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“I do not pretend to say the young man is without faults; but they are all the faults of wildness and of youth; faults which he may, nay, which I am certain he will, relinquish.“

One of the great works of the English literary canon, this comic masterpiece, first published in 1749, draws us into the lives of two neighbouring Somersetshire squires and friends, one genial and generous, the other a hot-headed lover of the hunt and the bottle, who conspire together, on the basis of a mutual misunderstanding, to marry the former’s nephew to the latter’s daughter, very much to the discomfort of the young lady herself, whose true affections lie with Tom Jones, a foundling (ie, bastard child of persons unknown) whom the genial squire has raised almost like a son, but who has of late disgraced himself in various ways, some real and others imagined.

While there are not many true villains in this tale, several key players are extremely sure they have right on their side, and don’t mind expressing themselves with great gusto, while ever waiting in the wings is the author himself, ready to step forward and share his own thoughts on the action — and, indeed, on almost any other subject that occurs to him on the spur of the moment.

Duration: 33 hr 08 min.  On Librivox

Homer’s “The Odyssey” forms the template of practically every adventure story that has been told in the West since it was composed nearly three thousand years ago: a bold and ingenious hero (in this case Ulysses, one of the principal warriors who fought at Troy) undertakes a long and perilous journey in the course of which he (or she) must confront many different dangers and temptations, both physical and psychological, before engaging in one final struggle that will prove decisive for the hero, and for all who depend upon the hero. Many episodes in this work have entered into our common lore — Ulysses’ encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops, his brush with the deadly, beckoning Sirens and his daring pass between Scylla and Charybdis. Many other less familiar episodes in this justly famous tale are likely to strike a modern listener as rich, strange, or downright appalling, reminding us powerfully that the past is, indeed, “another country”. The text translation is by Samuel Butler.

Duration: 10 hr 46 min.  On Librivox

This warm and witty novel presents itself as the first person narration of an immensely likeable and resourceful woman who, born in the most shameful of circumstances, comes to be desired by, and indeed married to, many men, in the course of her life — some of whom she inveigles into marriage on false pretences — who, when all else fails, resorts to an extraordinarily successful life of crime, pulling many ingenious heists until at last she is nabbed and faced with a real prospect of being hanged. Moll’s descriptions of the amorous inclinations of males are often very funny — and not the least part of the joke here, of course, is that Moll’s voice itself is actually the creation of a male.

Duration: 11 hr 52 min.  On Librivox

This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here rendered into prose by Samuel Butler, himself a major nineteenth century English novelist) is at once violently graphic, emotionally searing and, in 2024, at the time of my reading, strikingly contemporary in its understanding of the extremities to which rage may drive men, even as they understand full well that they are pursuing their own doom. Nearly three thousand years before the advent of cinema, the author(s) of The Iliad had already mastered many of the tropes the Hollywood blockbuster would later adopt, and so much of the form of this ancient masterpiece already feels oddly familiar. However, the depictions of physical and emotional violence at its heart retain their full power to shock us with their bleak, deeply disturbing truthfulness.

Duration: 14 hr 8 min.  On Librivox

I became interested in reading the novel after learning that a literary hero of mine, Gerald Murnane, described George Borrow as his favourite prose stylist. George Borrow was an eccentric self-taught English linguist, traveller and one-time bible salesman. This most unusual narrative combines elements of autobiography, fantasy and anti-Catholic polemic. We follow Borrow around the countryside of England, Scotland and Ireland — and, for a period, through the streets of London — as he grows from a young boy to a young man in the first decades of the nineteenth century, attracted to studying various languages, hoping but failing to make his mark as a writer and translator, and then later adopting the life of an itinerant tinker, all the while struggling with intermittent bouts of existential despair and terror. The two figures Borrow denotes as “scholar” and “priest” in his title figure only slightly in the tale, while even Mr Petulengro, a gypsy Borrow befriends, appears only intermittently.

Duration: 21 hr 48 min.  On Librivox

This is the last novel in Ford Madox Ford’s “Parade’s End” tetralogy. My own readings of its predecessors Some Do Not, No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up are all available on Librivox. In this coda to the tetralogy, the prevailing mood is elegiac. The foreground action takes place on a single day, some years after the Great War has ended, in the rural setting where Christopher Tietjens and his unmarried partner Valentine Wannop have settled down, and where Christopher’s older brother lies unmoving under a thatched shelter, having long since suffered a stroke. Valentine is expecting a child, but Christopher’s passionately irascible wife Sylvia has plans for upsetting this rural idyl. As always with Ford’s mature work, the reader has to do some work to figure out “what is going on” as the tale jumps about in time and between points view, but Ford’s display of narrative virtuosity is interlaced throughout with wry humour, and the novel’s conclusion is heart-wrenchingly poignant.

Duration: 6 hr 47 min.  On Librivox

It is a brave author indeed who gives his hero as many flaws as Stendhal bestows upon young Julien Sorel, an ambitious young carpenter’s son turned priest who secretly models his behaviour after the heroics of Napoleon, in an era when the great man had only recently died at St Helena, and French society has grown stultified (for all its still vivid memories of the Jacobins’ excesses and fear these may be revived). With remarkable skill, Stendhal manages as once to hold Julian’s character up to excoriating examination while leaving us with some measure of sympathy for his young hero as he romantically pursues, first, the wife of his local mayor, then the haughty young daughter of a nobleman who has employed him as a personal secretary. Combining penetrating psychological insights with scathing social satire, The Red and the Black is rightly regarded as one of the great classics of French literature.

Duration: 18 hr 48 min.  On Librivox

In an astounding act of literary improvisation, Stendhal dictated this complex and innovative novel, combining political and psychological realism with wit, irony and romance, in only 54 days. The result, which Henry James regarded as one of the dozen best novels of all time, feels in many ways like grand opera, an art form to which Stendhal himself was greatly attracted. The tale is set in northern Italy in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The plot revolves around Fabrizio del Dongo, an idealistic young nobleman, his aunt Gina Sanseverina (who loves Fabrizio more than perhaps she ought) and a large cast of other figures (many of them associated with the court at Parma) who have their own designs, romantic and otherwise, upon Fabrizio and his dazzling aunt. Note: Listeners who wish to avoid the spoilers in Balzac’s delightful but detailed introduction to this edition should begin listening at section 5.

Duration: 21 hr 43 min.  On Librivox

The imagination responsible for these remarkable stories, the third and final collection published in Mansfield’s lifetime, is clearly living with one foot firmly planted in this life, even if her other is already reaching tentatively across a gloomy chasm to the next. Unsurprisingly, given the perilous state of the young author’s health at the time Mansfield wrote them, many of these stories allude to that strange transformative process we call ‘death’. And yet — and this is really quite a miracle — their net effect is actually extraordinarily uplifting.

Duration: 5 hr 53 min.  On Librivox

“(N)ot to say that they are cheerful stories; they are anything but that; they have not, however, that element of trivial discomfort so dominant in modern fiction”, a critic wrote in the Spectator on the publication of this, the second of Mansfield’s collections of short stories in book form. There is a wide range of forms and subjects here. Some of these stories are bold, early forays into literary territory that Mansfield’s frenemy Virginia Woolf would later triumphantly stake out as her own. The adult male characters tend to be perversely wooden, the central female characters often verge on states of ecstasy or frank neuroticism, while ever present in the background are children, whose experiences are nearly always treated with great tenderness and sympathy.

Duration: 6 hr 32 min.  On Librivox

Katherine Mansfield was only 22 years old when these stories were first published in book form. Mansfield was later reluctant to see them republished, considering them, apparently, to be mere juvenilia, but they still make interesting listening as portents of a formidable talent. Only some of the stories relate to life in a German boarding house (one presumably similar to the location where Mansfield herself spent the early months of an probably unwelcome pregnancy that ended in miscarriage). Many of the stories display a wicked sense of humour, while Mansfield’s restiveness under the restrictions and expectations imposed on her as a woman is most palpable.

Duration: 3 hr 13 min.  On Librivox

In the time of Napoleon, a thoughtful and romantic young Russian officer finds himself asked to do something unthinkable. In 1868, a Polish boy of eight encounters a real life prince and finds him to be nothing like what he had imagined a prince to be. The captain of a British ship patrolling the North Sea during the Great War comes upon small craft from a neutral country whose captain denies giving aid to the enemy — but is he telling the truth? In the 1880s, an officer in a sailing ship with a very dark secret finds himself under the thumb of a nasty, opinionated captain who believes strongly in the possibility of communicating with the dead. Even at his most anecdotal, Conrad understood well how to hold an audience, and these four tales, collected in book form soon after his death, certainly do that.

Duration: 3 hr 20 min.  On Librivox

Possessed “of a passion weary of itself”, elderly ex-privateer Peyrol is driven by “a sudden impulse of scorn, of magnanimity” to engage in a mortally perilous exploit designed to trick Admiral Nelson into lifting his blockade of the French coast during the Napoleonic wars. The immediate backdrop of this tale’s action is an horrific, politically-driven massacre that took place in Toulon in 1793, and which has greatly affected the lives of the small community amongst whom Peyrol has subsequently settled in his retirement. It is probably not a co-incidence that this novel, Conrad’s last, was written soon after the Great War, in which Conrad’s own son Borys served as an artillery officer, including at the Somme. Conrad’s theme is the psychological disfigurement caused when we suffer, or inflict, great trauma, and the high price that must be paid thereafter to achieve any possible redemption.

Duration: 8 hr 29 min.  On Librivox

Conrad described the twenty-six essays collected in “Notes on Life and Letters” as a “one-man show” comprising “Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial”, but never Conrad “with his boots off”.

Not surprisingly, his essays on other authors provide key insights into his own ideas on the nature and goals of fiction writing, when treated as an art.

Conrad is particularly passionate here when writing on Russian autocracy, on Poland’s undervalued past and its hopes for the future, and on the self-serving blather of promoters loudly proclaiming that the sinking of the Titanic held no lessons for anyone but that the vessel should have had fewer lifeboats, and that her captain should have aimed to strike any iceberg head on. There are quieter, more tender recollections here too, including Conrad’s appreciation of Stephen Crane, whom Conrad knew personally and liked very much, and a moving account of his return to Poland after a long absence at the very moment the Great War was breaking out.

Duration: 8 hr 13 min.  On Librivox

In this engaging and well-crafted novella, an older man recalls how a combination of obscure personal impulses and diabolical co-incidences marked his own difficult passage as a young ship’s officer across that invisible “shadow line” that separates the last days of carefree youth from the taking up of full adult responsibilities.

Duration: 3 hr 51 min.  On Librivox

What a strange, dark tale is “Victory”, with its none-too-subtle allegorical tinge, and its queerly fetishistic villains, stepped straight out of a melodrama, seemingly. In the middle of it all, the hopelessly misunderstood European Axel Heyst, fled east to free himself from all associations with his nihilistic and embittered father, then linking his future to a much younger working class girl he hardly knows. Distrinct shades, surely, of Conrad’s own autobiography here. When the world comes knocking at the would-be isolate’s door, is there to be no escape?

Duration: 11 hr 56 min.  On Librivox

A self-important English philosopher and his haughty, beautiful daughter sail to the South Pacific in hope of locating the daughter’s wrongly accused fiancée and rehabilitating his reputation. An evasive silk planter who may have met the man in question has other plans, however, for the beautiful, if dangerously vapid, daughter. A patent medicine salesman goes into partnership with an honest but financially troubled ship owner. What could go possibly wrong? During the Napoleonic era, a young British naval officer has a terrifying encounter involving a bed in Spain in which an Archbishop has once slept. The kind-hearted captain of a small steamer in the Far East undertakes a voyage to collect silver dollars being withdrawn from circulation from various trading stations, but runs up against three vicious rogues, one without hands, who have their own ideas about where those dollars belong. Even the greatest authors have to pay their bills — and these four stories, originally published in magazines, would appear to show Conrad writing very much in a bill-paying frame of mind.

Duration: 6 hr 4 min.  On Librivox

“You are the expert in the psychological wilderness,” the nominal narrator of this engaging tale says at one point to Marlow, who in practice serves as this novel’s chief discoverer of hidden events, and commentator on the vagaries of human behaviour. In “Chance”, these are notable chiefly in the actions of various parties — some well-meaning, some blinded by their own lofty idealism, and others frankly exploitative — who in various ways meddle in the fate of Flora de Barral, an innocent young woman who just happens to be the only child of a fascinatingly bland and self-deluded fraudster who proves to be a very nasty piece of work indeed. Marlow’s ruminations on the actions of the various players whose paths cross Flora’s are always dry, and often very droll. ‘Chance’ was Conrad’s first truly popular novel, and even today it’s not hard to see why. This is Conrad at his most accessible.

Duration: 13 hr 31 min.  On Librivox

This is the third, and in many ways culminating, part of Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’ tetralogy of novels, which begins with ‘Some Do Not’, followed by ‘No More Parades’, and whose coda would be ‘Last Post’.

While ‘A Man Could Stand Up’ can be appreciated on its own, it will make far better sense to a listener or reader already familiar with its predecessors. It’s at once a war story (the middle section is set in the trenches in France, in 1918), a story of immense upheaval in social mores, and a passionate, if extraordinarily restrained, love story. Just like, say, Virginia Woofe’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’, published the previous year, Ford’s novel is pitched at readers who are assumed to be highly literate and well-educated.

Duration: 6 hr 58 min.  On Librivox

While the central figures in each of the three stories in this collection are sailing captains, the main action in two of them takes place on land, albeit in sight of the sea. In “A Smile of Fortune”, a naive young sea captain falls into grave moral peril when he locks horns with a wily ship chandler in Mauritius. In “The Secret Sharer”, a newly appointed sea captain is confronted with an altogether different kind of challenge when he attempts to haul in a rope ladder over his ship’s side one evening and finds it much heavier than usual. In “Freya of the Seven Isles”, Jasper Allen, the captain of a lovely little brig, floats on a cloud of love, expecting soon to marry Freya, the daughter of an East Indies plantation owner, and not taking seriously the pretentions of an older Dutch naval officer who sees himself as Jasper’s rival. The depth of psychological insight in these stories is variable, but each is a gripping and suspenseful example of Conrad’s magazine fiction in the years immediately preceding the Great War.

Duration: 6 hr 57 min.  On Librivox

“But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings.”

Set in St Petersburg and Geneva, this austere and claustrophobic psycho-political tragedy focusses on the terrible plight of Razumov, a bright young student without family ties whose chance to live his own life is snatched from him the moment a fellow student takes refuge in his room after helping assassinate a Russian statesman. Razumov’s profound sense of grief and bitterness at the cruel logic of his predicament may well reflect Conrad’s own reaction to having his childhood and early teen years stolen from him, cruelly subsumed by the disastrous consequences of his Polish parents’ resistance to Russian brutality and domination.

Duration: 11 hr 16 min.  On Librivox

Each of the stories in this collection is spun from a simple, if typically wry and bleak, idea. In “Gaspar Ruiz”, a South American general who has fought in a war of independence tells his guests a long tale about a notorious strong man that explains the origin of his current domestic arrangements. “The Informer” leads the reader into the depths of a political conspiracy, dealing very slyly indeed with questions of truth and pretence. In “The Brute”, we are asked whether we can believe there could be such a thing as a positively malevolent ship, while “An Anarchist” introduces us to an unfortunate man who has had a vision of society itself as malevolent and has not been able to rest in peace ever since. “The Duel”, the most obviously likeable tale in this collection, recounts the history of an unfortunate feud between two officers of Napoleon’s army that caused them to fight a series of duels over many years. “Il Conde” rounds out the collection, giving a new twist to the saying “See Naples and die”.

Duration: 8 hr 22 min.  On Librivox

“Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to know.”

In this volume of essays, more than in any other single work, we get to see clearly just what Joseph Conrad’s years working on sail-powered ships meant to him — and they certainly meant a great deal to him, for all Conrad’s subsequent fretting that he might be typed as “only” a writer of the sea. This collection is particularly renowned for the lengthy episode titled “The Tremolino”, where Conrad gives us, in the character of the real-world Dominic, the model of his fictional Nostromo, as well as an account of personalities and gun-running activities he would later depict in “The Arrow of Gold”.

Duration: 6 hr 5 min.  On Librivox

An impossibly imperturbable old sea captain, with two hundred Chinese labourers aboard his steamship, faces a terrifying typhoon for the first time in his life. When emigré Austrian peasant Yanko is washed up on an English beach, he encounters widespread hostility from the local people on account of his foreign ways, and only in time earns a meagre measure of grudging respect. Captain Falk — seemingly half man, half tug boat – desperately loves a shapely young woman, but standing in the way of any possible match is a most delicate question indeed. A young woman compelled to care for her blind father caringly refrains, over a period of years, from disillusioning crusty old Captain Hagberd, her landlord and immediate neighbour, when he maintains adamantly that his long-lost son, a sailor, will return imminently, and will naturally want to marry her. Conrad’s short fiction is often lighter than his novels. With the exception of Yanko’s tale (“Amy Foster”), these beautifully crafted, eminently readable stories tend to strike a sardonic, rather than a tragic, note.

Duration: 8 hr 11 min.  On Librivox

This short tale was first published in book form alongside ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, the three tales representing youth, middle age and old age, respectively. One of Conrad’s ‘Marlow yarns’, the story is based on the trouble-plagued, much-delayed and ultimately ill-fated voyage of the cargo vessel ‘Palestine’ (here, ‘Judea’) carrying coal from England to Bangkok in 1882-1883, on which Conrad served his first posting as second mate. The story is notable (and somewhat unusual, for Conrad) in the light-hearted buoyancy of the narrator’s tone as he confronts difficulty after difficulty.

Duration: 1 hr 18 min.  On Librivox

While it’s not often described as such, “Lord Jim” can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which develops between an older and worldly-wise sea captain, Marlow, and a deeply troubled young sailor called Jim who, in the opening phase of the story, commits an act of reprehensible cowardice for which he is publicly shamed. While the novel’s nominal focus rests squarely on Jim and his subsequent attempts to rebuild a sense of self-worth through his involvement in the life of a jungle community, we hear most of Jim’s tale from the mouth of Marlow, who watches Jim’s progress with the loving and respectful concern of a father overseeing the moral development of a wayward son. It’s worth noting that the story of the fictional SS Patna, retold here, is closely based on true events.

Duration: 12 hr 51 min.  On Librivox

A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer’s wife is determined to bear no more. A spoonful of sugar brings a neophyte ivory trader to a moment of Nietzschean self-realisation. A pompous ass discovers that his wife has run off with another man. Secluded in an eerie lagoon, a Malay carries a guilty secret in his heart. “Tales of Unrest” was the first volume of short fiction Joseph Conrad published in his own lifetime. While some of these tales evoke the settings of Conrad’s earliest novels, others clearly anticipate elements of Conrad’s subsequent masterworks “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Agent”.

Duration: 6 hr 35 min.  On Librivox

Today, we’re likely to react to the title of this novella, on whose ‘sincerity of expression’ Conrad was willing to stake his artisitic reputation, with visceral disgust. There is a sad irony in this, for Conrad’s title originally alluded to a rather complex set of meanings, implying that, by virtue of our human nature, we all carry within the fragile vessel that is our idealised image of ourselves a darker being we find troubling, even despicable, but with whom we must eventually come to terms. Indeed, in the couse of this tale of a traumatic sea voyage from Bombay to London, Conrad suggests that in projecting their loathing of their own ambivalent feelings onto their (possibly dying) black shipmate James Wait, the crew of the Narcissus have considerable difficulty seeing the real James Wait behind their confused emotional reactions at all. The novella is remarkable for its knitting together of a stunningly well-realised physical drama involving an imperilled ship with a most discomforting psychodrama that draws in all twenty-six men who sail her.

Duration: 5 hr 48 min.  On Librivox

How Conrad struggled to write this book! In the Author’s Note eventually published with the novel, Conrad said that having laid it aside (around 1897) in order to write The Nigger of the Narcissus, the reason he did not return immediately to The Rescue was not that he “had grown afraid of it”, but rather than he had decided it could wait while he completed some other projects he had in mind. The truth, though, seems to have been more complicated. Conrad’s biographer Karl Fredericks states Conrad was in some way or another working on The Rescue for 23 of the 29 years of his writing career.

I had not read this work before recording it for Librivox, and I have to admit I found it confusing and disappointing overall, though in any Conrad novel there are always going to be some marvellous passages. I feel such a sense of personal affinity with Conrad I’m prepared to read anything he wrote. If you’re in the same small club you’ll probably want to listen to The Rescue, too. I think it’s fair to say, however, that it’s not Conrad at his best.

Duration: 14 hr 8 min.  On Librivox

F.R. Leavis famously quibbled “Is anything added to the impressive mysteriousness of the Congo by such sentences as It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention?” (F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, p 177) Novelist Chinua Achebe took a different line of attack, describing Conrad in an essay as “a thorough-going racist”, and asking “whether a novel… which celebrates this dehumanization (ie, of Africans), which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art”, before concluding “No, it cannot.” (Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad ‘s Heart of Darkness).

If, as I hope you do, you one day read, or listen to, Heart of Darkness, you’re more than likely going to find yourself faced with exactly these questions yourself. I myself find this novella (it’s less that 40,000 words long) as mesmeric and sombre as a great requiem mass, even in the face of such criticisms as Leavis and Achebe have raised.

Duration: 4 hr 3 min.  On Librivox

I’ve never quite forgiven the publishers of a Penguin volume in which this novella appeared for giving away a key plot point on the back cover of their book. I’m not about to commit the same error here! If you’re not already aware of what this story is ‘about’, you’ll find out soon enough, but I suggest you steer clear of spoilers in the meantime.

I love this tale for the way in which Conrad seems, for a rare moment, to have been able to shrug off the coat of bleak pessimism that was his habitual garb to tell a tale of great poignancy that does, nonetheless, feel broadly consistent with his generally grim philosophy of life.

I am rarely moved to actual tears reading Conrad, but I am when reading The End of the Tether. For me it doesn’t hurt, either, that the central character’s daughter has settled in Melbourne, Australia, which is my own home town.

Duration: 5 hr 16 min.  On Librivox

The oddest things can nudge one to pick up a book. I was moved to dip into this remarkable work after coming across a passage in Ford Madox Ford’s remembrance of Joseph Conrad to the effect that Conrad physically wrote The End of the Tether “before the glass bookshelves that had seen Carlyle write ‘The French Revolution’”.

On looking into the text itself, I was immediately struck by Carlyle’s love of grand, rolling phrases that just cried out to be read aloud.

Her Majesty, who looks unusually sad tonight (his Majesty sitting dulled with the day’s hunting), is told that the sight of it would cheer her. Behold! She enters there, issuing from her State-rooms, like the Moon from the clouds, this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts; royal Husband by her side, young Dauphin in her arms! She descends from the Boxes, amid splendour and acclaim; walks queen-like, round the Tables; gracefully escorted, gracefully nodding; her looks full of sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of France on her mother-bosom! And now, the band striking up, O Richard, O mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne (O Richard, O my King, and world is all forsaking thee) — could man do other than rise to height of pity, of loyal valour? Could featherheaded young ensigns do other than, by white Bourbon Cockades, handed them from fair fingers; by waving of swords, drawn to pledge the Queen’s health; by trampling of National Cockades; by scaling the Boxes, whence intrusive murmurs may come; by vociferation, tripudiation, sound, fury and distraction, within doors and without — testify what tempest-tost state of vacuity they are in? Till champagne and tripudiation do their work; and all lie silent, horizontal; passively slumbering, with meed-of-battle dreams!

Tripudiation? Just one of many words in Carlyle’s rich vocabulary I had never encountered before. And then, of course, the plot’s not bad either!

In an audiobook, the listener doesn’t get the scholarly apparatus of citations and index to be found in the text version, but for the most part the story comes alive well once the listener gets attuned to Carlyle’s rather idiosyncratic way of narrating his tale.

They don’t write history like this any more, and it’s rather a pity. Particularly surprising to me were Carlyle’s generally sympathetic treatment of the Jacobins, and his refusal to be overawed by the horrors of the Terror.

Duration Vol 1 The Bastille: 11 hr 9 min.  On Librivox
Duration Vol 2 The Constitution: 12 hr 6 min.  On Librivox
Duration Vol 3 The Guillotine: 12 hr 44 min.  On Librivox

Conrad biographer Maya Jasanoff admitted she “failed spectacularly to read Nostromo the first time.” As a far less well-educated reader than Dr Jasanoff, I can recall that when I first read Nostromo in my thirties, I balked at Conrad’s insistence on alluding darkly to ‘material interests’, and to much other seemingly irrelevant matter (as I thought), much preferring that he would get on with what I hoped would emerge as ‘the story’. It was only after returning to this novel decades later that I really began to appreciate its riches, and to understand that these are not riches of plot, per se.

If this is your own first encounter with Nostromo, I suggest you be gentle with yourself. Much of the beauty of the novel becomes apparent only when one can read the individual parts against an understanding of the overall design. You almost certainly won’t read this novel twice in a year, but I’d suggest it is well worth reading (or listening to) at least twice in a lifetime.

Duration: 18 hr 1 min.  On Librivox

To me, it was a no-brainer that I would want to read this for Librivox once I had read Some Do Not…

Although Ford was ultimately to write four inter-related novels about the Tietjens and their associates set immediately before, during and after World War I, this was not his plan at the outset, and the four novels are not — to my eye, anyway — stylistically identical, although each deals powerfully with mental states of dissociation and hysteria, and thus to some extent invite comparison with the passages about Septimus and Rezia in Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway, which, incidentally, was published in the same year (1925).

Many aspects of Ford’s picture of life in the British army in France may strike the modern listener as bizarre, but it’s worth recalling that Ford himself did live through military experiences very similar to those described here, so he presumably knew what he was writing about. Indeed, contemporary critics generally praised the way Ford had captured the crazy essence of the experience of many soldiers in this novel.

Duration: 8 hr 26 min.  On Librivox

Despite this novel’s title and its date of publication (1915), it’s not really about soldiering at all.

In a sense, the narrative is one long game, as Ford challenges us to read between the lines and figure out what his narrator, John Dowell, either genuinely does not understand, or pretends not to understand, about the love intrigues that are going on right under his (apparently very obtuse) nose.

After Librivox published this audiobook, I was contacted by someone who had taken on the challenge of translating this work into Arabic, and who was hoping I might be able to tease out the meaning of some of the more difficult passages. As our correspondence developed, I began to appreciate better just how densely packed with (difficult-to-translate) meanings and allusions many of Ford’s paragraphs are, often with very witty, though dark, effect.

All up, the novel constitutes a ferociously funny (well, I think it’s funny) and bitter attack on the institution of the “British stiff upper lip”.

Duration: 7 hr 35 min.  On Librivox

I had never previously read this late work of Conrad’s, but was moved to record it when I noticed it was not in the Librivox catalogue.

According to one Conrad biographer, E.M. Forster’s mother felt the work should have been titled The Arrow of Lead (The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff, p. 305). A reviewer in Nation remarked that “Ortega and the sinister pietist, Teresa Rita’s sister… are both horribly well done and stand out in an incisive terror” but concluded that these are “a tenuous compensation for a book in which genius itself seems to become insubstantial” (Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, Frederick R Karl, p. 826).

So no, perhaps this is not Conrad at his best — but it’s still Conrad, and that’s good enough for a diehard fan like me.

Duration: 11 hr 14 min.  On Librivox

When I first read this novel as a young man, I remember being disappointed that it turned out not to be much about spying, and that so many of the characters seemed awfully seedy. On listening to the collaborative reading on Librivox (the first audiobook Librivox ever released), I was gobsmacked that I had missed so much, and was struck by Conrad’s ability to milk every ounce of pathos and bitter irony from a succession of well-sustained dramatic scenes.

Believing (mistakenly, as it turned out) that there was no solo reading of this work already in the Librivox catalogue, I decided to record one of my own — only to find Cori Samuel’s wonderful reading after I had begun. By then, though, I had discovered how much pleasure I could get from reading the work of a great writer out loud, and there could be no turning back.

Duration: 10 hr 14 min.  On Librivox