Twice-Told Tales

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Ellis Freeman

Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an 1837 collection of stories that had previously appeared in literary journals like Atlantic Souvenir and The Token. The stories explore ideas of pride and sin through allegory, in a New England setting. Contemporaries of Hawthorne, including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, praised the book, which was also named Book of the Year for 1837 by the Grolier Club, the oldest book club in the US. Twice-Told Tales includes stories like "Sunday at Home", "The Wedding-Knell", "The Minister's Black Veil", "The Maypole of Merry Mount", "The Gentle Boy", "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe", and "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment."

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

Ability to read should be a requirement

The stories are fine, sometimes brilliant, but they were written in the earlier part of the 19th century so the language can be difficult. It needs an excellent narrator to make it intelligible. This is decidedly not an excellent narrator. The ability to pronounce words correctly ought to be a minimum requirement, and there are just too many instances of mispronunciation to list. That, and the chopping of long sentences into three or four word sound bites that render the arc of the sentence incomprehensible, make listening a chore. Sorry, but it's pretty dire.