Thanksgiving: Free Audiobooks and Free Books to Enhance Thanksgiving

Sometimes during the Thanksgiving weekend, you may want to get away from the television, the relatives, and even the food, for a few moments to yourself. One of the best ways to create quality time for yourself is with a good audiobook, and if that audiobook is free, then, at Thanksgiving or anytime, it is even better.

Of course, you may prefer to read with your eyes, so some good free books, as well as free audiobooks, may be just what you need at Thanksgiving. Free is always good, and these free audiobooks and free books can certainly go on your list of things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

What better topic to consider during Thanksgiving than your spirituality? So, these links to free audiobooks and free books for Thanksgiving concentrate on the religious side of the holiday.

Free Audiobooks for Thanksgiving: Christian Classics Ethereal Library

The "Christian Classics Ethereal Library" is, according to the website (here), "a digital library of hundreds of classic Christian books selected for edification and education," maintained by Calvin College (more), a Christian liberal arts school in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A special part of the CCEL website is its selection of free audiobooks in MP3 format, which you can listen to online, download to your computer to listen on on your computer of MP3 device, or convert to audio files that you can listen to on a CD player.

The selection of free audiobooks in English at CCL includes the complete World English Bible (information page here), the text of which is also available for download. CCEL's free audiobooks include the Autobiography of George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Journal of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, Pilgrim's Progress, The Imitation of Christ, and Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. You can also download Anna Karenina and other works by Leo Tolstoy. My favorite free audiobooks from CCEL are some of the stories of Father Brown, a sort of ecclesiastical Sherlock Holmes, written by G.K. Chesterton, whose wild work, The Man Who Was Thursday, still leaves me almost gasping for breath.

The free audiobooks from CCEL all meet a litmus test of Christian orthodoxy, but they also have the charm of quality works of literature.

Free Audiobooks for Thanksgiving: A few more

You can use your holiday time to learn about other spiritual traditions. If you want to learn about Hinduism, the most popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, is available as a free audiobook here - in English, Spanish, French, or some Indian languages, including the original Sanskrit.

You can listen to a contemporary English translation of the twenty-six chapters of the Dhammapada, the most popular Buddhist scripture, as a free audiobook, read by translator Gil Fronsdal, here.

To hear the Koran or Quran recitation in Arabic and English, you can find free audiobooks here. It is believed by devout Muslims that the Koran cannot be "translated," that it must be experienced in the original Arabic.

Free Books for Thanksgiving: Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Besides audiobooks, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library also includes an extensive collection of classic Christian texts as free books as well. All of the works available as free audiobooks are also available as free books. If you had all of these free books available from CCEL in digital format on paper, you would probably need to add another room to your home. Check the complete list (here).

From the patristic writers (the Church "Fathers") to Billy Graham, with Julian of Norwich, Søren Kierkegaard, Dante (his Divine Comedy is offered as a free book either in English translation or in the original Italian), with a variety of Bible translations and reference works (including the complete Catholic Encyclopedia), the CCEL's free books will challenge and delight students of Christianity for a long, long time.

Free Books for Thanksgiving: Many more

The Internet Sacred Text Archive (here), which is identified as a "quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship" will keep you from running out of free books. As I browsed the list of free books available from CCEL, I found many titles that I had never heard or. As I browse the Internet Sacred Text Archive, I find religions that I have never heard of.

Amazingly, the Internet Sacred Text Archive is a one-person operation, and that one person is named John B. Hare. In his list of Frequently Asked Questions (here), he says that he created the Internet Sacred Text Archive "To do something nice for people."

By the way, you can find here free texts for the three scriptures from other religious traditions for which you have links to free audiobooks in this article: the Bhagavad-Gita (here), the Dhammapada (here), and the Koran (here), which I have listed both times in alphabetical order.

You may also enjoy these articles of mine -

"Thanksgiving: Thousands of Pieces of Free Music to Enhance Your Holiday" - read it
"Thanksgiving: Free Movies to Make Thanksgiving Special" - read it
"Thanksgiving: Free Old Time Radio for a World War II Thanksgiving" - read it
"How to Make a Free Conference Call at Thanksgiving - or Any Day" - read it
"How to Find Free Online Stuffing for Thanksgiving - No Money, No Calories!" - read it