Anyone got a New Year Resolution to learn a foreign language this year?

Have just added over 1,000 language audiobooks to http://www.best-audiobooks.com.

The great benefit of these new audiobooks is that they are all MP3 downloads so they can work on computers and mobile devices.
Also they are in 30 minute lessons and they only cost $5.99 plus sales tax.

Here is a selection of them.
Learn Arabic (Eastern)
Learn Chinese Mandarin
Learn Dari (Persian)
Learn English for French Speakers
Learn English for German Speakers
Learn English for Mandarin Chinese Speakers
Learn English for Portuguese Speakers
Learn English for Spanish Speakers
Learn Farsi
Learn French
Learn German
Learn Greek
Learn Haitian Creole
Learn Hebrew
Learn Italian
Learn Japanese
Learn Korean
Learn Polish
Learn Romanian
Learn Russian
Learn Spanish
Learn Swahili
Learn Tagalog
Learn Thai
Learn Vietnamese

For the first time, Ulysses by James Joyce is now available as an MP3 audiobook download.

This masterpiece by the Dublin author is narrated by John Lee and is more than 29 hours long.

Joyce’s experimental masterpiece set a new standard for modernist fiction, pushing the English language past all previous thresholds in its quest to capture a day in the life of an Everyman in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Obliquely borrowing characters and situations from Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce takes us on an internal odyssey along the current of thoughts, impressions, and experiences that make up the adventure of living an average day. As his characters stroll, eat, ruminate, and argue through the streets of Dublin, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness narrative artfully weaves events, emotions, and memories in a free flow of imagery and associations. Full of literary references, parody, and uncensored vulgarity, Ulysses has been considered controversial and challenging, but always brilliant and rewarding.   James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake, as well as the short-story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Coco Barrington was born into a legendary Hollywood family: her mother Florence is a mega-bestselling author, and her sister Jane is one of Hollywood’s top producers. Jane has lived with her partner, Liz, for ten years, in a solid relationship. Florence, widowed but still radiant, has just begun a secret romance with a man twenty-four years her junior. And Coco, a law school dropout and the family black sheep, works as a dog walker, having fled life in the spotlight for the artsy northern California beach town of Bolinas.

When Coco reluctantly agrees to house-sit in Jane’s luxurious home, it turns out Jane’s house comes complete with an unexpected houseguest: Leslie Baxter, a dashing but down-to-earth British actor who’s fleeing a psycho ex-girlfriend. Their worlds couldn’t be more different. The attraction couldn’t be more immediate. Suddenly Coco is seeing things differently: Leslie is not just a celebrity, he’s a single dad to an adorable six-year-old girl. Her mother is a woman in love, with vulnerability and new insight. And Jane and Liz are about to take the bravest plunge of all – into parenthood.

One Day At A Time

Author:  Danielle Steele

Narrator: Dan John Miller

As Coco contemplates a future with one of Hollywood’s hottest stars, as her mother and sister settle into their lives, old wounds are healed and new families are formed – all bonded by love. With wit and intelligence, Danielle Steel explores love in all its guises, taking us into the lives of three unusual but wonderfully real couples.

One Day at a Time is at once moving, thought provoking, and utterly impossible to put down.

In areport by The Business Journal, The Chevy Chase Bank is in talks to sell to Citigroup Inc., according to a report in the Wall Street Journal Thursday.

The newspaper said that Citigroup is one of a number of bidders pursuing Bethesda, Md.-based Chevy Chase, with $14.9 billion in assets, and it is not certain that Citi will prevail.

Chevy Chase Bank has been banged up by the real estate market decline. As of last month, $420 million, or about 4 percent, of its domestic real estate loans were in a non-accrual status. But Chevy Chase did manage to improve from a first quarter 2008 loss and post a second quarter profit of $2.2 million.

In the past year, Chevy Chase has trimmed its operations and holdings, putting the Lowes Island golf club up for sale, reducing hours at some branches, and ending its in-store banking relationship with Giant Food.

APA Survey Finds Solid Audio Gains in 2007  

by Jim Milliot — Extract from Publishers Weekly, 9/15/2008 10:27:00 AM

Sales of spokenword audiobooks rose 12%, to just over $1 billion, in 2007 and the percentage of adults that now listen to audiobooks rose to 28%, according the Audio Publishers Association’s annual sale and consumer surveys. Young listeners are the fastest-growing segment of the market, with the APA reporting that 53% of teens have listened to an audiobook. Sales of CDs and downloads increased in the year, while sales of cassettes declined. CDs represented 78% of audiobook sales in 2007, with downloads comprising 17%, up from 14% in 2006. The market share of cassettes was 3% in 2007 down from 7% in 2006. The library was the most popular place for consumer to get audiobooks, while retail bookstores was the largest sales channel.

The car continues to be the place where consumers listen to audiobooks the most, with 40% of consumers reporting they listen to audiobooks during long drives and another 18% listen on their commute to work. Twenty-three percent of consumers said listening to audiobooks was a good use of time while doing other activities. According to the survey, mystery/thriller/suspense is the most popular segment, followed by general fiction, science fiction/fantasy, biography/memoir, and classic fiction.
What surprises me is that foreign language audiobooks did not feature in the statistics.

The new iTunes 8 has launched and fans of audiobooks couldn’t be happier. Prior versions of iTunes kept the Audiobooks section under lock and key. The only files that would display in the Audiobooks section on your iTunes or iPod were books purchased from the iTunes music store. Not very handy to people who buy copies of audio books on CD or download them from other sources on the interwebs.

With 8.0, iTunes now allows you to change the Media Kind for files to Audiobook, taking them out of the Music section (where they never belonged in the first place). So score one for iTunes for enabling those who just want to use the software, but exercise choice in where they get their audiobook content.
Read entire article here.

 don’t need to tell you the downside to traffic — heck, we’ve got a whole blog for that. But the upsides are harder to come by. Today, we have the Good Magazine commuting culture consumption chart.

Good compares the length of some hefty works of art — CDs of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the three “Lord of the Rings” films, and the audiobook of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” — to the annual time spent driving to work in major American cities.

The good news is that the only American city with a long enough annual commute to hear the complete unabridged audiobook of “War and Peace” is Los Angeles. The bad news is that, with a total of 72 hours spent in traffic going to work each year, you could even start on “War and Peace” a second time. Or any number of other classics.
Read entire article here

Plot Overview – Audio Books For High School
Jethro Creighton, the protagonist, is young and idealistic when the Civil War begins. At first he thinks the war will be neat, full of marching soldiers and demonstrative patriotism. He learns the realities of war soon enough as he watches his three brothers, his cousin, and his teacher go off to fight. One of his brothers, Bill, chooses to fight for the South in a decision that plagues him for a long time. Jethro and his family follow the progress of the war through the newspapers, but it is hard to tell exactly what is happening. Each day the paper is full of praise or criticism for one of the Union generals, and Jethro has trouble sorting out what is actually going on.
Read more at Sparknotes.

Summary
In 1833, a wild, imposing man named Thomas Sutpen comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, with a group of slaves and a French architect in tow. He buys a hundred square miles of land from an Indian tribe, raises a manor house, plants cotton, and marries the daughter of a local merchant, and within a few years is entrenched among the local aristocracy. Sutpen has a son and a daughter, Henry and Judith, who grow up in a life of uncultivated ease in the northern Mississippi countryside.
Henry goes to college at the University of Mississippi in 1859, and meets a sophisticated fellow student named Charles Bon, whom he befriends and brings home for Christmas. Charles meets Judith, and over time, an engagement between them is assumed. But Sutpen realizes that Bon is actually his own son–Henry and Judith’s half-brother–from a previous marriage which he abandoned when he discovered that his wife had negro blood.
Read more at Sparknotes.