Reading Austen, seeing Frayn; its like watching the Saracens in full flow.

December 16, 2008 3:09 AM

Christmas gift ideas, please! For dad: sports or literature podcasts. For mum: tickets for a play in Leeds/London/Manchester in March/April. Suggestions for either very much appreciated!

Hey team, looking for some gift ideas here. Dad's getting an ipod for Christmas so I'm looking for some podcasts he can subscribe to. He's a big fan of 'classic' literature (more Pepys & Austen than Ishiguro and Pynchon - if it's a Penguin Classic he'll read it), and intelligent rugby and cricket debate. I'd love suggestions of good podcasts discussing matches, teams, books, re-issues, anything with some good chat.

I've seen the two threads about intelligent podcasts and there are some excellent suggestions there. Got anything more book-y? Rugby-y?

For mum I'm after play tickets. We took her to see Much Ado at the National last year and it was ace - looking for something like that in any of the above cities (they've a child in each) so we can have a family gathering in Spring with food and then some cultural magic.

Thanks guys!

posted by Cantdosleepy to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

Best answer: Leeds
There's a version of Don Giovanni at the WYP in March, which might fit the bill. I've not seen it myself, but it's by Kneehigh, so it should be pretty good.

Manchester
Matthew Dunster's doing Macbeth at the Royal Exchange, who've also got a George Bernard Shaw on in April.

London
Marlowe's Dido is on at the National, or there's Spyski at the Lyric which has been getting good reviews if you fancy a comedy. Dancing At Lughnasa is on at the Old Vic or there's Pete Postlethwaite doing Lear the the Young Vic.

And of course there's the entirety of the West End, but you can get their combined output through most theatre ticket aggregator sites, so...
posted by the latin mouse at 6:14 AM on December 16, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks Latin!

West End isn't really our thing, so your other suggestions were great!
posted by Cantdosleepy at 6:25 AM on December 16, 2008

Podcasts:
University of Oxford Podcasts - hit the radio button for "Humanities Division" and you can filter out the other feeds.
Librivox - not exactly podcasts, but people reading books that are in the public domain (i.e. mostly classics).
Haverford Classics Podcasts - if he's also interested in Greek and Latin classics?

Things I googled up:
Some random indexing site
The Classic Tales Podcast - similar to Librivox, only oriented towards classics.

Actually, these classic-books-read-aloud things seem to be a dime a dozen.

Additionally, it seems major universities like Stanford and Yale host a lot of audio/video courses and lectures on iTunes through something called "iTunes U" - I wasn't able to look into this because I don't use iTunes.
posted by softsantear at 6:47 AM on December 16, 2008

I recently got into the lovely Writer's Almanac podcast with Garrison Keillor via an AskMeFi on poetry. Mr. Keillor talks about significant writerly events on that date in history and reads a poem. It's short but quite nice.

I'll also second iTunes U, since it has a great variety of courses available.
posted by fantine at 8:34 AM on December 16, 2008