Christmas Audio Tales: Orson Welles’ Christmas Carol (and More)

Let me serve up a quick few bits of audio for the holiday.

Let’s start with a free podcast of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Written in 1843, Dicken’s tale remains one of the most popular Christmas stories of all time. It gave us the indelible characters of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. And it invented the notion of “christmas spirit.”

You can listen to a fairly straightforward reading of the text on iTunes. But you may want to spend your time with this 1939 radio presentation staged by Orson Welles, which notably features Lionel Barrymore. (Or you can listen to Welles’ 1938 version here.)

Also, over at BoingBoing today, Cory Doctorow has posted a recording he made of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (etext here). You can download it in mp3 or other formats. I’ve also added Doctorow’s reading to our AudioBook Podcast Collection, where you can find an alternative reading of Carroll’s work, plus 100 other classic works on free audio. (For our complete collection of enriching podcasts, see our Podcast Library.)