New Reviews: Classics

The Queen, the Duchess, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter. Award-winning voice actor Barbara Rosenblat leads an able cast in giving proper nineteenth-century accents and voices to all our favorite iconic characters from one of the most beloved children's classics in the English language. Energetic newcomer Georgia Lee Schultz provides Alice with an updated and nicely... Read More

This audiobook is not only a portrait of a way of life on the edge of extinction. Thesiger is also one of the main sources that author Frank Herbert used in creating his classic novel, DUNE. Laurence Kennedy narrates the story of Thesiger's experiences with the Bedouin of Arabia like a man reminiscing about the best times of his life. He conveys the wit and wonder of an... Read More

Such a miraculously good new audio version of this great novel is cause for hats in the air. BLEAK HOUSE is particularly rich in the verbose minor characters Dickens's newly literate audience loved. Margolyes makes them so various and so funny that you'll relish every syllable. The pompous vanity of her Mr. Turveydrop is delicious, and the nasal horror of the succubus lawyer... Read More

This new prose translation of the Iranian national epic is read, as Francis Ford Coppola says in his introduction, with the right amount of excess. Ferdowsi's classic is full of battles, love, revenge, grief, piety, and more, and narrator Marc Thompson plays it to the hilt. Even though this version omits the historical age (the last third of the work), what we get moves from... Read More

This is a classic ripe for audiobook form. With an eccentric cast of characters and a fast-paced plot, the novel offers a delightful challenge for the narrator. Tristam Summers proves up to the task. Articulate and enthusiastic, he keeps the listener engaged. Summers highlights the humor of the novel's dialogue. His vocal characterizations are especially amusing in the... Read More

Sir Walter Scott's first historical novel takes place during the Jacobite Uprising of 1745. Young Englishman Edward Waverly goes to Scotland in the army but becomes intrigued by the Highlanders' cause and eventually changes his support from the Hanoverians to the Jacobites. David Rintoul's narration gives a natural cadence to Scott's prose. His clear, deep voice emphasizes the... Read More