Choose a book from our online library and click to listen.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. ~Mark Twain
Welcome to Great Books Audio, the free audio book podcast of classic fiction. I invite you listen to my narrations of great books by famous authors. All downloadable in mp3. All free.
Visit the Great Books Online Library and choose a book. Or sample a narration by jumping to the latest chapter of the book I’m currently reading.
Clifton Fadiman said, “When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.” So, even if you may have already read many of the books listed on these pages, Great Books Audio offers you an opportunity to re-visit a story now. In a different time and place. In a totally different way.
I hope you enjoy the presentations you’ll find here and I welcome your comments, especially about how Great Books Audio might be improved.
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Now Playing: ULYSSES by James Joyce
Ulysses, the novel by James Joyce, chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (e.g., the correspondences between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate June 16 as Bloomsday.
Ulysses totals about 265,000 words from a vocabulary of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into 18 “episodes”. Since publication, the book has attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual “Joyce Wars.” Ulysses’ stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich characterizations and broad humor, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
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