The Very Best of Rabindranath Tagore

Gitanjali, the Home and the World, and Stray Birds

By: Rabindranath Tagore

Narrated by: Museum Audiobooks cast

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works renewed Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Three of his most prominent works are included here: Gitanjali is a cycle of 103 poems about the bliss of living and dying in wonder of the creation, while Stray Birds is a collection of some 300 poems. The poems are short but profound and the imagery lingers. The novel, The Home and the World is set on an estate in 1908; it’s a blend of love story and political intrigue against the background of the conflict in India.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

Worst Narrator I’ve Ever Heard

It’s like he’s never read anything out loud with feeling before.

Like if you had an accountant read you DMX lyrics having never heard of rap before.

Come one come all. Hear poetry delivered like data into an algorithm.

Like instructions to assemble furniture.

Never has he felt ecstasy or head of it.

Seriously, it sounds like Flash Flash hundred yard dash.

I dare you to listen to it.

It’s awful.

Thankfully Audible has a reasonable return policy and I was able to get my credit back.

Can’t speak to the content as I couldn’t stand listening to the narrator any longer.

Poor Choice of Voice Actors

I love Rabindranath Tagore. This voice actor is reading his work as if it were a medical textbook. No emotion, no nuance. Hey somebody’s paying me to read this book aloud I don’t know who this writer is or what he’s about, lemme just get this over with. Sad treatment of great writing.