Music

Treasure Island (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

Jim Hawkins tells his tale and later that of his companion Dr Livesey. Listeners are plunged into a world of pirates, buried treasure, mutiny and deceit. The characters include Billy Bones, Blind Pew, Black Dog and Long John Silver. The music includes works by Smetana, Berman, Bantock and Borodin.

Climb aboard for the swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. Treasure Islandhas enthralled (and caused slight seasickness) for decades. The names Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins are destined to remain pieces of folklore for as long as children want to read Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous book. With it's dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues and villains, it seems unlikely that children will ever say no to this timeless classic. --Naomi Gesinger

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

Tom Sawyer lives with his strict Aunt Polly on the banks of the Mississippi River, yet loves to run wild with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Episodes include whitewashing the fence, the murder in the graveyard and the pursuit of Injun Joe. The music is from Janacek and Delius.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

Eliza and George, make a desperate bid to escape to Canada, while 'Uncle Tom' is sold to two successive and very different owners, in this intensively dramatic and moving novel.

Frankenstein (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

The gothic tale of Frankenstein and his construction of a human being that runs amok has, with the help of numerous films, become one of the most vivid horror stories.

Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.

The Phantom of the Opera: Gaston LeRoux (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

The tale of the mysterious Erik, the the grotesque and elusive "phantom", who hides himself from the world in the labyrinthine bowels of the Paris Opera and entices with his angelic voice the beautiful opera singer Christine. The organ music is by Franck, Massenet, Puccini, Berlioz and Saint-Saens.

Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Classic Literature With Classical Music) ABRIDGED [4 Audio Cassettes]

Anna Karenina has been described as the perfect Russian novel. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Anna Karenina is defenseless against the power of her passions once they are unleashed by the adoration of Count Vronsky. Having defied the rules of 19th Century Russian society, Anna is forced to pay a heavy price. Human nature, with all its failings, is the fabric of which this great and passionate work is composed.

White Fang (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

The companion title to The Call of the Wild, this classic novel is of the raw realism of life on the edge of civilization for both man and animal.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

Take a terrifying journey to the Earth's core where young Axel, lead by his overbearing uncle, discovers not only the planet's secrets, but also his own identity, in this classic thriller.

Northanger Abbey (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Her friend Isabella introduces her to "gothic novels". The music is by Beethoven and Mendelssohn.

Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers. In it, Austen skewers the novelistic excesses of her day made popular in such 18th-century Gothic potboilers as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly satirical twist. Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.

Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style. --Alix Wilber

The Call of the Wild (Classical Literature with Classical Music)

Buck is living the good life in the soft South, when he is snatched and transported to the savagery of the Northland, where the Klondike gold rush has brought out rough basic instincts of survival in men and dogs. He adjusts to the gruelling regime of a sled dog, which almost kills him, but he survives to find a new and fulfilling way of life. The Call of the Wild is not only a classic ripping yarn , but also an enduring masterpiece of the inescapable laws of nature. Read by Garrick Hagon.