss, I can live with that. As a Brit, listening to Americans mispronounce English place names is always a source of amusement :).
