The Guardian Books Pod­cast has start­ed offer­ing an audio­book ver­sion of the young adult nov­el Wolf Broth­er as a ser­i­al pod­cast. The sto­ry is the first in a series of books by Michelle Paver called Chron­i­cles of Ancient Dark­ness. It makes good audio since it’s grip­ping and not hard to fol­low (or get back into if you get dis­tract­ed). But what real­ly makes it worth­while is Ian McKel­lan’s voice, which lends the tale just the right lev­el of ancient, mag­i­cal atmos­phere. The Guardian has released 9 out of 13 episodes so far, at a rate of one a week. (Site, iTunes)

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This is a book that needs no intro­duc­tion, but we will give it a short one any­way. Pub­lished in ser­i­al for­mat between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was ini­tial­ly reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. Today, it’s wide­ly con­sid­ered a clas­sic in mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, and The Mod­ern Library went so far as to call it the most impor­tant Eng­lish-lan­guage nov­el pub­lished dur­ing the 20th cen­tu­ry. Although chron­i­cling one ordi­nary day in the life of Leopold Bloom in 1904 Dublin, Ulysses is no small work. It sprawls over 750 pages, using over 250,000 words, and takes over 32 hours to read aloud. Or, at least that’s how long it took the folks over at Lib­rivox. In the Blooms­day tra­di­tion, a cast of read­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the project, offer­ing cre­ative read­ings with “pub-like back­ground noise.” The audio files can be down­loaded as many indi­vid­ual mp3 files here, or as one big zip file here.This is not the only free audio ver­sion of Ulysses. There is anoth­er not quite tra­di­tion­al ver­sion put out by “Paigerel­la” (iTunes — Feed). And, while you’re at it, you might as well check out a read­ing of “Ara­by” (iTunes — Feed), a short sto­ry from Joyce’s col­lec­tion, Dublin­ers. It’s pro­vid­ed cour­tesy of Miette’s Bed­time Sto­ry Pod­cast. Next up, we hope is a nice read­ing of Finnegan’s Wake.For more free audio books, includ­ing many good ones from Lib­rivox, see our Audio Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

While our col­lec­tion of for­eign lan­guage lessons pod­casts has been get­ting a fair amount of love and atten­tion late­ly, we’ve been spruc­ing up our direc­to­ry of audio book pod­casts.

To this list of Eng­lish-lan­guage clas­sics, we’ve added three new clas­sics by Jane Austen — Per­sua­sion, Mans­field Park, and Northang­er Abbey — all of which are byprod­ucts of the new tele­vi­sion series, The Jane Austen Sea­son. You’ll also find some new audio files from the great Lib­rivox col­lec­tion, includ­ing E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Char­lotte Bron­te’s Jayne Eyre, and F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s This Side of Par­adise. And final­ly we’ve added some select­ed poet­ry and prose by Walt Whit­man and Hen­ry David Thore­au. To review the longer list of clas­sics, click here.

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