La vie décousue

I hope you enjoyed Cutler’s Stor­ies of King Arthur and His Knights. I do love those Arthur­ian legends…

I recently dis­covered the Urban Fantasy genre, and have got­ten hooked. In the last month, I have read all of Char­laine Har­ris’ South­ern Vam­pire series, Patri­cia Briggs’ Mer­cedes Thompson and Alpha and Omega series, Lynn Viehl’s Darkyn series, Alyson Noel’s Immor­tals series (not recom­men­ded), and Lori Han­deland’s Phoenix Chron­icles (not recom­men­ded). If you haven’t figured it out, I read fast (when I’m not read­ing aloud). I think I’ve been aver­aging around 2 or 3 books a day (I’ve also been tak­ing a break from work). Any­way, in keep­ing with this theme, I will be record­ing Théo­phile Gau­tier’s Clar­i­monde, aka La Morte Amoureuse. The links con­tain major spoil­ers, so if you haven’t heard or read the story before, I sug­gest wait­ing

Record­ings of the KJV bible con­tinue. I am sure that I am mis-pronouncing many of the names, so please for­give me for that. If any­one can point me to a web page with pro­noun­ci­ations of Bib­lical names and places, that would be fant­astic. Just a reminder for those of you who like to keep the record­ings — I highly recom­mend down­load­ing them from Lib­rivox cata­logue. The record­ings I provide on this site are my first drafts, provided for those of you who can’t wait. Once each book is com­pleted, they are checked and any errors are fixed before Lib­rivox cata­logues them.

I haven’t decided yet what I will do after Clar­i­monde. It’s prob­ably time to do some­thing reli­gious, but I’m not sure whether I should do some­thing easy to read like an Andrew Mur­ray work, or some­thing meatier.

Well, I’ve returned from Manila, and as you’ve prob­ably noticed, I wasn’t able to do any blog­ging whilst away. I actu­ally had inter­net access, but I just didn’t have the words to express what was going on over there. It was an amaz­ing, amaz­ing, amaz­ing trip, and it’s a bit of a downer hav­ing to return to nor­mal daily life again At any rate, pod­cast­ing should resume shortly.

I’m sorry for the sparse post­ing recently. I’ve been extremely busy lately. In a few hours I will be fly­ing to Manila for the week, so don’t expect any pod­casts from me until I get back I’m hop­ing to blog about my trip while I’m there, but I’m not sure what my inter­net access will be like. I should be able to get back into record­ing when I return. À bientôt!

Well, 1 Samuel is done, and we’re on to 2 Samuel now. I’m hop­ing to record all the his­tory books of the bible first, before mov­ing on to the minor proph­ets, then the major prophets.

I haven’t men­tioned it pre­vi­ously, but the major­ity of record­ings I post on this site are hot of the press, and haven’t been checked in any way. When a pro­ject is com­pleted, all the files are proof-listened and edited as needed, before being cata­logued at Lib­rivox. If you have down­loaded files from here with errors in them, it’s worth re-downloading them when a pro­ject is com­pleted, or get­ting them from the Inter­net Archive. I update the files on my server when they are fixed, but I gen­er­ally don’t bother cre­at­ing another post for them. Of course, if you’d like to help with check­ing my files, just head over to the Lib­rivox. There are many tasks you can help out with even if you don’t want to do any record­ings yourself.

Now, on to excit­ing new things… I have decided to start post­ing book reviews on this site. There will be a vari­etyof old and new, fic­tion and non-fiction books — basic­ally whatever I feel like read­ing, and I read a lot. I have been want­ing to do this since the incep­tion of this site, but never got around to start­ing. Every time I have read a book that I’d like to review, I have ended up being too lazy to actu­ally write any­thing. In an attempt to stop pre­var­ic­at­ing, I am announ­cing my inten­tions here today I don’t think any­thing will ever replace the pod­casts being the primary focus here, but I’d like to have more text around the place as well.

We’ve fin­ished “With Christ in the School of Prayer”, and I hope it’s inspired and encour­aged you. It’s worth read­ing or listen­in­ing to over and over again. Any time you are feel­ing inef­fec­tual or tired in your pray­ers, I sug­gest hav­ing another look at that book.

Lib­rivox now wants files in mono sound (I don’t really know why) so future record­ings will no longer be in ste­reo. For speech, it prob­ably won’t make much dif­fer­ence to listen­ers any­way. I have a few chapters that I’ve already recor­ded in ste­reo, but after that record­ings will be in mono.

Com­ing up next is “The Song of Roland”, an ancient French poem, full of decep­tion, hon­our, bravery, hatred and love. I’ve always loved it, though I don’t think I can really do it justice. Fol­low­ing on from that, I will be return­ing to Arthur­ian tales, with U. Waldo Cutler’s retell­ing of the stories.

Finally, I am announ­cing a pro­ject that many of you have asked me for: The Bible. A num­ber of people have been record­ing the vari­ous pub­lic domain ver­sions of the bible over at Lib­rivox, and I felt that there wasn’t really any need for me to do it as well. How­ever, after that last chapter on George Muller, where he men­tions the real­ity that many Chris­ti­ans do not know the bible well enough to even know the basic fun­da­ment­als of their faith, pre­fer­ring to read the words of other men, I decided to do it.

If the reader under­stands very little of the word of God, he ought to read it very much; for the Spirit explains the word by the word. And if he enjoys the read­ing of the word little, that is just the reason why he should read it much; for the fre­quent read­ing of the Scrip­tures cre­ates a delight in them, so that the more we read them, the more we desire to do so.

I don’t under­stand why read­ing the bible is seen as a daunt­ing task, so if I can encour­age oth­ers to read it more by record­ing it, that’s what I will do. I am start­ing with the King James Ver­sion, because it hasn’t been com­pletely recor­ded at Lib­rivox yet. When that is done, I’d like to move on to other ver­sions, but let’s focus on 1 ver­sion, 1 book at a time I’ll be start­ing with 1 Samuel (them mov­ing on to 2 Samuel) for no par­tic­u­lar reason, apart from the fact that I love Samuel. His story is excit­ing, encour­aging and inter­est­ing, so I hope even those of you who don’t like the Old Test­a­ment, or the bible in gen­eral, will listen and enjoy it. I don’t know what fre­quency I will be releas­ing chapters. If I only released one a day, it would take a few years to fin­ish the bible. Many of the chapters are only a few minutes long any­way, so hope­fully I will be releas­ing a few chapters a day.

The death toll from the Vic­torian bush­fires has now risen to 173, and con­tin­ues to climb. Numer­ous fires are still burn­ing. Again, I urge you to sup­port the Red Cross Appeal. Donate blood, if you can. Thou­sands of people have lost their homes. Many people are in hos­pital with ser­i­ous injur­ies — some of these will wake up to dis­cover they have lost their fam­il­ies and their homes. Pray for these sur­viv­ors. I can’t ima­gine the pain and hope­less­ness they must feel.

The worst bush­fires in Aus­tralian his­tory occurred over the week­end. So far, 750 homes have been des­troyed, and 108 people have been con­firmed dead, though the num­bers are expec­ted to rise. Some small towns were com­pletely wiped out. My heart goes out to those who have lost loved ones, and those who have lost their homes and all their pos­ses­sions. I urge you to give whatever sup­port you can. You can donate to the Aus­tralian Red Cross Vic­torian Bush­fires Appeal here.

Well, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I com­pletely failed in my attempt to offer a post a day dur­ing Advent. Some things came up, and I haven’t been able to do any record­ings since my last post. Well, it’s a new year now, so I’ll try to do bet­ter from now on! Thank you for all your sup­port over the past year, and I hope I’ll be able to record many more books for you this year. Happy New Year!

As you have prob­ably seen, I missed yesterday’s and today’s record­ings. My apo­lo­gies! I will try to catch up by mul­tiple posts over the next couple of days.

RSS feeds are back, and lis­ted here. You can now sub­scribe to the whole site, just the com­ments, a single author, or a spe­cific book. Not all the feeds have been cre­ated yet, but they will be added over the next few days.