Snoozecast

We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read a chapter from "Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do", titled "Ventriloquism and Polyphony", written by “Many Hands” and published in 1914. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

Ventriloquy, an act of stagecraft in which a person changes their voice so that it appears that the voice is coming from elsewhere, usually a puppet, known as a “dummy". Originally, ventriloquism was a religious practice among the ancient Greeks. 

The noises produced by the stomach, for example were thought to be the voices of the unliving, who took up residence in the stomach of the ventriloquist. The ventriloquist would then interpret the sounds, as they were thought to be able to speak to the dead, as well as foretell the future. 

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the opening chapters of “New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future”, written by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett under the pen name “Mrs. James Corbett” and first published in 1889. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

Categorized as “feminist utopian”, it was one element in the wave of utopian and dystopian literature that marked the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her novel, Corbett envisions a successful suffragette movement eventually giving rise to a breed of highly evolved "Amazonians" who turn Ireland into a utopian society. 

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the story "The Princess of Babylon", taken from "The Strange Storybook" by Mrs. Lang, published in 1913. The story is taken from a lesser known philosophical tale by Voltaire, written in 1768. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

The story focuses on Amazan, a handsome, unknown shepherd, and Formosanta, the Princess of Babylon, whose love and jealousy drive them to travel the world. Through their travels they encounter the basic values of the Enlightenment. 

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the opening chapters to "Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of their History and Development", written by W. H. Matthews and published in 1922. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

The history of the maze is paradoxically explored as both a tool for spiritual inquiry and as a vexing trap. Apparently he wrote the heavy tome in less than three years — and it may have been a way for Matthews to deal with the aftermath of his time as a soldier in the labyrinthine trenches of World War I. 

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Tonight, we’ll read the third chapter of “Little Women”, by American author Louisa May Alcott, published in 1868, titled “The Laurence Boy”. Following the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—the novel details their passage from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her sisters.

In the previous chapter, on Christmas morning, the girls wake to find books under their pillows. They find their mother has gone to aid poor neighbors. When she returns, she asks her daughters to give their delicious Christmas breakfast to the starving family. That evening, they perform their play, in which Jo gets to play male roles. After the performance, the girls come downstairs to find a feast laid out on the table, provided by another neighbor, who has a grandson that Jo would like to meet. 

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the story of "Sleeping Beauty", from the Lang’s "Blue Fairy Book" published in 1889. It is a classic fairy talea bout a princess who is cursed to sleep for a hundred years by an evil fairy, where she would be awakened by a handsome prince. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

The earliest known version of the story is found in the narrative “Perceforest”, composed in the 14th century. "Perceforest" provides an original Genesis of the Arthurian World. 

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Tonight, we’ll read another chapter from the book "Bird Watching" published in 1901 by Edmund Selous, titled "Watching Birds at a Straw Stack". 

The author started as a conventional naturalist, but Selous developed a hatred of the common practice at the time of killing animals for scientific study and was a pioneer of bird-watching as a method of scientific study. 

The author was a solitary man and was not well known in ornithological circles. He avoided both the company of ornithologists and reading their observations so as to base his conclusions entirely on his own observations. And to be clear, Straw Stacks are similar to Hay Stacks in that both are field crops, although hay is the remains of grasses and straw is made from the stalks of wheat. 

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Tonight, we’ll read the second chapter titled “A Merry Christmas” to “Little Women” by American author Louisa May Alcott, published in 1868.

Following the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—the novel details their passage from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her sisters. 

In Chapter 1, the March sisters lament that they won’t receive Christmas presents as their family has fallen into poverty. They discuss a Christmas play they are going to put forth, and their mother arrives with a letter from their father who is away in the Civil War. They resolve to practice their Christian faith’s values in their daily lives in order to rise above their material complaints. 

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read “Balsam Fir”, a Snoozecast original. Experience tromping through an evergreen tree farm to pick the perfect tree to bring home. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read an excerpt about traveling to a high alpine winter resort, from a book called Winter Sports in Switzerland, written by E. F. Benson in 1913. Benson was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

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