The Wind in the Willows

By: Kenneth Grahame

Narrated by: Derek Jacobi

When Mole goes boating with the Water Rat instead of spring-cleaning, he discovers a new world. As well as the river and the Wild Wood, there is Toad's craze for fast travel and motor-cars that leads them all on a timeless adventure.©2006 BBC Audiobooks; (P)BBC Audiobooks LTD

B A Uu T Full

Loved the story and the reading was just perfect for the story. I'm 35, but I'm feeling 7 right now :)

Brilliant but sadly abridged

This version is brilliant. Sadly abridged but Derek Jacobi is masterful. The accents and intonations, songs and timing.Jacobi embodies each and every character.

You Cannot Edit Pefection

What more could one ask for? Perhaps the most enduring work of the 20th Century, innocently unpretentiously disguised as a children’s book and arguably the best actor of our time who is willing to read it, masterfully, for us. And someone else who blows it.

It needs to be redone, just as it was originally, with Derek Jacobi…but it must in no way be edited. It is not a work that can be edited, or specifically, elided, any more than Shakespeare can. Can you imagine the listeners’ disappoint when Toad quickly bargains for the horse without that poetic description of the Gypsy’s stew? It is life without breath or marrow. What is it about? There are countless other butcheries done by some madman who doesn’t understand the work at all. Just as it’s spiritual twin, the Odyssey while depicting action, eschews it. The ideal state is peace, ease and contemplation…return to Ithaka. And some fool with scissors has decided, “Well let’s trim this down to what happens.” So we are left with plot, that is, almost nothing, except Jacobi’s curtailed brilliance.

Keep everything that has been done, but add back everything that belongs there. There is no partial perfection, and here you have two perfect actors. It were as though someone had painted wide black frames on the scenes of the Sistine Chapel and said to you, “Here, focus on what’s important.” The point of great art is that everything, and nothing is important. It all fits flawlessly, indispensably together.

Re-record it. For the sake of posterity. When will Jacobi come again? When will Grahame come again?

good performance

fabulous performance but very abridged. I missed some of the descriptions and storyline that was cut out to make it move faster.

Always great.

Have loved this book since I was a child and to hear it read to me once again, now I'm old, well, was simply delightful. Well done!