Classics Read Aloud

I am currently walking 162 miles of the Camino de Santiago with my family. While on this pilgrimage, I am republishing some of my favorites from the archives. Willa Cather’s “Double Birthday” was the very first reading I published on Substack. If you missed these stories the first time around, now is a great time to listen or explore the archives on your own (searchable by date recorded , by autho...

The World Cup is making its way across the United States this summer, and with it, there is a newfound international appreciation for all things American. While the mass media is fond of highlighting the broad European fascination, nay, envy, of our humming temperature-controlled interiors; our giant Buckee’s, Wal-Marts, and refrigerated meat departments; and our ubiquitous “ranch sauce,” I hope t...

I am currently walking 162 miles of the Camino de Santiago with my family. While on this pilgrimage, I am republishing some of my favorites from the archives. Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” released in September of last year, remains one of my most popular recordings. If you missed these stories the first time around, now is a great time to listen or explore the archives on your own (searcha...

“The thought that some day—perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not five—all this world would be taken away from him, before he had exhausted his powers of loving it, seemed to him in the nature of an injustice brooding over his horizon. If anything came after this life, it wouldn’t be what he wanted; not Robin Hill, and flowers and birds and pretty faces—too few, even now, of those about him!” In...

“The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to branch.” Sarah Orne Jewett is one of those great American writers who enjoyed bro...

“The notion of being the one member of his family with a country house weighed but little with him; for to a true Forsyte, sentiment, even the sentiment of social position, was a luxury only to be indulged in after his appetite for more material pleasure had been satisfied.” What is in a name? Well, if the name is Forsyte, very much indeed. The Forsytes, a fictional upper-middle-class family in Vi...

“Rip Van Winkle was one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.” Rip Van Winkle is one of those characters whom everyone feels they have heard of, many could identify why, few could delve into any particulars, and near...

“The valley was mine, really mine; I had conquered it with my legs, and I was the real landlord by right of friendship.” Today, I invite you to remember springtime in your youth. Go back to that enchanted period, filled with an abundance of nature’s delights. Perhaps you remember rushing outside to roll down grassy hills, or rubbing yellow dandelions on your skin, painting it with the sun… Eventua...

“If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” On New Year’s Day, 1897, the writer Stephen Crane joined the crew of the SS Commodore at a dock in Jacksonville, Florida. Traveling as a journalist tasked with documenting the insurrection...

“I ain’t attempting to decry the celebrated moral aspect of parental affection, but we’re dealing with humans, and it ain’t human for anybody to give up two thousand dollars for that forty-pound chunk of freckled wildcat.” In a memorable episode of the hit PBS Masterpiece show Downton Abbey , Lord Grantham’s valet, Bates, leverages a rather ungentlemanly skill to save not only the day, but also th...

Untold volumes have been written about T. S. Eliot’s seminal work, “The Waste Land.” For over 100 years now, scholars and enthusiasts have mined the poem’s 434 lines for literary and historical allusions, biographical clues, and coded phrases, all in the noble pursuit of unlocking the work’s brilliance. Ironically, the intensity of analysis was perhaps originally triggered by Eliot himself when he...

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson “ Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good .” I had the explosively beautiful Spring chapter of “Jean Gourdon’s Four Days” by Émile Zola all teed up for this week’s reading. Alas, as the temperatures hover in the 30s in my world, and the wind howls, and the rain feels a touch too icy to be properly cal...

The End of the World: A Vision by James Kirke Paulding “In the course of my wanderings, methought I encountered the celebrated Fire-King, who was sitting at home, quietly smoking his cigar, and calculating that being the destined survivor of all his race, he would succeed to an immense landed estate, and become lord proprietor of the whole earth.” In the early months of 1843, a wave of Judgement D...

“And so it appears that all these five blocks of buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the Eastern markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink Madeira.” In 1890, Anton Chekhov made what was surely an uncomfortable six-week journey across Siberia. His destination: Sakhalin Island, a penal colony established by imperial Russia to house criminals and political...

“Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, Four women, taught by weal and woe, To love and labor in their prime.” Louisa May Alcott’s bestseller, Little Women , has been a cherished favorite of readers young and old, rich and poor, optimistic and cynical. The only dichotomy that may not be confidently claimed is male and female. Perhaps we’ll break the mold with this readin...

“I would prefer not to.” Today, Moby-Dick is regarded as one of the greatest novels in American history and a towering achievement for its author, Herman Melville. Not so when it was first published: Sales were poor, and those who read it mostly had no idea what to do with it. His subsequent novel, Pierre , fared no better. “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” was an attempt to turn th...

“Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms.” Depending on who you ask, Sherwood Anderson is either a genius who ushered in a new era of American storytelling or the unfortunate progenitor of utterly forgettable prose. It’s a little like the age-old chicken-and-egg question… it probably can’t be both. Perhaps the divide rests on what one expects from a story. Anderson’s work was born...

“He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more—he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back to France.” Every so often, youthful American audiences are treated to a “voice of their generation,” and in the Jazz Age, that voice was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. In 1918, Fitzge...

“Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty.” In the early 1900s, James Joyce set out to capture Irish life as he saw it, which wasn’t a particularl...

“Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries.” Guy de Maupassant was like a flash of lightening on the literary scene. He had a short life and a shorter writing career that left a slowly fading echo of light in the night sky. As Maupassant himself acknowledged, “ I entered the literary life like a meteor and I will come out like a love at first sigh...

Paste by Henry James “She had laid the pearls on his table, where, without his having at first put so much as a finger to them, they met his hard, cold stare.” There is something about the writing style of Henry James that can leave one with the impression that his work exists in the service of the hoi polloi; that his work is snobbish and unrelatable. Respected biographer Carl Van Doren once refe...

The Hounds of Fate by Saki (H. H. Munro) “Three pounds goes but a little way in the world when there is nothing behind it, but to a man who has counted his exchequer in pennies it seems a good starting-point.” Hector Hugh Munro had an eye for irony and the humbling tricks that the universe is inclined to play upon its fallible occupants. One gets the sense in reading “The Hounds of Fate” that the...

Peter Pan, An Excerpt, by J. M. Barrie I was inspired to pick up Peter Pan after reading “ What I Learned from Reading Peter Pan to my Children ” last year, a most excellent essay from Henry Oliver at The Common Reader . Oliver does a brilliant job reminding us that, beyond the familiar nostalgia associated with the story of “the boy that never grows up,” Peter Pan is a tale that cherishes the int...

"Leave It to Jeeves" by P. G. Wodehouse “’Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.”...

To Build a Fire by Jack London “At the man’s heels trotted a dog...The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment.” Over at Doomberg , where we write about energy as the lynchpin to humanity’s ability to not only survive but thrive (“Energy is Life”), we have often highlig...