Silent Servants...

Silent Servants...

... of the Used, Abused, and Utterly Screwed Up.

A Secular Franciscan looks at the world...
with a more jaundiced eye than ever...
and lots of ellipses for you to fill in the missing text...
(with thanks to Thomas S. Klise for the title)



Monday, May 02, 2011

Do you like books?


I certainly do. But more and more I'm finding that listening to them while driving is a good way to 'read' more than I have time for. My kindle is good for reading lots of things to me, if the Kindle books allow for that. SWMBO gets recorded books from the public library to listen to while she works in her studio. What do I do?

Well, besides the Kindle, I've discovered this wonderful website called

LibriVox

who function as a sort of audio Project Gutenberg. While they have some public domain books in audio format, that is what LibriVox specializes in, with volunteer readers and 'proof-listeners' doing the work. And I've gotten some terrific MP3 books from them already.

One of the recent books I've started listening to is by G. K. Chesterton, and the blurb describing it goes say:

"Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they claim philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than Albu felt an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have reached their position through their own organising ability. They generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a “constructive social policy,” they do not lie. They really are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in for an equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still half-constructed, the accursed thing which they construct."
A summary by Chesterton himself.

Anonymous, do you remember when we recorded books to share (you started doing them for someone else)? In audio cassette format? With the occasional editorial comment (about flying monks, for instance)? Well, these are less, ummm, fluid, I guess...


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