Dream Days: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Dream Days, credited to Kenneth Grahame, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

Dream Days is a collection of children's fiction and reminiscences of childhood written by Kenneth Grahame. A sequel to Grahame's 1895 collection The Golden Age (some of its selections feature the same family of five children), Dream Days was first published in 1898 under the imprint John Lane: The Bodley Head. (The first six selections in the book had been previously published in periodicals of the day—in the Yellow Book, the New Review, and in Scribner's Magazine in the United States.) The book is best known for its inclusion of Grahame's classic story The Reluctant Dragon. Like its precursor volume, Dream Days received strong approval from the literary critics of the day. In the decades since, the book has perhaps suffered a reputation as a thinner and weaker sequel to The Golden Age—except for its single hit story. In one modern estimation, both books "paint a convincingly unsentimental picture of childhood, with the adults in these sketches totally out of touch with the real concerns of the young people around them, including their griefs and rages." Its concern is chiefly with the lands of imagination, ranging from a reconnaisance of men of solitude, a disastrous introduction of a girl to the narrator's private castle in the clouds, derring-do on the high seas, and, of course, an encounter with a dragon. Its concluding bittersweet story bids a reluctant farewell to the dream days of childhood. (Summary by Wikipedia and Catharine Eastman) Read by Catharine Eastman

Recording facts

• Recording title: Dream Days
• Author credits: Kenneth Grahame
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 9
• Combined MP3 track duration: 4:51:48

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• children

Track guide

1. 1: The Twenty-First of October — 27:33
2. 2: Dies Irae — 29:16
3. 3: Mutabile Semper — 32:27
4. 4: The Magic Ring — 34:34
5. 5: Its Walls Were as of Jasper — 31:54
6. 6: A Saga of the Seas — 32:16
7. 7a: The Reluctant Dragon, part 1 — 42:11
8. 7b: The Reluctant Dragon, part 2 — 30:45
9. 8: A Departure — 30:53

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.