Audio Book

Audiobook: The Lady of the Rivers

1 Comment

by Philippa Gregory
Read by Bianca Amato
ages: adult

So, I have loved Philippa Gregory in the past. The intrigue, the sweeping historical drama, the women behind the kings. And, this one has such a pretty cover (though I like the hardcover one better). So, I got the audiobook and started to listen to it, hoping for that same grandiose, sweeping world that I love from Gregory.

And what I got was a petulant, whining brat.The story is of Jacquetta, a French girl married to the Duke of something or other, who wants her for her “powers” (they never really manifest into anything, and peter away after a while; it would have been better had they gone somewhere and did something). They never consummate their marriage, and when he dies, she ends up with his squire, Richard Woodhouse (I think. I never really cared that much.) From there they go to England, have tons of babies, serve the king (who is a total douche), and then I gave up.

I do have to admit that perhaps a lot of my feelings about this have to do with the person reading the book. She. Drove. Me. Batty. Seriously. What may have come off in print as strong, or at least caring, came off as petulant and whiny. And the plot was moving a glacially slow pace; nothing happens for pages and pages and pages. (I checked the print book: I bailed at 190 pages.) I felt the plot spinning in a hamster wheel: going around and around but never moving forward. (I think reading MG/YA books have completely spoiled me for long, complex, SLOW plots. I can’t stand them.)

On the other hand, maybe the 15th century just isn’t as interesting or sexy as the Tudors are, and there’s nothing that Gregory could have done to make it interesting. Which is a distinct possibility.

Either way, I couldn’t hack this one.

Audiobook: Sports From Hell

Leave a comment

by Rick Reilly
read by Mike Chamberlain
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Not content with being a writer for Sports Illustrated or ESPN — or perhaps it was bored with being a writer of normal sports — Rick Reilly decided to go on a quest: over the course of three years, he (and his lovely researcher/girlfriend, TLC) searched the world over for the World’s Dumbest Sport.

And because he’s a journalist, he felt the need to share it with the world, as well.

The sports range from the pretty cool (women’s football), to the retro (the Jart; remember those? If not, you didn’t grow up in the 70s and 80s), to the weird (ferret legging; that’s what he’s doing in the picture up there) to the “I wanna try” (Zorbing; seriously looks like fun), to the eye-rolling (his chapter-long rant on baseball), to the certifiably insane (bull poker). Not to be outdone, there’s a chapter on drinking games (did you know there’s a world series of beer pong?), on the world championship Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament, and the Finnish “sport” of Saunaing (or whatever they call it).

It’s a completely useless book — there’s really nothing of value in here, unless you want to impress people with your synonyms for vomit — but it’s entertaining. Or, at least, it tries very hard to be.

See, Reilly’s use of similes drove me completely batty. Literally. I laughed at them at first, but as the book wore on, I grimaced and eventually rolled my eyes. I wish I had the actual book in front of me, so I could write a few of them down; they were literally that bad. And all over the place. Which I found highly distracting.

The second distracting thing was Mike Chamberlain as a reader. He only had two
“voices”, and he would alternate between the two of them. And I have to admit that his inflection grated on me after a while; it was nice and chatty at first, but eventually, I kind of wanted to smack him.

Still, it wasn’t enough for me to give up the rubber-neck value of the book: the sports were so bad, I had to see what Reilly would find out next.

Oh, and for the record, the dumbest sport: chess boxing.

Audiobook: Castle in the Air

1 Comment

by Diana Wynne Jones
Read by Jenny Sterlin
ages: 12+

Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Howl’s Moving Castle

Abdullah is a mediocre carpet merchant in Zanzib, living a terribly boring life. Sure, his daydreams are exciting, full of princesses and beautiful gardens, but his life? It’s just selling carpets and dealing with his father’s first wife’s relations. That is, until a stranger comes by and sells Abdullah a magic carpet.

The first night he has it, he goes to sleep on it and wakes up in the garden of Flower-in-the-Night, a smart, yet naive (and very sequestered) princess. Abdullah, of course, falls instantly in love. Everything was supposed to be happily ever after, but a powerful djinn kidnaps Flower-in-the-Night, and Abdullah’s life suddenly gets more complicated. There’s a cranky genie, a trip to Ingary, falling in with a bitter Strangian soldier, and finally, a castle in the air where Abdullah has to save 30 princesses from their fate of being brides of an evil djinn.

It’s the perfect kind of fairy tale (which is, of course, what DWJ is known for): romance, adventure, humor, magic; sweeping grand panoramas that captivate you fully. No, Howl and Sophie aren’t in this one (well, hardly at all), but that’s really just fine: Abdullah, the pompous flatterer and coward that he is, made up for that. I was constantly rolling my eyes at him — the way that Sterlin made him sound was quite grating at first — but that didn’t mean I didn’t like him. On the contrary, he was quite enjoyable to go on an adventure with, even if he was lovesick and heartily silly.

Sterlin (aside from the grating-at-first Abdullah) was a stellar reader, doing voices for all the different characters and keeping me entertained throughout the story. I’m glad I picked this one as an audiobook; it was definitely an enjoyable way to spend a commute.

Audiobook: Who’s Your Caddy?

2 Comments

by Rick Reilly
read by Grover Gardner
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Yes, this is a sports book. Not just a sports book, but a GOLF book. I don’t play golf. (Hubby does. Sort of. Well, he goes golfing about once a year with his dad.) I don’t follow golf. I do know you hit a little ball with a stick and the lowest score wins. But that’s about it.

So, why the heck did I decide to listen to a golf book?

Well…. because I was in the mood for something completely different (you don’t get much more different than golf in my world), and because I think sports writing, when it’s good, is a lot of fun to read/listen to.

And you know what? This is some seriously good sports writing.

I was told, however, that because this is a sports book that’s 10 years old, it’s hideously out of date, and I shouldn’t be reading it. I didn’t care. I loved every minute Grover Gardner was talking at me (lovely, lovely reading voice, that man; I think a good part of why I loved this was because his reading was so phenomenal).

The basic schtick: Reilly — who writes for Sports Illustrated — decided that the best way to get to know golf — to really know golf —  is to be a caddy. So, he managed to finagle (con?) some of the best (and worst, and well, in-between) golf players into letting him caddy (or “loop” as I learned) a tournament for each of them. It’s basically one story after another of all the people he looped for, from Deepak Chopra and Donald Trump to Jack Nicklaus and David Duval, not to mention Jill McGill on the LPGA tour. Lest you wonder: yes, he did caddy at the Masters, but no, not for one of the top players. Yes, he did ask Tiger Woods (this was back when Tiger was really hot stuff; I mean, I’ve heard of him and I don’t know squat about the sport), but he turned Reilly down. And no, Reillly wasn’t any good. Sucked at being a caddy. Though I got the impression that he’s a pretty good golfer.

So, what made this go great? I laughed. Seriously laughed. Reilly made me interested in and got me to care about a sport that I know nothing about and will probably never pick up. Sure he dropped terms and names like nobody’s business, but it didn’t matter, because he was telling a story, and he knows how to tell a story in a way that will get even the most clueless readers interested in his subject.

No, I probably won’t pick up golf clubs (though he did kind of make me think maybe I could give a go, just to see what the fuss is all about). But I am going to hunt down more of Reilly’s stuff. He is really that good.

Audiobook: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

11 Comments

How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks
by Kathleen Flinn
Read by Marguerite Gavin
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

(Also a post for Weekend Cooking.)

I adored Flinn’s first book, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, and was quite excited to tackle her next book.

Home from Paris and Le Cordon Bleu, author Flinn is wondering what to do with her life. She really has no interest in owning a restaurant, and is getting tired of people asking her when she’s going to open one (and on a similar line, when are she and her husband going to have a baby…). Then, in a grocery store, inspiration hits: she sees a woman whose grocery cart is full of processed foods, and the reason? Because she doesn’t feel she can cook. It’s intimidating. She doesn’t know how. It’s too hard. Thus, the Project is born: Flinn finds nine volunteers all who are generally insecure about cooking, and persuades them to come in for a series of lessons on cooking basics. Flinn’s goal: to give them the skills and confidence to cook and turn away from fast food and processed food.

I’ll tell you straight up: I learned a lot from this book. A lot. And that was listening to the audio version. I need to go out and purchase the book, so I can have it as a reference in my kitchen. She really does go over all the basics: knife skills, chicken, meat, vegetables, braising, roasting, soup, salad, vinaigrette… it’s all in there. And Flinn is a good teacher. I’m sure her nine volunteers learned a lot from the classes, but she was able to convey what was taught — with a few side trips, to Rome and some fancy dinner parties to raise money — through her words in a way that engaged and interested me. I ended up thinking about this as a practical Michael Pollan: while he spouts ideals (and good ones at that), Flinn actually gives people the tools to use in putting those ideals — eating real food, cooking with real ingredients — to use.

The woman who read the book grated on me at first; she has weird pauses in the middle of sentences that bothered me. Also: listening to recipes being read aloud isn’t that great, so I ended up skipping those. Even with those shortcomings (and they’re not even Flinn’s fault), it’s the best kind of food book: useful, interesting, yummy-sounding with dozens of good recipes that are easy to use. Hopefully, it’ll do for you what it did for me: inspire you to cook.

Audiobook: The Spellman Files

1 Comment

by Lisa Lutz
Read by Ari Graynor
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I first heard about the Spellmans through Jen Robinson who blogged about them a few years ago. She mentioned that they’re for people who love quirky characters, and since I’m all for that, I stuck it on my TBR list and let it sit.

One of the things I’m doing through my audiobook listening is going back through my age-old lists and finding ones that have been sitting there forever to listen to. This one definitely qualifies.

Twenty-eight year old Isabel Spellman grew up working in her parent’s PI buisness. Which means that she’s excellent at stakeouts, can pick a lock with the best of them, and has absolutely no respect for the privacy of others (yes, she really did run a credit check on ex-boyfriend #6). However, when she meets Daniel (ex-boyfriend #9), things get a little, well, sticky. After he breaks up with her, she decides she’s had Enough. But, before she’s allowed to quit the family buisness, her parents give her a 12-year-old cold case to “solve”. And, before that’s solved, a case closer to home pops up, one that may be the most important of Isabel’s life.

Okay, that makes it sound all dark and dangerous, and honestly: it’s not. This book is mostly an introduction to the Spellmans and all their quirkiness (why, yes, Mom does hire out someone to stake out Isabel, not to mention bugging her apartment). Mom and Dad don’t really play much of a role (except as ominous yet loveable background players); the more important figures in Isabel’s life are her lawyer brother David, her Uncle Ray, and her teenage sister Rae. Between the four of them — and the back-and-forthing they do — they drive what plot there is.

And there really isn’t much of one. It didn’t seem to matter, though: I was captivated by Isabel’s voice (and Graynor’s reading of her), her observations of her ex-boyfriends, the cases, and her family. It was a lot of fun to listen to.

That said, there is one glitch: I didn’t realize until the very end (when the credits said “adapted by”) that this was an abridged novel. Nooooo! Now I’m going to have to get the book and read it: I want to know what I missed!

In spite of that, it was quite an entertaining way to spend my time.

Audiobook: Bossypants

3 Comments

by Tina Fey
Read by the author
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I really don’t know why Tina Fey felt that she needed to write a memoir. Perhaps it’s because this is the last season of 30 Rock (I hope; I really can’t imagine the show without Alec Baldwin), and she wanted to try her hand at writing… something not television/movie related. That said, it’s a good book. She goes pretty much chronologically through her life: from a childhood in West Philadelphia, to college at the University of Virginia, to her time in Chicago with Second City, to her years at Saturday Night Life, to 30 Rock. In there, she fits her marriage and birth of her first child as well.

Like most comedy, it’s uneven. Some parts are horribly hilarious (like her Doomed Honeymoon), some parts she just lectures (about sexism in politics, for example) and the jokes fall flat (but perhaps they were meant to). That said, it was entertaining enough — Fey’s self-deprecating style is really pretty funny — to keep me sitting in the car listening long after I had gotten to where I was going. My favorite sections were about the development and production of 30 Rock, perhaps because I’ve been a fan of the show since it started. But, I found that’s where the biggest laughs were for me.

A note on the audiobook: on the one hand, I really enjoyed hearing Fey read her book. She did voices (her Alec Baldwin is really quite good), and we got the audio clip of her first Sarah Palin Saturday Night Live. She did mumble on occasion which bugged me until I checked the print version and realized that she was mumbling the asides. But she kept saying “check the pdf for this picture. Really. You won’t regret it.” I never did. I listen to the books in the car, and I’m not going to take the CDs out just so I can look at a picture. I did, however, check them out in the print edition. And they were, as she promised, quite hilarious.

So would I recommend the audio book for this one? Well, yes… if you’re like me and willing to check out the print edition for the extra laughs.

Audiobook: Water for Elephants

9 Comments

by Sarah Gruen
Read by David LeDoux and John Randolph Jones
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

It’s no secret that I don’t do well with books on the bestseller list. And so it was with much trepidation that I picked this one up. (I say “much trepidation” but really it was curiosity and a sense that maybe the hype had died down…)

For the three of you who haven’t read it: it’s the Depression and Jacob Jankowski is a veterinary student at Cornell, just about to sit for his last final exams when his parents were killed in a tragic accident. This throws Jacob completely off course, and one fateful night, he jumps a train. It turns out to be the train for the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. And in one fell swoop  — and for three and half tumultuous months — Jacob’s life is changed.

First and foremost, this is a circus book. And it’s not a pretty picture. There’s Uncle Al, the ring master, who is vain and malicious. August, the animal trainer who is alternately charming and violent. And because these two are in charge, the whole environment of the circus is not healthy, to say the least. Jacob falls in with a dwarf named Walter; the relationship is rocky at first, but eventually they form a close friendship. And he falls in love with the lovely Marlena, the star of the Liberty Horse act, and August’s wife.

But where do the elephants come in? I have to admit that I was a tad disappointed there; the jacketflap (do audiobooks have jacketflaps?) implied that there was a bond between Jacob, Marlena and Rosie, the elephant the Benzini Brothers show picks up soon after Jacob joins on. But, I never really felt it. Sure, the elephant was the catalyst for much of what happened in the book, but really? I wish Jacob had done more, interacted more with the elephant. It seemed to me he spent much of his time running around, baffled as to what the heck was going on. And I did feel quite cheated by the climax. It was an honest twist, but I think Gruen misled us on purpose, which always gets my hackles up.

What really made the book for me was the present day segments, when Jacob was “ninety or ninety-three.” I have a friend who is currently studying gerontology, and keeps me up to date on her studies. Because of that, I had more sympathy for Jacob’s situation, being in a nursing home, and his concerns about getting old. He was alternately a sweetheart and a firecracker, and I adored him.

That said, I think that audio was the best way for me to experience this one. Both the narrators were excellent (LeDoux read the young Jacob; Jones the older one), and because of that I was able to really “see” the book in a way I don’t think I would have, had I read it.

I’m not sure if my good experience with this one will change my opinion on bestsellers. But I can say that this one was worth my time.

Audiobook: The Eyre Affair

5 Comments

by Jasper Fforde
read by Susan Duerden
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

When I finished Jane Eyre a few years (well, five) back, someone told me that now I needed to read The Eyre Affair. I said okay, and stuck it on the TBR list, and then promptly forgot about it.

As I finished up my last audio book, I was looking through my old lists for a good audio book to read, and this one stood out. Why not give Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next a try?

I can safely say I’m torn about this novel. On the one hand, it was weirdly brilliant: why not create an alternative world, where in 1985 there’s time travel and interesting inventions; where planes aren’t used for commercial travel, and there’s a questionably moral corporation — Goliath — basically running England, and where the ending to Jane Eyre is that she goes off with her cousin to India. In this world, there are people called Litera Techs, SpecOps-27, who deal with crimes on literature. It’s a pretty mundane job, for the most part, especially for Crimean War veteran (the Russians and the English have been fighting this war for more than a century) Thursday Next. Then evil mastermind Archeron Hades steals the manuscript for Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit and all hell breaks loose, and it’s up to Thursday to put it right.

The other really brilliant thing in this book was the names: from Archeron (and his brother Styx) Hades, to Thursday’s partners Victor Analogy and Bowden Cable and her ex-boyfriend Landon Parke-Lane (not to mention the Goliath head honcho Jack Schitt. Yes, that is exactly how you say it.) they are all brilliant. No, I didn’t get all the British references, but I got enough to find it amusing.

But, in the end, that’s all the book had: a great premise and some funny literary illusions. It took much too long in set up, getting around to the point of the novel; why was it called the Eyre Affair, when it was such a small part of the whole novel? I enjoyed the Shakespeare debates, but felt they didn’t really serve much purpose in the overall arc of the story. In fact, I could say that for a lot of the novel: it took too much time building the world, which was only sometimes fascinating, and then it took too much time wrapping up (and setting up the next one) in the end. It was just… too long.

A note about the reading: it was quite good. I probably had more patience for this book in audio form because Duerden was such a capable reader, creating a world for me with her voice that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. (Plus it helped that she tackled both the Welsh and the French with aplomb, something which I couldn’t have done on my own.)

So, cut 150 or so (just guessing here; a few discs would have been nice), and perhaps it’d be a really great novel.

Audiobook: At Home

6 Comments

by Bill Bryson
read by the author
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

When Bill Bryson and his wife moved back to England, they purchased a rectory built in 1851. I’m not sure if he thought much of it when he first moved in, but after living there a while, he started thinking about how little he knew about his house, and the history that surrounded it. Thank heavens for his curiosity, because out of it was born this book:  a fascinating history of the world without leaving the home.

Initially, that sounds a bit dry as well as overly ambitious: how can one tell the history of the world through the house? The short answer: you can’t. What you can tell is a general history of how homes came to be what we find them today in Great Britain and the U. S. Bryson ends up focusing on those two countries, as well as mainly on the 19th-century, giving the book a much less ambitious perspective. And because Bryson is a thorough researcher and a masterful writer, this book — which is stuffed full of facts and people you can’t hope to begin to keep straight — is downright fascinating. From the history of how tea came to be England’s national drink, to the Eiffel Tower, to indoor plumbing and the telephone, to the rise of the middle class, to sexual repression in Victorian England: this book seriously has it all.

I listened to this one on audio, which possibly wasn’t the best way to interact with this book. (That, and Bill Bryson sounds nothing like I thought he would.) I kept wanting to flip back chapters, to reread earlier passages, to find earlier references to the people and circumstances that he refers back to. He does do a well enough job reminding the reader about who or what things were, but I still wanted to go back and see it for myself. That said, the information itself was fascinating. (I also wish I could have marked things, because for the life of me, I can’t remember half of what I heard.)

It’s fascinating not just because history is fascinating, but because Bryson makes it so. It’s  his snide asides (said in a dead-pan voice, so we know that he’s poking fun), and his brilliant observations, and the sheer amount of research that he did to write this book that really makes this book worth reading.

Then again, I’m not sure Bryson can write a book that isn’t worth reading.