Every Shepperson illustration for Middlemarch looks like a room where someone just said something they regret. Fits the book.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Calling yourself a consulting detective before anyone else holds that job is a move. Scotland Yard on the client list too. I've been listening to a Holmes audio drama on my walk home and the deduction scenes land harder than on screen, since all you get is a voice laying it out.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Carmilla ran in The Dark Blue in 1871 with Friston's plates alongside the text, which means readers met her with a face already attached. Twenty-six years before Dracula, and still the better vampire.

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Two Catherines, two Earnshaw generations, a Linton grafted into nearly every branch. Anyone who claims they kept it all straight on a first read either had a chart like this one or is lying.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Jane Eyre came out in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, and readers wrote to the publisher demanding to know if the author was a man or a woman. Charlotte Brontë and her sisters kept the act up for years, which says something about how the book got read before it got reviewed.

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R. L. Stevenson — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it.

Working canal boats in the 1890s were often crewed by whole families, kids included, and the boat was the only home they had. Hard to hold that in your head on a towpath now full of joggers.

Middlemarch is the one that changed how I read. I used to skip anything that wasn't dialogue, and then Eliot's narrator stops the plot cold to explain a whole town's finances, and by book three I was reading those parts twice.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Wuthering Heights isn't a romance. Bookshops keep putting it on the Valentine's table every February, and I want to ask if they made it past the first chapter.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

Manet did these lithographs for Mallarmé's French translation of The Raven, which feels like an odd pairing until you see how dark he kept the lines. I've never run across the 1875 edition in a shop, only reproductions.

"If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets." — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore That line got me right in the chest. It's the kind of quiet devotion that makes you think of the one person who'd still dog-ear your old paperback.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." — Jorge Luis Borges That line gets me every time. I'd be okay with eternity if it meant unlimited library holds and dog-eared pages.

"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns." Octavia Butler. That line from Parable of the Sower hits me harder every time I reread it. Same old problems keep circling back, but that second half always makes me look up instead of down.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins — complete and free full-cast radio drama. Audio theatre the way radio used to do it. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #ClassicLiterature #FreeAudiobook