Each month ChristianAudio offers one of their audio books for free afterwhich they go back to the regular price. This month the free book is G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Add the audiobook to your cart and then just enter the coupon code “APR2008″ to receive this book completely free.

From the site:

All that G. K. Chesterton’s critics and comrades labeled him - devotional, impious, confounding, intelligent, humorous, bombastic - he wove into The Man Who Was Thursday. This page-turner sends characters bobbing around a delightfully confusing plot of mythic proportions. There are so many twists and turns that soon you’ll be tangled in a story that you cannot put down…even if you’re not entirely sure why!

The Man Who Was Thursday begins when two poets meet. Gabriel Syme is a poet of law. Lucian Gregory is a poetic anarchist. As the poets protest their respective philosophies, they strike a challenge. In the ruckus that ensues the Central European Council of Anarchists elects Syme to the post of Thursday, one of their seven chief council positions. Undercover. On the run. Syme meets Sunday, the head of the council, a man so outrageously mysterious that his antics confound both the law-abiding and the anarchist. Who is lawful? Who is immoral? Such questions are strangely unanswerable in the presence of Sunday. He is wholly other. He is above the timeless questions of humanity and also somehow behind them.

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was born in London. He matured into one of the great journalists, philosophers, novelists, and personalities of the twentieth century. Chesterton offered inspiration to many others, including his fellow Brit C. S. Lewis. His much-loved works include The Everlasting Man, Saint Francis of Assisi, Orthodoxy, and the Father Brown series of mystery novels.

Great Books Audio has begun podcasting The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am sure I am not alone in not having read the story even though I am familiar with the characters. I look forward to finally getting a chance to ‘read’ the complete story.

According to Wikipedia, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a novella written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and first published in 1886. It is about a London lawyer who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the misanthropic Edward Hyde. The work is known for its vivid portrayal of the psychopathology of a split personality; in mainstream culture the very phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has come to mean a person who may show a distinctly different character, or profoundly different behavior, from one situation to the next, as if almost another person. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was an immediate success and one of Stevenson’s best-selling works. Stage adaptations began in Boston and London within a year of its publication and it has gone on to inspire scores of major film and stage performances.

I have listened to the first installment and cannot wait to hear the remaining chapters as they are published. Go check it out over at Great Books Audio.

Some heroines will steal your heart…
This one will steal your wallet

What happens when a con-artist gets herself stranded in a distant galaxy after hijacking a space ship from an alien doing a human survey mission? Christiana Ellis just finished putting the 10th and last episode of this hilarious and very original sci-fi comedy audiodrama, Space Casey, online. The production quality is superb with great sound effects, music, and an all-star cast of voice talents.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this great story.

Title: Space Casey
Author: Christiana Ellis
Published: November 2007 - February 2008
Length: 10 episodes, Approximately 4 hours
License: Non-Commercial, Share and Share Alike, Creative Commons license
Website: http://www.SpaceCasey.com
Podcasts: http://www.spacecasey.com/?feed=podcast

LiteralSystems publishes classic literary works as free mp3 audio books under the Creative Commons License. What sets there recordings apart from others is that they utilize paid performers to create the recordings. Due to the cost of using paid help the selection is limited but the recordings are all of the highest quality.

I like what the site admin says about why he uses paid performers:

On average an hour long audio book requires about four or five hours of work on the part of the actor to make it good. Consider, during the recording stage, the actors also have to deal with the director (yours truly) calling “…one more time.” from the next room; this process tends to be more work than most volunteers want to put in. But, because the director (yours truly) likes the results better, in the last two years, in this fashion, we have moved largely away from working with volunteer performers to a paid performers situation.

Below is a list of the titles that are currently available:

• The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
• An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
• The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood
• Excerpt from Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Upper Berth by Francis Marion Crawford
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Briar Rose by the Brothers Grimm
• Travelling Musicians, The by the Brothers Grimm
• donaco de la Magoj, la by O Henry
• The Gift of the Magi by O Henry
• The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs
• The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling
• Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling
• Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling
• To Build A Fire by Jack London
• The Heathen by Jack London
• Saves You Time by Kendall McCook
• The Highwayman by Alfred Noyez
• The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar A. Poe
• Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• On the Decay of the Art of Lying by Mark Twain
• 2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The Red Room by H.G.Wells
• The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde