#librivox

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

I love you PBS I love you NPR I love you public libraries I love you wikipedia I love you project gutenberg I love you librivox I love you libby I love you hoopla I love you openlibrary I love you internet archive I love you resources that make information free and accessible to the public

[player-1]

Just making a separate post on the Limbus Library for now, though looking through Project Gutenberg and LibriVox is pretty great too. So here's a full list in the order of the Cantos :)

-Metamorphosis (Book & Audiobook)

-Crime and Punishment (Book & Audiobook)

-Demian (Book & Audiobook)

-The Wings (Book & Audiobook)

-Moby Dick (Book & Audiobook)

-Wuthering Heights (Book & Audiobook)

-Don Quixote (Book & Audiobook)

-Dream of the Red Chamber (Book & Audiobook (& bonus drama series))

-Hell Screen (Book & Audiobook)

-The Stranger (Book & Audiobook)

-The Odyssey (Book & Audiobook)

-Faust (Goethe and Marlowe books & Audiobooks 1 and 2)

[buffdyke]

hey you! do you like free public domain audiobooks? of course you do!

LibriVox | free public domain audiobooks

let me introduce you to librivox! this site is dedicated to providing free volunteer read audiobooks! they currently have 19,610 free public domain works recorded and they are always adding more as people volunteer

long post short, please go help yourself to some great classic audiobooks!

[whirling-ghost]

I don't know if that thing about posts with links not showing up is true or not. but fuck it! I like finding free books. I like free audiobooks (and the people who read them) but sometimes finding matching ones is difficult.

The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius. translation by R.C. Seaton, 1912. book and audiobook. the introduction matches so I'm just assuming the rest of the text does

[whosaidjames]

In my Book Reading era

Over the holidays at the end of 2025 into 2026, I got really into reading. As of posting, I’ve finished 24 books, I’m partway through one more, and I’ve got two or three lined up after that.

Reading has always been a struggle for me. I grew up in the late 90s, when a lot of teachers weren’t trained to catch learning disabilities, especially teachers already coasting toward retirement. I had the perfect storm of issues and none of them got noticed for years. I remember sitting through Hooked on Phonics lessons while nothing clicked, while other kids got to watch a movie or have free time because they’d already moved on.

After years of struggling and getting called illiterate, I was finally tested and diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, and comprehension difficulties. I got placed in the Resource program in 6th grade, and by using every bit of extra help available to me, I improved enough to test out of the program by senior year. I graduated as a general ed student.

One thing I learned along the way: I read best when I can follow along with an audiobook. Growing up, I’d sit in the library after school and do exactly that, I loved it. After I graduated in 2010, I could still find physical books at the public library, but not the audiobook to go with them. Reading without that support was so hard that I basically stopped. I could still skim short, simple stuff, web articles, that kind of thing, but full books fell off completely.

Now that I’m an “adult” with a little disposable income, I got back into it. It started with Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, a client recommended it, and I had a cross-country flight coming up over the holidays. I had the audiobook, a 40-plus chapter novel, and nothing but time. I couldn’t stop. I read it on planes, in the car, in the dark, whenever I could sneak in a chapter. It was billed as a 24-hour listen and I finished it right as our trip wrapped up.

That momentum turned into wanting a whole series next, inspired by watching The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. I read all 14 of L. Frank Baum’s original Oz books in about a month and a half using LibriVox.

LibriVox opened up a ton of classic literature for me, George MacDonald’s Phantastes, William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Physical copies of a lot of these were harder to track down, so I leaned on public-domain PDFs from Archive.org in the meantime, while slowly building a physical collection of what I still need to read. I’ve also started digging into the authors themselves, how their lives shaped what they wrote, which has become its own fascinating rabbit hole.

Current reading:

I just finished Marissa Meyer’s Renegades trilogy, Supernova had me glued, I cleared my schedule for it, no regrets. Now I’m on Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, giving me heavy Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 vibes. Up next: Dungeon Crawler Carl, which approximately everyone in my life, friends, and now my wife, has been telling me to read.

That’s my new hobby era. Hope you enjoyed the read as much as I’m enjoying these books.

[karizard-ao3]

I was thinking, "Oh, I'm having such a hard time getting through Les Mis, maybe I'll go back to the audiobook instead of reading it with my eyes", only to remember that my library's copy DOESN'T HAVE CHAPTER MARKERS. It doesn't even break it up by volume! It's all random! And the Librivox recording is fine, just a little annoying because I had to download it all as individual chapters and so every five minutes or so I have to pull up the next chapter, adjust the speed because they all read like turtles, and then skip through the introduction. And sometimes that alone is enough to make me stop listening for the day.

"Fine!" I thought. "I guess I'll just see about buying it!"

The cheapest audiobook is AI narrated, and the next cheapest one is $8, which is like... Not bad, but how much more money am I going to spend trying to find a way to finish this damn book before the year runs out? I haven't been able to find any bootleg copies.

I'm in hell.

Edit: I think I can use the VLC app to stream the Librivox version without having to adjust the playback speed every time it switches to the next chapter. Wish me luck

[stringcage]

I LOVE YOU LIBRIVOX RECORDINGS

[walkawaytall]

i would love to hear more about your opinions on LM Montgomery's works 👀

Oh, hi! Thanks for dropping me a note. So, I really have only read her Anne books (and, oddly, have yet to read Rilla of Ingleside). I enjoyed them as a preteen, and Anne was one of several fictional redheads that made me want red hair so badly as a kid :D.

I really started to love the books a lot more as an adult. I was working a job that involved a lot of sort of mindless work, which allowed me to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. I got hooked on LibriVox, which is a site that offers free audiobooks of works in the public domain, read by volunteers. I specifically really liked dramatic readings, and thoroughly enjoyed the Anne books that were available via dramatic reading (as well as Little Women and Pride and Prejudice).

I really enjoyed all of the books, but Anne of the Island and Anne's House of Dreams were my favorite. All the girls at Patty's Place in Anne of the Island reminded me a bit of this house I lived in shortly after moving out of my parents' house for good. I lived there with some women I knew through school and church, and we were all varying levels of friends. It was a really sweet, fun time, and I love being reminded of those years.

But, I'm also all for emotional works, and I think that's why I love Anne's House of Dreams best. I really like Anne and Gilbert together, I like the domesticity of them building a life together after they get married in this new place, and I really like all of the new characters as well. Additionally, I like the way the book handled death and tragedy. Anne's proclamation after the loss of Joyce that, "The thought that it may stop hurting sometimes hurts me worse than all else[...]", is something I think anyone who has lost a loved one can relate to. Some of the plot points are a bit more fantastical than the other books, but I still really enjoy it. I like when things work out in the end, even if there is a great deal of heartbreak in the midst of a story, and I think Anne's House of Dreams does just that.

Oh, and since it's on topic, I thought I might share this YouTube channel that I really enjoyed back when they were actively posting videos. Green Gables Fables is a modern take on some of the Anne books, told via vlog, similar to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (though, GGF was done by a bunch of students -- it is admittedly much lower-budget and less-polished than LBD, but I still think it's great). I highly suggest watching using the playlists for Season One and Season Two, as these contain vlogs by characters other than Anne that help fill out the story and that are easy to miss if you're not aware of all the characters' account names. If you want to like...grow attached to Ruby Gillis, this may be the series for you!

If you're interested in the LibriVox dramatic readings I mentioned, they are here (I usually used the iTunes subscription option, I think, since I was always taught not to just download random files from websites. Haha...But I also have no idea if that still even works.):

Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Avonlea

Anne of the Island

Anne's House of Dreams

The quality of reading varies because these are volunteers, but I really like Arielle Lipshaw, who acts as both narrator and the voice of Anne, so I found them really fun and engaging.