I’m very much enjoying “auditing” this course:

This is the third Hebrew Bible course I’ve listened to. (The first two were from Modern Scholar and the Teaching Company, respectively.) This is the first one to teach me more than Asimov’s Guide to the Bible did.

I love Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad. I love it in print and I love the audio version, which he reads himself. Audible is having a sale right now on 150 of its unabridged classics for $8.95 each. Both Lombardo’s Iliad and his Odyssey are included in the sale. Very highly recommended.

An instant-message exchange after I recommended Bart D. Ehrman’s The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which I listened to over the weekend:

BK

I read very little outside my job. All my "intake" is audio.

Carolyn

oh that’s right

I keep forgetting

you "read" all this sophisticated and complex stuff, I keep figuring it’s print

BK

heh

no

I keep encountering the claim in early-Christian history that most people who knew these texts were illiterate, but not necessarily uninterested. And so they’d have the texts read to them, usually in groups.

Other than the group part, that sounds like me and my iPhone.

I’m like a modern-day illiterate.

One benefit for Nathalie is that I volunteer to do pretty much anything that allows me to focus and listen: shopping, errands, dishes, dinner, yard work …

Gary North recommends carrying a book whenever you’re out in the world, so you don’t waste time standing in lines or sitting in waiting rooms. That’s what I do, minus the physical book.

I realized the other day that I was standing in an especially slow line at the store but didn’t bother switching since I was interested in what I was listening to.

Carolyn

right

I like the modern day illiterate claim

you should blog that

BK

will do

Jeff Riggenbach reads the whole of the masterpiece, beginning with the introduction printed here, and continuing through the end. As always, all files are being made free online for everyone to listen to or download. It will also be packaged as a CD and available in the store for gift giving or otherwise. This is something the Mises Institute has wanted to do for decades. The time has come. Here is the Introduction and here is the audio.

(This one is a lot of work, but a real pleasure to work on.)

I wrote a brief review of Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: the 2500-Year Struggle Between East and West — and the author briefly replied.

The audiobook is on sale right now at Audible for only five bucks: