Christmas Audio Tales: Orson Welles’ Christmas Carol (and More)

Let me serve up a quick few bits of audio for the hol­i­day.

Let’s start with a free pod­cast of Charles Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol. Writ­ten in 1843, Dicken’s tale remains one of the most pop­u­lar Christ­mas sto­ries of all time. It gave us the indeli­ble char­ac­ters of Ebenez­er Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christ­mas Past, Present, and Future. And it invent­ed the notion of “christ­mas spir­it.”

You can lis­ten to a fair­ly straight­for­ward read­ing of the text on iTunes. But you may want to spend your time with this 1939 radio pre­sen­ta­tion staged by Orson Welles, which notably fea­tures Lionel Bar­ry­more. (Or you can lis­ten to Welles’ 1938 ver­sion here.)

Also, over at Boing­Bo­ing today, Cory Doc­torow has post­ed a record­ing he made of Lewis Car­rol­l’s Alice in Won­der­land (etext here). You can down­load it in mp3 or oth­er for­mats. I’ve also added Doc­torow’s read­ing to our Audio­Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion, where you can find an alter­na­tive read­ing of Car­rol­l’s work, plus 100 oth­er clas­sic works on free audio. (For our com­plete col­lec­tion of enrich­ing pod­casts, see our Pod­cast Library.)