Hello and welcome to Story Time for Grownups. I'm Faith Moore, and this season we're reading

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Each episode, I'll read a few chapters from the book, pausing from time

to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built-in

notes. So brew a pot of tea, find a cozy chair,

and settle in. It's story time.

Hi everyone. welcome back. Did you catch the trailer? I hope you did. If you didn't, pause me right now. Go into your podcast feed. Find the trailer for the 2025 Christmas Spectacular. Play it and then come back. Okay, did you do that? Great. Hopefully now we have all heard the trailer, and I am so excited and thrilled to announce again, if you've listened to the

trailer, that our Christmas book this year is going to be A Little Princess by Francis Hodgson

Burnett. Now, some of you may be thinking is that, in fact, a Christmas

book? And the answer is kind of no, although it is very, very Christmassy in atmosphere and

vibe. And also, Christmas does occur in the book, so I think it counts, but really what we're going to do,

and I said this a little in the trailer, and I will talk much more about it in our intro episode

for the Christmas Spectacular. But just to get you prepared, really what we're doing on

Storytime for Grownups this year is having a Victorian Christmas. And part of a Victorian Christmas was a shift toward children and

family. It was really about family all of a sudden in a way that it hadn't been before. We talked

about this a little bit when we were talking about a Christmas Carol, and I'll say a little bit more in our

intro episode, but basically because there were more ways for people

to connect with family members that were far away, things like the railroad made it so that you

could actually visit your family, but also a really improved mail system, like the postal system,

meant that you could write letters back and forth very quickly, send cards around the holidays,

that kind of thing. So people were more

connected to each other than they had been in the past. And that meant that Christmas time became,

for a variety of reasons, including what I just said, a time to be with family or a time to check in

...