Sunday, December 23, 2007

A Christmas Carol

Everybody knows the story; Scrooge, Three Spirits, Tiny Tim, from Bah, Humbug to Keeping Christmas, but I, for one, had never read the book. So a few weeks back I sampled what Audible.com had and picked an unabridged copy for about $15 and put it on my download wish list. I have been meaning to get it downloaded for weeks and yesterday was the day to get it done. However before paying for it I wanted to double check Librivox, I remembered not liking how it had sounded but wanted to check again because free is always better than $15.

The First link for A Christmas Carol at librivox is only okay, each stage is read by a different reader and the quality of the recording is a bit wanting. However, there is a second recording. It is labeled as "A Christmas Carol (version 2)" read entirely by Glen Hallstrom. I sampled it and it sounded pretty good so I downloaded it and took it to work.

Glen Hallstrom is a great reader, The recording quality is excellent, and the story is great. No movie has ever captured it. The Patrick Stewart version is a direct enactment of the story with the script being word for word dialog from the book, but there is a certain something that can not be translated onto the screen. I can see why President Monson reads it every year.

My opinion: It is free, it is short (listening time is 4 hours), it is a great story well read. Everyone should listen to or read A Christmas Carol.

here is the link to download Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol"

1 comment:

Smokestack Jones said...

You certainly do have an opinion, and I like it. Thanks for DL'ing and listening to Christmas Carol. It was the first full book I did (I've done short stories - mostly Lovecraft - for LV) and i was worried about the quality (I used a headset/mic).

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it and I hope you can listen to more at Librivox. There's a lot of good readers there and maybe you can be one of 'em. ;-)

-SJ AKA Glen Hallstrom