Download 33 1/3: Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (Free Version) (Unabridged) by Mark Polizzotti; free audio book at Audible.com

You can download and burn it to CD for the Dylan freak in the family, perhaps wrapping it along with a copy of this review at Playback. (Amazon reviewers give it more traditional reviews.)

You have to register and download the Audible Download Manager and have/put iTunes on your computer, and you'll be asked to choose how you usually want to listen to audio (including "burn CDs"), so there's a bit of hassle involved. But you don't have to give credit card information.

This is a book from the 33 1/3 series by Continuum, small, short books entirely about one beloved album. (Titles published so far, and pending, range from 1967 to 1999.)

Series editor David Barker, who blogs at 33 1/3, started all this by making a list of his 50 favorite classic albums and emailing writers, musicians and unclassifiable others, inviting them to write a book about one they especially loved.

For Dylan fan Mark Polizzotti, the Director of Intellectual Property at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts whose other works include a biography of Surrealist Andre Breton and many translations, writing this must have been great fun. He titles the first chapter "Vegetables and Death."

Barker has excerpted some of the previous volumes in 33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 1 and Volume 2 (which includes some of this Dylan book).

And he's still looking to cover more special albums.

Would you like to write a book? You may be interested to know that, as of RIGHT NOW, we're accepting proposals for future 33 1/3 books, to be published in 2010 and 2011. Please read the information below carefully - I've tried to outline the process as clearly as possible. You can send in one proposal, about one album.

Details at that link. The deadline for submission of proposals is midnight on Dec. 31 -- two weeks from today.