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Fiction & Literature

Time Machine Audiobook Free: A Journey Beyond Time – Free Download

Surely the Time Traveler threw great dinner parties! His guests were treated to a once-in-forever trial of a miniature time machine – an exquisite miniature that acted so flawlessly as to appear to be stage magic. That his guests did not believe the explanation – the machine vanished into the mists of the future – was patent. Still, a couple of the more thoughtful had reservations about branding the demonstration an outright trickery. And what about the nearly-complete full-size Machine in the Traveler’s laboratory?

Confronted at the next party by the disheveled Traveler, who had apparently suffered privations and who displayed two curious flowers of no known type, the Narrator’s wonderment increased. For the Traveler provided a perfectly arresting story to explain his condition – a surprising tale of a far future where humankind divides into a carefree above-ground race, the Eloi, and a mechanical subterranean race, the Morlocks. A tale in which it appears that the inheritors of the Earth inhabit it as cattle for the feeding of their underground cousins!

Believe, or disbelieve? But perhaps the inventive genius of a man who can translate “thousands of millions of days” of time travel into an exact date should not be doubted!

Fiction & Literature

Adventures of Pinocchio (Version 2) Audiobook Free: A Journey Through Moral Transformation – Free Download

Do today’s children still learn what a “marionette” is? The beloved story of Pinocchio may represent a last lingering picture of a world not dominated by plastic or electronic toys. Pinocchio is a puppet made from a piece of wood that curiously could talk even before being carved.

A wooden-head he starts and a wooden-head he stays – until after years of misadventures caused by his laziness and failure to keep promises he finally learns to care about his family – and then he becomes a real boy. For those who have seen the Disney movie the cast of characters will be familiar, from the Talking Cricket (who acts as his conscience) to Lamp-Wick, his partner in truancy and having heedless fun.

Though the toys of today are far from the puppet shows in Carlo Collodi’s book, his themes of being truthful, thoughtful, and dependable will always be timely. (Summary by Mark)

Fiction & Literature

White Fang Audiobook Free: Journey Through the Yukon Wild – Free Download

When White Fang is birthed in a cave to a wolf sire and a wolf/dog halfbreed dam, he is heir to two traditions. At first he is content to explore and learn laws of the Wild. But then his mother is caught and held by old memories of a past relationship with Man, and White Fang follows her into service with the Indians. Life among sled dogs is hardly less cruel and dangerous than living in the Wild, but brutality notches upward when his drunken master sells him to a nasty, twisted hanger-on at a riverside town of white men. He is stripped of everything soft and gentle when forced to fight to the death for a crowd of bettors.

Taming this savage spirit and reclaiming the nobility within looks impossible. Fortunately, and heart-warmingly, a man arrives in White Fang’s life to try.

“White Fang” is often called the mirror image of Jack London’s acclaimed “The Call of the Wild” in which a dog follows the reverse arc from tame to free.

Fiction & Literature

Sense and Sensibility Audiobook Free: Journey Through Regency Love – Free Download

This is a story of the English moneyed class and its eternal struggle for creating “sense and sensibility” in its world. A potential marriage prospect must make “sense” by bringing with it enough assets and income to permit the couple to continue to live in happy, idle leisure, complete with servants and a prestigious address. Provided one can find such a match among the eligible persons of the opposite sex, one then hopes for “sensibility”, or capacity for emotion, so that if love is not immediately to hand, it might come around later. And while these gentlemen and ladies make their hopeful pirouettes in the social eye, they must of course adhere to all the forms of civility.

Jane Austen writes of the family of a gentleman named Dashwood who dies and leaves most of his fortune to his son, with the understanding that he will “look out for” his mother and three sisters. When that son marries a grasping woman who convinces him that his sisters’ funds are suitable to their needs and so require no contributions from his inherited fortune, the sisters are left to play the game of “Sense and Sensibility” in earnest.

But all’s not fair in love. Carefully prepared “attachments” can and do go awry when gentlemen find other young women of greater fortunes than the Dashwood sisters. So, will they marry for love? Or money? Or perhaps, not at all?

Fiction & Literature

Unraveling Mysteries Across Miles: A Travel Writer’s Dive into the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Audiobook – Free Download

Dr. Watson chronicles here some of the more interesting detective cases that he and his good friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have encountered during their association. We see the cases unfold as he does, scratch our heads as does he while the evidence is collected, and then marvel at the impeccable observations, remarkable insight, and doggedness which Holmes displays as he teases apart the tangled clues.

Packaged as twelve distinct cases, by the end of this book your own senses of observation and deductive reasoning should be improved. It’s easy to see why this book became a model for detective yarns!

Fiction & Literature

Drifting Down the Mississippi: A Travel Writer’s Take on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Audiobook – Free Download

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates an entertaining adventure of Middle America in the 1800’s – afloat on a raft on the Mississippi River. Huck escapes his civilized life when he arranges his own “murder” and turns back into the backwoods, downriver yokel he started as, and in the process springing a slave, Jim, from bondage.

Huck and Jim experience life as a series of tableaus as the river sweeps them through small towns on their way South. At each stop, Huck engages his talent for mixing fact with bald-faced lies to endlessly get himself out of situations… and of course, putting him into others!

Much has been written about the statement Twain is making about slavery in this book, but it’s really secondary to the story. The facts of how black people were treated in this period give Huck and Jim their license for life on the run. Modern listeners will be intrigued by the unencumbered life of the pair; they make do with coffee, fish from the river, and little else (but of course, when they do need something extra, they don’t mind helping themselves to it without recourse to money!)

Huck and Jim have run-ins with desperados and family feuds and even manage to get run down by a steamboat. The adventures ratchet up when they are joined on the raft by a self-proclaimed “duke” and a “king” – shysters both, who spend their time in figuring how to fleece the public in the little river towns. And when Jim is captured and threatened with being sent back into slavery, Huck enlists his old buddy Tom Sawyer in a frenzied, desperate, and terribly funny rescue.

I had to clip a lot of laughing from this recording at Twain’s sly, catch-’em-when-they’re-not-looking humor, but you can feel free to enjoy some good belly laughs at this crew of lovable rapscallions!

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