Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Tao Te Ching is a classic Chinese text written around the 6th century BC by Laozi, a Zhoudynasty courtier. While its authorship is debated, the text remains a fundamental building block of Taoism and one of the most influential works of its time. Today it’s one of the mosttranslated works in the world. The work itself is a series of 81 short poetic sections, each one written in a fluid, ambiguous style, leaving them open to w...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the Puritan English poet John Milton between 1658 and 1663, and published in 1667. This is a period of English history which encompasses the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Perhaps reflecting some of his country’s turmoil during Milton’s life, Paradise Lost deals with revolution in Heaven by Satan and his followers against God, their defea...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Commentaries on the Gallic War describes the conflicts between Rome and the region of Gaul in western Europe, as well as the Germanic peoples who lived to the east of the river Rhine, and Britain to the north, in the later years of the Roman republic. Despite being written in the 3rd person, the commentaries are the memoirs of Julius Caesar himself, and offer a unique insight into these events. Before the Gallic war began, the Ro...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Hercule Poirot has retired to the English village of King’s Abbot, determined to use his little grey cells in the growing of vegetable marrows. But when Roger Ackroyd, a local businessman and former acquaintance of Poirot’s, is murdered, the man’s niece begs Poirot to investigate in order to clear her fiancé. With Hastings having married and moved to Argentina, Poirot enlists the local doctor to be his assistant and scribe, and t...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Helen Keller was just nineteen months old when, in 1882, she was struck with an illness that rendered her deaf, blind, and unable to communicate beyond basic signs. When she was seven, the arrival of Anne Sullivan, a partially blind teacher, catalysed Helen’s learning and created a completely new way of teaching deafblind children. In The Story of My Life, written when Helen was twentythree, Helen recounts her childhood and the w...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Nibelungenlied was Germany’s first heroic epic put into writing. Thomas Carlyle considered it “a precious national possession, recovered after six centuries of neglect, [which] takes undisputed place among the sacred books of German literature.” Due to a lack of interest in copying the manuscripts, the work was forgotten, only faintly remembered as an influence in other German writing. Today, a total of 36 manuscripts have be...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Peter Kropotkin initially published the chapters of Mutual Aid as individual essays in the intellectual periodical The Nineteenth Century over the course of six years. In 1902 the essays were published as a book. In it, Kropotkin explores the role of mutuallybeneficial cooperation across both animal and human societies. He begins by outlining how animals, both within and across species, thrive not through individual fitness, but ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Jude the Obscure was first published in its complete form in 1895, just after finishing its serial run in Harper’s Magazine. At the time, its unconventional and somewhat scandalous themes earned it widespread criticism and condemnation. In the 1912 “Wessex Edition,” Hardy appended a postscript to the book’s preface in which he stated that the outrage ultimately abated with no lingering effect other than “completely curing me of f...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. D503 is the Builder of the Integral, the United State’s first spaceship. A life of calculations and equations in the United State leaves little room for emotional expression outside of the pink slips that give one private time with another Number. The façade however starts to crack when I330, a mysterious sheNumber with a penchant for the Ancients, enters the picture. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s fourth novel, was written in 1920–21, b...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. My Brilliant Career is a classic Australian work published in 1901 by Stella Miles Franklin, with an introduction by Henry Lawson. A thinlyveiled autobiographical novel, it paints a vivid and sometimes grim picture of rural Australian life in the late 19th Century. Sybylla Melvyn is the daughter of a man who falls into grinding poverty through inadvised speculation before becoming a hopeless drunk unable to make a living from a s...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Although many readers might associate the term “fairy tales” with the Germanic or Celtic folk tale tradition—like in the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm—countries like India have their own rich history of fairy tales. Many of these tales, infused with a local flavor, bear a striking structural and thematic similarity to those with which Western readers are accustomed: moral allegories, talking animals, gambling incidents,...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Set a mere three months after The Laughing Cavalier, the titular first Sir Percy is set to wed his love Gilda in a double wedding with her brother and his intended. The attendees include many of the rich and famous, including the Stadtholder himself. But immediately after the ceremony, bad news arrives, and Percy, A.K.A. Diogenes, is tasked with rushing to get messages to two of the Stadtholder’s divisions that are in peril from ...