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From “The Benefits of Cooking Together”
by The Chef & The Dish
Read by Sandra Wetzel
“If cooking is in the very foundation of being human, then working together toward that shared enjoyment of eating is in the very foundation of what establishes human bond.”
From Taste: My Life Through Food
by Stanley Tucci
Read by Yves Herak
“There is a dish, a very special dish, that is served in a home on Christmas Day. It is called Timpano…”
From Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
Read by Moana Toteff
LADY MACBETH
Who dares receive it other,
As we shall make our griefs and clamor roar
Upon his death?
MACBETH
I am settled and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
Away, and mock the time with fairest show.
False face must hide what the false heart doth
know.
From “The Monkey’s Paw”
by W. W. Jacobs
Read by Curtis Runstedler
“It moved,” he cried, with a look of horror at the object as it lay on the floor. “As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.”
From Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Read by Sophie Franklin
“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open…”
“Frost at Midnight”
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Read by Dan Poston
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
From The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Read by David Korn
“I came home afterwards and wrapped myself in my blanket and rocked back and forth, ice in my very bones, and thought of all the sunny Christmases of my childhood—oranges, bikes and hula-hoops, green tinsel sparkling in the heat.”
“The Black Belt”
by Jean Guthrie-Smith
Read by Jonathan Sharp
Gruff trams and trains criss-cross and intersect
With glittering steel this leprous countryside;
Pyramid slagheaps threaten, seamed and specked
With smouldering pink: a lively trade is plied
In coarse flamboyant clothes and gaudy sweets
And all the brave romantic merchandise
Folk make the most of, being poor and wise.
In unimagineably squalid streets,
Ranked rabbit-hutches, citizens do dwell, –
Weird, gnome-like men, shrill women and their young,
Most piteous young! Where Heaven is seared to Hell
With steam and smoke from demon valve, or stung
To crude geranium from the furnace flares,
There’s life and love, much talking and much drinking
In this black bunch of towns, and bitter thinking
On why and wherefore of the world’s affairs.
That ship be sped and tool or weapon forged
And laughter quickened round a million fires,
The miser pit-heads will be daily gorged
With stunted peoples of these pock-marked shires.
Like goblin print upon a yellow page
Forested chimneys spell their rigmarole;
The fungoid mine spreads canker in the soul
To feed the sinews of an iron age!
From Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Read by Vera Yakupova
“Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. “Wuthering“ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones[…]“
image source: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/true-story-house-hill-inspired-wuthering-heights-1799935
From Howl’s Moving Castle
by Diana Wynne Jones
Read by Yves Herak
“She shivered and cranked her stiff old neck around, but there was only darkness behind her. “Let’s have a bit more light, shall we?” she said. Her cracked little voice seemed to make no more noise than the crackling of the fire[…]“
image source: https://dianawynnejones.fandom.com/wiki/Calcifer?file=Calcifer.png
Amoretti XXX
by Edmund Spenser
Read by Nora Schalker
My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.
“The Burning Babe”
by Robert Southwell
Read by Capucine Blanc
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.
“The Giver (for Berdis)”
by James Baldwin
Read by Ellen Dengel-Janic
If the hope of giving
is to love the living,
the giver risks madness
in the act of giving.
Some such lesson I seemed to see
in the faces that surrounded me.
Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,
what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?
The giver is no less adrift
than those who are clamouring for the gift.
If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,
if their empty fingers beat the empty air
and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer
knows that all of his giving has been for naught
and that nothing was ever what he thought
and turns in his guilty bed to stare
at the starving multitudes standing there
and rises from bed to curse at heaven,
he must yet understand that to whom much is given
much will be taken, and justly so:
I cannot tell how much I owe.
“Andrew“
by Jane Bowles
Read by Michael Reid
Andrew had an urge to bolt from the clearing, but he seated himself stiffly on the end of the tree trunk. The boy was beautiful, with an Irish-American face and thick curly brown hair. His cheeks were blood red from the heat of the flames. Andrew looked at his face and fell in love with him. Then he could not look away.
A mess kit and a brown paper package lay on the ground. “My food is there in that brown bag,“ the boy said. “I’ll give you a little piece of meat so you can see how good it tastes when it’s cooked here, out in the air. Did you go in for bonfires when you were a kid?“
“No,“ said Andrew. “Too much wind,“ he added, some vaguememory stirring in his mind.
“There’s lots of wind,“ he agreed, and Andrew was unreasonably delighted that the boy considered his remark a sensible one. “Lots of wind, but that never need stop you.“ He looked up at Andrew with a bright smile. “Not if you like a fire and the outdoors. Where I worked they used to call me Outdoor Tommy. Nobody got sore.“
From Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Read by Sophia Smolinski
I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with sitting at a distance from the drawing-room fire. I felt now as composed as ever I did in my life: there was nothing indeed in the gipsy’s appearance to trouble one’s calm.She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf-locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze.
From The Cricket on the Hearth
by Charles Dickens
Read by Rebecca Felchle
“suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to Chirp!”
“The Snow-Storm”
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read by Raphael Zähringer
From The Housemaid: Her Duties, and how to Perform Them
in Victorian London, Etiquette and Advice Manuals
Read by Julia Schatz
“The housemaid’s work is heavier in winter than in summer, and particularly in the town. She has all the additional work of the fires: not only the care of the grates, the lighting and keeping in of the fires, and the carrying of fuel, but, in a town, the dirt from a thousand fires in other people\’s houses. […]“
From Good Omens
by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Read by Inken Armbrust
“Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone’s quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there’s a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.“
From The Fiery Cross
by Diana Gabaldon
Read by Sandra Wetzel
From “A Christmas Dream, and How It Came to Be True”
by Louisa May Alcott
Read by Moana Toteff
“I wish I was a beggar-girl.”
“Would you like to be hungry, cold, and ragged, to beg all day, and sleep on an ash-heap at night?” asked mamma, wondering what would come next.
“Cinderella did, and had a nice time in the end.”
From Martin Chuzzlewit
by Charles Dickens
Read by Sara Rogalski
“All the farmers being by this time jogging homewards, there was nobody in the sanded parlour of the tavern where he had left the horse; so he had his little table drawn out close before the fire, and fell to work upon a well-cooked steak and smoking hot potatoes, with a strong appreciation of their excellence, and a very keen sense of enjoyment.“
image source: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations-martin-chuzzlewit.html
From The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Read by Elena-Mira Tara
“There are some things here that didn’t burn!“It was one of the cleanup men. He was not facing the girl, but
rather, the people standing by the town hall.
“Well, burn them again!“ came the reply. “And watch them burn!“
image source: https://bookriot.com/nazi-book-burning/
From Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Read by Matthias Bauer
“Though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of my trousers.”
Jacklight
by Louise Erdrich
Read by Uwe Küchler
The same Chippewa word is used both for flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa word connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one’s hands.
-R.W. Dunning (1959) Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa
We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,
out of hiding.
At first the light wavered, glancing over us.
Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,
searched out, divided us.
Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.
Each of us moved forward alone.
We have come to the edge of the woods,
drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,
this battery of polarized acids,
that outshines the moon.
We smell them behind it
but they are faceless, invisible.
We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,
mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.
We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.
We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,
teeth cracked from hot marrow.
We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,
of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.
We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.
We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.
We smell their minds like silver hammers
cocked back, held in readiness
for the first of us to step into the open.
We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of leaves creaked shut, out of our hiding.
We have come here too long.
It is their turn now,
their turn to follow us. Listen,
they put down their equipment.
It is useless in the tall brush.
And now they take the first steps, not knowing
how deep the woods are and lightless.
How deep the woods are.