The Golden Compass, Project Gutenberg

[asterroc]

I just finished the audiobook of The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. I wanted to read it for a while after sclerotic_rings and others told me to, but never got around to it. Then I saw they're making a movie of it with Nicle Kidman as Ms. Coulter. So when I saw an audiobook of it at a B&N, I grabbed it up. It's a short one, only 9 CDs total, unabridged, and it's narrated by the author with a cast doing the characters, which is unusual but interesting. It's definitely a young adult work, but there are elements of particle physics and ideas from quantum mechanics that I was shocked and delighted to find in such a book. It's worth reading.

And then it ended. At only 9 CDs and a 1:15 commute, that's around a week to finish the book.

So T$ reminded me of Project Gutenberg - a project to make all public domain literature freely available on the web. There are two sections or lists that I will find useful in the future and therefore wish to draw your attention to: the list of all Sci-Fi, and the lists of all audio works (broken down into sub-categories of human read and computer read).

I've also been wanting to read Beowulf, so that's currently downloading from Gutenberg while The Subtle Knife (sequel to the Golden Compass) is also dowloading via iTunes. Hooray for more bandwidth hogging! ^_^ Next task: burn as mp3's to CDs to play in my car.

Comments

[framefolly.livejournal.com]

Leave it to you to find the best places to hang on the web!

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

i personally like The Subtle Knife the best of all three. it's been a while since i've read them though. my roommate has them, maybe i could reread them and then we can talk about them!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I have to say I was quite delighted by the bits of physics that Pullman worked in. I find it intriguing that someone with no physics background at all would make that a significant part of the plot to the series, and learning through Wikipedia that he's a member of the British Humanist Association makes me even more intrigued about his choice to build a society where physics is theology.

I'm not far through The Subtle Knife, but I did read the full Wikipedia summaries of all three books a while ago, so don't worry too much about spoilers. :-P

[ayashi.livejournal.com]

I am about halfway through Golden Compass and really enjoying it so far :)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

How does the writing style seem to you? I enjoyed it too, but it seemed more young adult or teen fantasy than adult, and I'm curious if that is really how it was, or if that was an impression based upon the narration and voice actors. Everyone who'd recommended it me are people who read adult SF/Fantasy, so I wasn't expecting it to have a young adult feel to it.

And how long is it (how many pages) in the print version? I'm curious how # of pages corresponds to # of CDs.

[ayashi.livejournal.com]

When I read it I don't really get the impression that it is written for young people, but I definitely can feel the main character's "youngness" coming out - so for me it seems that it is more the character than the writing style, but I'm not sure :) Then again, the book was first suggested to me in either 8th or 9th grade - and then again, my friend who recommended it was already reading what I would call "adult fantasy" at the time. So I don't know!

It's 351 pages long! Part 1 is page 1-140, Part 2 is 141-265, and then the rest!

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Check out http://www.librivox.org . They have some nifty things going on there if you like audiobooks and you like PG. Librivox enabled me to finally make a complete first pass at "The Waste Land". Every time I tried to read it, I got stalled by the complexity of the allusions.

Looking at the PG audiobooks page, I see that they're doing some project in collaboration with Librivox. So you may already know about it.

But I'd say that it's probably been about ten years since I first discovered Project Gutenberg. It's probably the best thing on the entire Internet.