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.)

Joseph Con­rad would be turn­ing 150 years old, and to mark the occa­sion, The Guardian has tak­en a good look back at the Pol­ish-born writer who wrote some of Eng­land’s finest nov­els, even though Eng­lish was his third lan­guage. (Pol­ish and French were his first two.) Con­rad’s mas­ter­piece, of course, is The Heart of Dark­ness (1899), and we’ll take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to high­light two free audio­book ver­sions of the text. The first ver­sion comes rec­om­mend­ed by a read­er over at Metafil­ter. You can find the mp3 files here. A second/different ver­sion can be found on iTunes. (Both ver­sions per­ma­nent­ly reside in our Audio­book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.)

iTunes is serv­ing up a free­bie for audio­book fans. Writ­ten by Brad Meltzer, The Mil­lion­aires runs close to 15 hours. Pub­lish­ers Week­ly calls it “a fast-paced, fresh-scrubbed tale of finan­cial adven­ture.” Down­load it here, and check out our larg­er col­lec­tion of free audio­book pod­casts. (Source: Boing Boing)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Newsweek’s piece on Jeff Bezos’ plans to rein­vent the future of read­ing.

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This is just a quick note to let you know that we “re-orged” the Audio­book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion. The list, which had become a bit unwieldy, is now bro­ken down by genre: Literature/Fiction, Non­fic­tion, and Poet­ry. And, with­in these cat­e­gories, the texts are orga­nized by the author’s name. Hope­ful­ly this all makes the col­lec­tion eas­i­er to use. Check it out.

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Here’s a quick old time radio treat: Way back when, some­where in the gold­en days, the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater aired a dra­mat­ic radio broad­cast of three Edgar Allan Poe sto­ries, includ­ing the “The Cask of Amon­til­la­do,” “The Fall of the House of Ush­er,” and “Nosol­o­gy.” Have a lis­ten. (Source)
If vin­tage radio is your thing, then also see these relat­ed Open Cul­ture posts:

• The War of the Worlds on Pod­cast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riv­et­ed A Nation
• Vin­tage Radio Archive: The Lone Ranger, Abbott & Costel­lo, and Bob Hope
• New Sci­Fi and Hor­ror Pod­casts
• Audio­book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion