Books on the Ambleside list for home schooling

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » July 8th, 2013, 2:53 am

LibriVoxers with long memories may recall that 3 years ago, I started making Wiki pages for the LV recordings of items on the booklists of Ambleside Online, a free online homeschooling curriculum. Well, things happened in 2010-11, and I never finished it

.

My conscience has now been pricked, and I am getting on with updating and completing the lists. The early years PD books have nearly all been recorded, in fact. Even completing the Wiki pages for Years 9 - 11 will take some time to complete owing to the number of books.

You will see that each year group has three parts:

LibriVox Recordings
In the Public Domain, but not yet recorded
Not in the Public Domain

Obviously there is nothing to be done with (C), but I am now adding text links wherever possible to (B), so if some of our own homeschoolers (or other readers) are interested in helping to complete our coverage, it would be great. There is some very good stuff there.

It will be even better if you note in this thread when you adopt/complete any of the books on the list, so that I can keep it up to date.

Here are the pages on the Wiki:

Recordings of Books on the Ambleside List Part 1: Years 0 - 4.

Recordings of Books on the Ambleside List 2 Part 2: Years 5 - 8.

Recordings of Books on the Ambleside List 3 Part 3: Year 9.

Recordings of Books on the Ambleside List 4 Part 4: Year 10 (in progress now).

Recordings of Books on the Ambleside List 5 Part 5: Year 11 (not started yet).

Also, if you see anything in (B) for which there is a LibriVox recording that I have missed, please let me know.

Thank you!

Ruth

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » July 11th, 2013, 2:05 am

I have now completed all years 0 - 11, and there are many, many interesting books there, both fiction and non-fiction, for which we do not yet have recordings, so do please take a look through if you need ideas for your next project.

http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/Recommended_Listening_List

Look at 'In the Public Domain, but not yet recorded ' sections on each page.

Ruth

BellonaTimes · Post by **BellonaTimes** » July 18th, 2013, 6:24 pm

I've been looking through the unrecorded PD works and a fair percentage of them could be added to the non-fiction collections. The speeches by Nixon and Barbara Jordan are a surprising find; she was an especially riveting speaker. The Defoe work runs approx 250 kb in txt format, that could be polished off in a few hours. Maybe you could add the kb lengths to those works to drum up more interest...? Or I could compile a list, hmm.

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » July 18th, 2013, 11:53 pm

Maybe you could add the kb lengths to those works to drum up more interest...?

er... not me. This took me days as it is, and I am (more than) fully occupied elsewhere now. Anybody else willing to do it, feel free.

Ruth

silverquill · Post by **silverquill** » August 3rd, 2013, 8:27 am

Hi, Ruth.

This caught my eye since I did homeschool our daughters (just for one year, it turned out), and have been involved in providing support for the homeschooling community for many years (though not so much lately).

I'm currently trying to earn my Librivox stripes, having gotten quite sucked in, I'm afraid. I think I'm closing in on my first 100 sections of recording, and have probably more than that many sections competed as a DPL.

As soon as I complete my current recording obligations, I want to start on my personal list of solo projects. It is quite long, and some of them would be better as group projects. But, I'd love to add a few from this list. I guess I should check to see if these have been recorded yet, but here are a few that jumped out at me from the Year 10 List. These could be solo projects, but the last two are longer and might be better as group projects.

An Appeal To Congress For Impartial Suffrage by Frederick Douglass
What is Right With the World by G. K. Chesterton
Books and Bookmen by Ian Maclaren
Great Astronomers by Robert S. Ball
The Bible in Spain by George Henry Borrow

I should be ready to start something by the time the new MW is implemented.

Let me know what you think.

~Larry

PS: Matthew Henry's Commentary has not been done? Yes, mammoth project. I think I donated my copy to someone (it had been my father's) but maybe I could borrow it. Actually, I have a couple volumes of MacLaren's expositions on my list, too. Hey, I should recruit some of my pastor friends to read some of this stuff . . .

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 3rd, 2013, 9:13 am

The full Matthew Henry's Commentary was started and abandoned without a ball being bowled, if my memory serves me correctly (and if you can tolerate an English cricketing analogy). The Concise version appears to be in progress here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=34844&start=45

I have no particular attachment to the Ambleside list, I was just asked to put it on the Wiki and I did

. There are certainly some good things there for anyone who is short of ideas.

Ruth

Post by **TriciaG** » August 3rd, 2013, 9:48 am

viewtopic.php?f=28&t=34844

BellonaTimes · Post by **BellonaTimes** » August 7th, 2013, 9:40 am

File sizes for the books on PG, if this helps:

A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales by Jonathan Nield. 142k
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland by Samuel Johnson. 341k
A Primary Reader by E. Louise Smythe. 67kb
All for Love; Or, The World Well Lost: A Tragedy] by John Dryden. 190k
An Inquiry Into the Obligations of Christians by William Carey. 116 kB
Beacon Lights of History by John Lord. Text of Vol. X-- Vol. XIV -- Vol 10 is 483 kB
Books and Bookmen by Ian Maclaren. 68 kB
Bramble-Bees and Others by J. Henri Fabre. 535 kB
Bulchevy's Book of English Verse by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1.1 MB
Days with Sir Roger De Coverley by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. 80 kB
Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry by John Dryden. 362 kB
English Literature for Boys and Girls by H. E. Marshall. 1.1 MB
Essays of Elia and the Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb. Masque 31 kB
Chas & Mary Lamb 1.1 MB
Gooseberries from The Wife and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov. collection is 438 kB 9 stories, 48 kB average
Great Astronomers by Robert S. Ball 552 kB
Great Britain and Her Queen by Anne E. Keeling. 341 kB
Hereward, the Last of the English by Charles Kingsley. 924 kB
Home Geography for Primary Grades by C. C. Long. 116 kB
In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson. 594 kB
Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer, by Sir Richard Steele. 261 kB
Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune. 472 kB
Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen (Victoria) by Sarah Tytler. Vol. 1 662 kB & 2 596 kB
London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe. 245 kB
Marie Antoinette and Her Son by L. Mühlbach. 1.2 MB
More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. 345 kB
More Hunting Wasps by J. Henri Fabre. 463 kB
My Kinsman, Major Molineux by Nathaniel Hawthorne. one of 1/2 dozen stories 213 kB
Napoleon Bonaparte by John S. C. Abbott. 314 kB
Now It Can Be Told by Philip Gibbs. (Not PD for Europe) 1.0 MB
On the Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. 396 kB
Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle by Mary Johnston. 310 kB
Poems By a Little Girl by Hilda Conkling. 88 kB
Ponce de Leon by William Pilling. 1.2 MB
Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott. 1.0 MB
Redgauntlet by Sir Walter Scott - Time of George III. 1.0 MB
Guy Mannering by Sir Walter Scott - Time of George III. 1019 kB
Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin. 279 kB
Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald. 1.0 MB
Tales of Troy by Andrew Lang. 512 kB
The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy . 696 kB
The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift. 246 kB
The Bible in Spain by George Henry Borrow. 1.2 MB
The Book of Missionary Heroes by Basil Mathews. 388 kB
The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay. 337 kB
The Coverley Papers, From 'The Spectator' by Addison, Budgell, and Steele. 352 kB
The Daisy Chain, or, Aspirations by Charlotte Yonge. 1.6 MB
The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- Complete 6.4 MB
The Discovery of Muscovy etc. by Richard Hakluyt. 229 kB
The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot. 576 kB
The Harwich Naval Forces by E. F. Knight. 175 kB
The History of King Charles II of England by Jacob Abbott. 337 kB
The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol. 187 kB
The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald 121 kB http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/265
The Life of Christopher Columbus by Edward Everett Hale. 333 kB
The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson by Robert Southey. 565 kB
The Life of the Fly, With Which Are Interspersed by J. Henri Fabre. 549 kB
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come by John Fox Jr. 513 kB
The Making of An American by Jacob Riis. 556 kB
The Mason-Bees by J. Henri Fabre. 375 kB
The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer. 178 kB
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. 559 kB
The Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits by William Hazlitt. 484 kB
The Story of the Champions of the Round Table by Howard Pyle. 687 kB
The Surgeon's Daughter by Sir Walter Scott - Fifeshire, Isle of Wight, and India (1780). 405 kB
The Wonders of Instinct: Chapters in the Psychology of Insects by J. Henri Fabre. 515 kB
Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children by Roosevelt, ed. Joseph Bucklin Bishop. 248 kB
Unknown to History: Captivity of Mary of Scotland by Charlotte Yonge. 946 kB
Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton. 295 kB
William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood by Thomas Henry Huxley. 64 kB

Mike001 · Post by **Mike001** » August 15th, 2013, 10:33 am

silverquill wrote: The Bible in Spain by George Henry Borrow

Ah, your old friend George Borrow again, Ruth.

He went across Spain (and part of Portugal) distributing bibles for the London Bible Society. According to Borrow, at that time the Church in those parts was hostile to vernacular translations -- or actually, he says, to the bible itself.

Borrow carts these bibles around but doesn't get that many sales, but he does bump into some interesting people, including the gypsies (who always fascinated him). Even more dramatically there's a man whose family has maintained, claims Borrow, a secret existence as Jews ever since the time of Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsions, having a modest dwelling but with unseen fabulous riches inside. Borrow -- the lavengro (the master of "words", i.e. language) -- claims to have fallen into conversation with the man on the road, recognised his idiom as having Jewish elements, and spoken to him in Hebrew, thereby gaining his confidence.

That book's a very entertaining read ... although, as always with Borrow, one's left wondering how much of it is actually true and how much comes out of his imagination. Maybe he was really a novelist at heart ???

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 15th, 2013, 2:14 pm

An Appeal To Congress For Impartial Suffrage by Frederick Douglass
What is Right With the World by G. K. Chesterton
Books and Bookmen by Ian Maclaren
Great Astronomers by Robert S. Ball
The Bible in Spain by George Henry Borrow

All in the Public Domain, but not yet recorded for LibriVox, Larry. I am quite surprised to see the Chesterton and Ball haven't been recorded. Not so surprised to see the Borrow there, as Borrow is not an easy read, as I am finding myself. But it does go to show that there are still a lot of very interesting books without LV recordings.

Mike: Both Lavengro and Wild Wales are now in progress. I suspect Steve will finish Wild Wales long before I manage to finish Lavengro.

Ruth

Mike001 · Post by **Mike001** » August 15th, 2013, 10:39 pm

RuthieG wrote: Mike: Both Lavengro and Wild Wales are now in progress. I suspect Steve will finish Wild Wales long before I manage to finish Lavengro.

That's good to hear, Ruth.

Borrow ends up in clink in The Bible in Spain for his bible-selling activities. The list looks to me like very much a list that reflects nineteenth-century American protestant culture -- I only had a quick look, but I think probably not that far on in the century either, since there's about five Scotts but no Dickens -- and I suspect the Borrow is there because the list-complier sees it as illustrating the perfidy of Roman Catholicism. It's difficult to see it as book that's central to education even then let alone now. But, as you know, Borrow's always a good read if you take him with a pinch of salt and just enjoy the flavour of the writing and the picaresque quality of his adventures

I guess Lavengro would deserves a place on a reading-list for lovers of English literature. I'll certainly grab a copy of Steve's Wild Wales.

Post by **annise** » August 16th, 2013, 1:02 am

Ambleside is a popular USA home schooling site. These are the books on their list.
There is a large range of views on all sorts of matters in LibriVox , and the books read reflect this.

Anne

lezer · Post by **lezer** » August 16th, 2013, 12:35 pm

RuthieG wrote:
An Appeal To Congress For Impartial Suffrage by Frederick Douglass
What is Right With the World by G. K. Chesterton
Books and Bookmen by Ian Maclaren
Great Astronomers by Robert S. Ball
The Bible in Spain by George Henry Borrow
All in the Public Domain, but not yet recorded for LibriVox, Larry. I am quite surprised to see the Chesterton and Ball haven't been recorded. Not so surprised to see the Borrow there, as Borrow is not an easy read, as I am finding myself. But it does go to show that there are still a lot of very interesting books without LV recordings.

Mike: Both Lavengro and Wild Wales are now in progress. I suspect Steve will finish Wild Wales long before I manage to finish Lavengro.

Ruth

I happened to see your post, Ruth - and had to see what Chesterton thought was Right with the World - and when I read that I couldn't resist recording it - it's an essay, I've just submitted it to the Short Nonfiction Collection

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 16th, 2013, 12:42 pm

Splendid, Anna! I shall amend the list to show that we now have a recording

.

ETA um... when it is catalogued, that is

ETA Now added

Ruth

Post by **MaryAnnSpiegel** » October 31st, 2013, 6:37 pm

Ruth,

On this page: http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/Recordings_of_Books_on_the_Ambleside_List_2

Pursuit of God (year 7) is here: http://librivox.org/the-pursuit-of-god-by-aiden-wilson-tozer/
Life of John Donne (year 8) may be this one: http://librivox.org/izaak-waltons-lives-of-john-donne-henry-wotton-richard-hooker-and-george-herbert-by-izaak-walton/

I am looking for a new solo - and while I have a whole stack of books on my "to read" list, I can't help browsing to see if something different might catch my eye. There is quite a bit on these lists which looks interesting . . .

MaryAnn