Welcome to the Christmas season at SteynOnline. If you're short of gift ideas, we have some bargains galore among this year's Steynamite Christmas specials - and as always we will have a full panoply of seasonal programming in the days ahead.
As I've emphasized since we launched The Mark Steyn Club last year, our regular content will always be free to everyone around the world, but we are admitting Club members to a few experimental features which, in the event they're sufficiently non-incompetent, we may eventually make more widely available. Tales for Our Time is one such - my series of monthly audio adventures that so far has presented serializations of H G Wells, Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad, Kipling, Kafka and more. You can find them all here. But I was particularly touched by your reaction to our latest tale, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Midwestern Tim, a first-month Founding Member from, er, the Midwest, writes:
Bravo! Thanks for bringing joy to the past twenty-five mornings. My life is much richer with you adding to its soundtrack.
Felicity, one of our impressive contingent of New South Wales members, agrees:
I absolutely enjoyed this delightful novel as expertly read by you, Mark. You brought the characters to life in a most entertaining way. I was very taken with your music choice for this reading. Lively, stirring, glorious music that matched this story perfectly. One of the best efforts by you so far... Bravo, Mark, on an excellent and highly entertaining reading of this Tale For Our times.
Okay, one more - Josh, a first-weekend Founding Member from Massachusetts:
Hardly a minced oath--neither a diced, chopped, nor filleted one--but in a word Sir Percy would employ a century or so hence: spiffing! A spiffing tale, spiffingly read.
Thank you, Josh. But the festive season is now upon us and spiffingness must come with a red bow and a sprig of holly. So, for the first of our Christmas entertainments this year, I thought we'd spend a little time with a beloved American classic that, as I discuss in my introduction to Part One, in its original iteration begins and ends with two Christmases from the Civil War years. Indeed, the very first sentence of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is a contemplation of a most un-festive festive season:
'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
'It's so dreadful to be poor!' sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
'I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,' added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
'We've got Father and Mother, and each other,' said Beth contentedly from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, 'We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.' She didn't say 'perhaps never,' but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.
And thus we meet, in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, the four March sisters.If you're familiar with movies or musicals of this tale but not the original, we hope you'll enjoy this Christmas sampling of the novel's seasonal scenes over the next three nights. You can either enjoy it as a book at bedtime twenty minutes before you lower your lamp - or pile up all three vignettes and listen to the whole thing on a longish car journey come Monday. I always like reading stories, and I did do a little of it professionally a zillion years ago. So, if these fancies tickle you, we may release them as audio books on CD or Audible a ways down the road. But for the moment it's an exclusive bonus for Mark Steyn Club members.
To hear Part One of Little Women at Christmas, prefaced by my own introduction to the story, please click here and log-in.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club last year, and I'm very touched by all those SteynOnline supporters across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone - all my columns, audio interviews, video content, all our movie features and songs of the week. None of it's going behind a paywall, because I want it out there in the world, being read and being heard and being viewed, and maybe changing an occasional mind somewhere along the way.
If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club radio serials and you're looking for a Yuletide present for someone special, I hope you'll consider our limited-time-only Christmas Gift Membership, which this year includes a personalized Christmas card from yours truly along with a handsomely engraved Tales for Our Time sampler. Aside from our monthly audio adventures, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, SteynPosts, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Priority booking for the second Mark Steyn Club Cruise (following October's sell-out inaugural cruise);
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, including my upcoming tour with Dennis Miller;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Little Women at Christmas but to all the other audio adventures listed below.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like my reading of this Christmas Tale for Our Time or are minded to scoff "Bah, humbug!", then feel free to comment away below. And do join us tomorrow for Part Two of Little Women at Christmas.
For previous Tales for Our Time, click below:
#1: The Tragedy of the Korosko
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#2: The Time Machine
by H G Wells
#3: The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
#4: The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope
#5: The Cat That Walked By Himself
by Rudyard Kipling
#6: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#7: The Rubber Check
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#8: A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
#9: Plum Duff
by Mark Steyn
#10: To Build a Fire
by Jack London
#11: The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
#12: The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
#13: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
#14: The Man Who Would Be King
by Rudyard Kipling
#15: His Last Bow
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#16: Greenmantle
by John Buchan
#17: Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
#18: The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
