The magical feeling of being tucked snug in your bed and journeying to a distant world in your imagination as someone read to you is not hard to recreate, even if you’re all grown up! Thanks to Amazon’s Immersion Reading experience, you can follow along in a chapter or two as the Audible narrator reads to you during the day, then let the narrator take over completely to read just one more chapter to you before you fall asleep. Thanks to Whispersync for Voice, you can pick up in the Kindle book right where the Audible narrator left off in the morning, either following along with the narrator or simply reading the text as usual!
Here are some especially good picks for winter.
The Snow Child (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $9.87)
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart–he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone–but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.
This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
After purchasing the Kindle book, on the Kindle purchase confirmation page you can add Audible narration for $3.99.
The Call of the Wild (4/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents)
Jack London (1878-1918) was an American author most famous for his classic novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, which were set in the Klondike Gold Rush.
“The Call of the Wild,” written in 1903, brought Jack London to the world’s attention. It is the story of Buck, part St. Bernard and part Scotch shepherd dog, who shows the strengths of both breeds when he is stolen and sold off as a sled dog in the Yukon during the gold rush. A heartfelt story that appeals to both children and adults, “The Call of the Wild” is a timeless classic, and is still required reading for many students across the United States.
This version of London’s The Call of the Wild includes a table of contents.
After purchasing the Kindle book, on the Kindle purchase confirmation page you can add Audible narration for 49 cents.
The Clan of the Cave Bear – Enhanced Edition (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $6.99)
This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love. Through Jean M. Auel’s magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves The Clan of the Cave Bear.
A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by a woman of the Clan, people very different from her own kind. To them, blond, blue-eyed Ayla looks peculiar and ugly–she is one of the Others, those who have moved into their ancient homeland; but Iza cannot leave the girl to die and takes her with them. Iza and Creb, the old Mog-ur, grow to love her, and as Ayla learns the ways of the Clan and Iza’s way of healing, most come to accept her. But the brutal and proud youth who is destined to become their next leader sees her differences as a threat to his authority. He develops a deep and abiding hatred for the strange girl of the Others who lives in their midst, and is determined to get his revenge.
This enhanced eBook includes:
Eight never-before-seen video interviews with Jean M. Auel where she discusses The Clan of the Cave Bear and the Earth’s Children® series:
• You Must Be Able to Change in Order to Survive
• Jondalar and Ayla
• On Language
• Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals: The Crossbreeding Question
• On Research (and Glaciers)
• The Domestication of Horses and Wolves
• The Painted Caves
• What Is It Like Finishing a Series?
An excerpt from The Land of Painted Caves
An Earth’s Children® series sampler
A text Q&A with Jean M. Auel
The full text of the novel
After purchasing the Kindle book, on the Kindle purchase confirmation page you can add Audible narration for $3.99.
The Name of the Rose (4/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
Umberto Eco’s first novel, an international sensation and winner of the Premio Strega and the Prix Médicis Étranger awards
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”
“Like the labyrinthine library at its heart, this brilliant novel has many cunning passages and secret chambers . . . Fascinating . . . ingenious . . . dazzling.” – Newsweek
After purchasing the Kindle book, on the Kindle purchase confirmation page you can add Audible narration for $12.99.
* * *
Tech Tip of the Week: Managing Your Amazon Instant Video Library
* * *