Binge Reading James

I've been binge-reading Henry James' lesser known novels in the past few months.  The "reading" I'm referring to here is more involved than merely I eye-balling the texts.  It involved a collective effort, freely given, of many people from the LibriVox community to record and produce these novels as audiobooks.  In case you don't know, LibriVox is a volunteer organization which produces free public domain audiobooks.   

As you may or may not know I'm a devoted Henry James fan.  I delight in his circuitous and laborious way of rendering a character, scene, or a situation.  I admire his ability to spin a yarn out of a tiny germ of a situation that he perceives to contain dramatic potential.  I envy his characters' ability to say much by saying little.  

In July I chanced upon a recording project at LibriVox for a novel by Henry James called The Tragic Muse.  I had read the book before but didn't think much of it; I didn't like the central character, Miriam Rooth, an ambitious "drama queen" kind of person.  However, I was surprised to find that this project had been languishing in the "Readers Wanted" forum at LibriVox for a while.  Usually works by such an established writer like James are snatched up in no time.  Anyhow, I volunteered to record this book starting from the Preface and ended up recording 10 sections for it.  It was definitely not easy-going for me, especially in trying to parse his prose for the Preface, but I struggled on.  Along the way I met a few enthusiastic and responsible readers.  After we finished recording the book, it dawned on me that there might still be other books by James that have yet been "done" at LibriVox and wouldn't it be nice if I could launch these books myself and get them recorded. 

So to make the story short, I managed to launch three projects for LibriVox of three lesser known novels, Confidence, the Outcry, and the Other House, by Henry James in a short span of time, and with the help of several dedicated volunteers got the projects completed in three months.  For me being a BC (Book Coordinator) for LibriVox is a lot easier than being a Reader.  It takes a lot more time and effort to record and edit one's own recordings.  The best part of this experience was that I invited Kirk to record several chapters of these three books.  Kirk, in his obsessive compulsive way of doing everything, spent a considerable amount of effort to make his recordings as best as he could.  So without further ado, please check out the following free audiobooks at LibriVox --

the Other House

The Tragic Mus

the Outcry

Confidence

A Life's Morning

This is to let you all know that I've plowed through, not single-handedly, another Audiobook recording; it's titled "A Life's Morning" by George Gissing, published in 1888.  It can be downloaded here for free from Librivox.  I joined in the group recording effort in May 2013 and recorded 18 of its 33 sections.  It was hard-going at times, but boy I'm glad it's finally done.

I did not know of this late 19th century British author before I started recording for this project.  Though priding myself on having read a lot of the English literary classics from 18th century to early modern era, I've been finding out, to my amazement, the names of so many writers whom I've never heard of, simply by randomly browsing the free (no longer copyrighted) titles available on Project Gutenberg.  Like so many men and women of letters in various time and various quarters of the globe who have been overshadowed by their greater contemporaries, Gissing in his brief existence left a considerable literary production.  Whether his novels have any significant worth in the opinion of literary critics, they provide a window onto the life and preoccupations of the people of his time, which though very unlike our own, we can still thoroughly enter into on the basis of our shared human experience.   

The Song of the Lark

The third LibriVox project I worked on was "The Song of the Lark" by an American novelist from the late 19th-early 20th Century era, Willa Cather, depicting the journey of an irrepressible talent in finding her "voice" from humble beginnings, propelled by her indomitable desire, determination, and drive--the magical formula for successful enterprises.  (This was also the project that inspired me to learn German.)  Though there are insightful and lifelike depictions of each of the main characters in the book, they seem to me to be somewhat one-dimensional, even Thea Kronborg, the heroine, seems to be confined in and, as it were, protected by, the bubble of a character type defined by the author.  I thought that my reading had improved a little for this one but it was still plagued by halting diction, which impeded the flow of story-telling.  I'm onto my fourth project now; I'm grateful for the opportunity to work on my speech articulation, something which I wish I had practiced more when I was young. 

   

The Fixed Period

The Fixed Period is the title of the second audiobook to which I contributed in the LibriVox project.  It is a strange story, to say the least, written by the prolific Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, and first published in 1882.  Kirk and I, since we joined The Folio Society back in the 90's, have collected all of Trollope's 48 novels and have read most of them through the years.  The Fixed Period, however, was one that I tried in vain several times to read but could not get past the first few chapters.  It was very different from the usual themes of Trollope's stories about love, marriage, inheritance, lawsuits, impetuous and stubborn men and women, greed and ambition in some of his more unsavory characters, etc.  It has been called a dystopian fiction, set in 1980, long since passed without any such event, fortunately, ever having happened.  The story itself, though grim enough, was narrated in a matter of fact tone, mundane and argumentative, though what sends a chill down one's spine is not so much the dystopian society it depicts, but the realization how one can be led astray on a grand scale by mistaken beliefs and an inflexible will.

When I saw the book in the Readers Wanted list of LibriVox's catalog, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to find out, finally, what the story was about and how it ended.  I actually started reading, my first attempt at voice recording, from the last two chapters of the book.  After satisfying myself that nothing more disastrous happened than the frustration of a misguided idealist, I gradually read my way back up, and eventually recorded six chapters of the book in total.  I'm afraid my reading is rather mechanical, not like story-telling; I've a lot to work on still.   

Felix Holt, The Radical

The book, Felix Holt, The Radical, by George Eliot just came out as an audiobook available for free download in the Internet Archive website here or LibriVox's catalog here.  (Both sites have their eponymous free apps for convenient listening.)  George Eliot has such an extraordinary range of observation, power of description, and understanding of human aspirations and foibles that in reading her books one gets a vivid impression of the life, mostly in small towns, in 19th Century England.  I had not read Felix Holt before so it was a real pleasure to get to listen to the book for the first time.  I recorded four chapters for the book, not all in consecutive order.  If you listen to the whole book from the beginning, you can easily pick out my parts; they stick out like sore thumbs.  I hope they don't ruin your listening experience.  These are my first forays into reading for audiobooks; I hope I get better at it with practice.

p.s.: If you can, please consider giving to LibriVox.  Thank you.  

Reading Out Loud

Recording in Session

Earlier this month, I made myself a cardboard sign, which says "Recording in Session", to hang up as needed on the door of my office.  (It somehow seems to remain on the door any time of the day, for days on end, as Kirk soon finds out.)  You may be wondering what it is all about; well, there is a story behind it...

I recently jointed a multi-national volunteer organization, called LibriVox, whose ambition is to record all the books in the public domain and make them available for download for free -- a lofty goal indeed!  As you may be wondering why there are people doing this, here is what they say about it on their FAQ -

Why are you doing this?  What's in it for you?
"We love reading, love books, love literature, think the public domain should be defended and enriched, we like free stuff, we like to hear people read to us, and we like reading to other people.  It's fun, it's a great community, it's a rewarding public service to the world. And "nothing" is in it for us, except the satisfaction of participating in a wonderful project."

Well, it can't be said any better.  I've been listening to their free audio-books for some time and as they always begin and end their recordings with calls to volunteering, I finally decided to give it a try and signed up.  (They are not very particular about signing people up; no qualification is required.)  For the past several weeks I've recorded six chapters, three each in two books, and spent many late-night hours reading and re-reading paragraphs in the books and heavily editing my recording.  Compared to those of the experienced readers, my reading sounds laborious and has a unmistakeable foreign accent but they don't seem to mind it once the recording meets certain guidelines.  (I'll let you know what I read once they publish the two audio-books in question.)  Several of my readers will be a great fit for doing this kind of thing; I won't name names but you all know who they are.    

Reading out loud, though everybody does it, is not as easy as it sounds; to many of my friends who are professional pedagogues, for whom the ability to get their points across effectively with voice is essential, speaking/reading out loud is perhaps as easy as second nature.  Though I've been speaking English almost exclusively for over 30 years, it still frustrates me when I can't speak well, explain myself clearly, or when I feel that I speak with a foreign accent, and I don't mean in occasional episodes of public speaking but just ordinary day-to-day conversation.  As a way to improve my English, I read out loud to myself from time to time just to keep my tongue nimble.  Therefore, to volunteer to read for LibriVox seems like a great opportunity for me to practice my English.  I hope it gets easier as I continue to work on it.                     

Hmm, you may be thinking, "This is another of her early retirement projects, like blogging and learning to play the piano; how fun!"  Well, yes, and many thanks to Kirk that I have been able to do this.  As a New York Times' article asks "What do you want to be, now that you're grown?", I feel like I've been given a second life, to do whatever I like to do, now that I've left off, albeit not entirely voluntarily, being an income-producing adult, whose life is tied to the job that pays.  I have, however, never been at a loss to have something to "do" with my time; quite the reverse, I'm concerned about not having enough time to do all the things I like and want to do. 

An Island Unto Herself

The following is a striking passage I heard on my Audiobooks app. last night. I've always thought that it is impossible for one person to really understand another; it couldn't have been said better than this:

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book One, Chapter Three, Night Shadows -
(click the link to hear the passage read)

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?"

Or this, a lighter take on the same theme -

"That is the case with us all, Papa.  One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."--Jane Austen, Emma

A more positive view on the human condition is expressed in John Donne's No Man is An Island - 

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

What is your take?