Castaway Playaway

A while ago, I was in the library looking to feed my audio addiction. My eyes lit on this attractive cover of Robinson Crusoe, and I grabbed it, since I’d never read it.

It felt strangely light; judging from the shape, it should have contained a bunch of tapes.

I opened it up, after some struggle, and saw that it contained a little calculator-shaped gadget, and a battery in a separate foam slot.

I was annoyed. I felt old and cranky. I thought, “What in the world am I supposed to do with this? It probably goes with some machine I don’t have. Now I have to look around for something else acceptable to listen to?”

Then I made myself calm down and look at it. It was called a Playaway, and it was, of course, a digital version of the recording. It had a place to plug in your own headphones or earbuds (how hygienic), and instructions on how to turn it on and navigate through it. So I decided to check it out.

You may already know about this, but if you don’t, I recommend the format. You don’t have to change tapes or CDs. The navigation is pretty simple. And when I paused it to get out of the car, when I got back and turned it back on, it started right up where I had stopped it.

The only trouble I had was when the battery ran out in the middle, and I didn’t recognize the signs until it had flaked out a few times.

The only major design flaw (and I can deal with it) is with the volume—you can’t decrease it directly. You have to keep pressing the button that increases it until it gets to the loudest (pretty loud) and then jumps down to the softest and starts the climb again.

As for the book itself, I’m happy to have read it, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as The Swiss Family Robinson.

Son of a Witch

I’m listening to an audiobook of Gregory Maguire’s Son of a Witch, sort of a sequel to Wicked (which I haven’t read yet), on which the musical is based. He himself narrates it. I can’t recommend him as a narrator, but I’ll excuse him because I love his writing.

This starts where Wicked ends, apparently—when the witch dies. (In case you haven’t read or seen Wicked, it’s a riff on The Wizard of Oz.) Full of unexpected twists in language, character, and plot, this adult novel blends satisfyingly complex vocabulary and cultural references with the commonest of street talk. It also blends Maguire’s wild inventions with not-very-veiled references to current events.

I also loved the other book of his that I’ve read—Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. He reimagines the story of Cinderella, placing the characters in 17th-century Holland, and turning everything upside down.

I've Come Late to the Philippa Gregory Show

I thought I’d made a new discovery in The Boleyn Inheritance, Philippa Gregory’s historical fiction about Henry VIII’s fourth and fifth wives. Unlike some other efforts I can think of, this is not just a costumed veneer to disguise steamy sex (or a jockstrap ripper, as my mother said once), but what seems like an honest attempt to make history come alive (okay, with some incidental steamy sex).

Of course now that I look at the cover (I listened to it, so I didn’t get the full physical impact of the book), it does look more like a romance than anything else; I can see why I've skipped over this author before, completely unaware.

It turns out that Ms. Gregory is practically an industry already (philippagregory.com), and The Boleyn Inheritance is just the latest in a long line of novels about English history. A reliable source in the book club says that it’s not even her best. I’ll let you know when I read another one. And apparently a movie based on an earlier novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, is coming out in February.

It used to be that all I knew about Henry’s wives was “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.” Whether this book is on target or not (and it seems as though she intends it to be), I’ve got more of an interest in Anne of Cleves and Kathryn Howard, and an urge to read more.

Further Quick Update

The “friend” concept (see yesterday’s post, below) gets a little stretched, here. This is Nora Ephron, after all. She writes (and does other things for) movies. She’s friends with Rosie O’Donnell and knew Craig Claiborne. She lived in a much tonier section of the Upper West Side of Manhattan than I did.

Until I realized how much out of my league she was, though, I listened with a “time to tell my friend to quit whining” attitude. She writes about things that are common to most women over, say, 40—common enough that my reaction is, What else is new?—and with not enough exaggeration to be really funny. I confess I fast-forwarded through much of the Purse essay. I listened to most of the New York apartment in the 1980s essay thinking that I could have written it, until I came to the end. It was like watching all of “When Harry Met Sally” just for Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in the deli—that one scene makes the whole movie worthwhile.

So I’ll keep listening.

Quick Update

I’m listening to I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron. I was pre-primed to enjoy this one.

She wrote “When Harry Met Sally,” for one thing. And another movie I saw a long time ago and enjoyed.*

For another, she correctly titled it I Feel Bad..., not I Feel Badly..., which would have disqualified it immediately for my listening.

For yet another, Ms. Ephron herself narrates it, and has a great New York voice. She sounds like about a hundred people I used to know and like in New York.

And the first disk is all scratched and full of skips (don’t worry, I’ll do something about that before I return it), so a lot of people must have listened already.

And I am liking it, so far.

But here’s the weird thing: she doesn’t read it very well. Ms. Ephron reads as though she doesn’t know what’s coming next, and emphasizes words unexpectedly and ineffectively. Maybe she’s just not a great reader out loud, or maybe she’s self-conscious about reading her own prose, or maybe she’s self-conscious about her neck confessions.

I’m going to finish it and enjoy it, anyway. I’m going to pretend I know her and like her (I suspect I would), and listen to a friend’s effort at narration just because she’s my friend. (Yes, I do have a life.)

I’ll let you know how it goes.


*Just looked it up: “Heartburn.” Also “Sleepless in Seattle,” and “You’ve Got Mail.” And other famous ones, but these are the ones I’ve seen. I’m limited.

Another Really Good Audiobook

I was at the library yesterday and noticed that they have a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. I don't remember who the narrator was, but it looks like the same version I listened to several years ago, and you should run right into the library and borrow it. The text, as I'm sure you all know by now, is compelling (Arthur Golden must have been a woman in a previous life), and the narrator complements it perfectly.

In the meantime, I have resorted to The Lord of the Rings again.

Very Good, Sir

As it turns out, I have a limited tolerance for P.G. Wodehouse.

I picked up an audio copy of The Inimitable Jeeves only to feed my addiction to listening in the car. The version available at the library is the Audio Adventures one, narrated by Jonathan Cecil (not the cover shown).

I've seen the BBC Jeeves, featuring Stephen Fry as the butler, which I enjoyed tremendously, but never read any of the original before.

In this version, the narrator actually improves on the original. If I were reading this in hard copy, I would have thrown it across the room by the second chapter, up to here with the ridiculous, obvious situations. (I know, it's just comedy. I should get a grip.) But Jonathan Cecil has such a plummy British accent (indeed, at least twelve plummy British accents) that it doesn't at all matter what he's saying--I'll listen.

I Listen for Your Protection, Ladies and Gentlemen

Well, another Alexander McCall Smith bites the dust.

Hope springs eternal, because the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series continues to appeal--I just listened to the first one and read the latest one.

So of course I couldn't resist trying the second one in his Professor Dr. Von Igelfeld series, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs. This one, it turns out, leans more toward slapstick, which McCall Smith doesn't do as well as he does subtle tongue-in-cheek, or maybe I just wasn't in the mood. I confess I didn't finish it, didn't even get past the second disk, as a dachshund's third leg was mistakenly amputated. Quite possibly they were all reattached later, as things tend to work out in McCall Smith's worlds, but I didn't have the stomach to listen to the process.

Instead I switched to a book I read in high school: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. The narrator of this version (Michael Emerson, Recorded Books) is passable (though I think I'd prefer someone who sounds older and more Southern) and the prose is as rich as I'd remembered it. You can have it after I'm done with it, but only after.

The Devil in the White City

This is an interim post. I'm on the first CD of the audio version of The Devil in the White City. The information is interesting, and details are plentiful. But the narrator (Scott Brick) seems to imply that everything is really important--especially numbers. Any time he says, for instance, "seven million," he pauses first and then says the number as if he were Ryan Seacrest announcing the bottom three. It gets wearing. I will probably switch to reading this one.

A Sure Thing

What could be more sure than this: an Alexander McCall Smith novel, read by Davina Porter? I hyperventilated as I picked The Sunday Philosophy Club, blurbed as a mystery, off the library shelf.

Davina Porter, as you know, is my all-time favorite narrator, complete with various British accents and a generally good grasp of what's going on in a story and who should sound like what.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, a funny set of mysteries that takes place in Botswana. It's the first series in a long time that makes me long for the next one to come out. And the audio versions are narrated by my other all-time favorite, Lisette Lecat, another master of accents and innuendo.

Imagine my confusion as this unfunny book ambled along, paying little attention to the mystery. It features Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher and amateur sleuth in Edinburgh, and the community she moves among. Isabel is given to long philosophical considerations which require patience on the part of the reader (and, apparently, on the part of the other characters in the book), and which sometimes, though not always, end up having a bearing on the plot.

I stuck with it, however, on the basis of my previous experience with the author and the narrator, and decided at the end that it was a good story—the mystery revived itself, and some humor flashed through, including mentions of crushed-strawberry trousers that have made appearances in other books. I liked it enough that I'm listening to the next one: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. It helps that I know what to expect, and I do enjoy the development of the same cast of characters.

Perhaps some of the charm of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is that it takes place in a country completely different from mine, so much more can be considered funny, or at least surprising; possibly someone from Botswana would consider it tedious and completely expected. [No; I've just finished The Kalahari Typing School for Men, and it is genuinely funny.] I'm looking forward to the next one, in any case; The Good Husband of Zebra Drive is due out in mid-April.

I'm just gullible.

Warning: Spoiler details ahead. Don't read if you care about being surprised.

I've read a few of Lawrence Block's books about Bernie Rhodenbarr, the burglar who also runs a book shop, and they're pretty entertaining. Block's writing doesn't captivate me the way, say, Leslie Glass's does, and his books don't read as literature the way someone like Elizabeth George's do, but his situations merit a second look, and he has a sense of humor. So when I saw the book on CD about his hit man, Keller, I looked forward to a good time.

The author narrates it, and I like his deadpan style. I was both intrigued and repelled by the idea of hit man as protagonist. Block has Keller do his antisocial (to say the least) job within a code of honor, and much of the time he's thinking not about how to kill people, but about his stamp collection or about baseball or about retirement. He has an interesting relationship with his agent, Dot, who seems like a regular person except for the fact that she arranges people's murders.

About three quarters of the way through the book, against his better judgment, Keller gets to know one of his targets and befriends him. Keller develops serious doubts about whether to kill him, and develops a complicated scheme to help the target fake his own death. Then, after the suicide note has been written and all the other preparations made, Keller kills him after all, and it turns out to have been a big con. Keller is uncomfortable with this, and says that he could never be a con man on a regular basis, because it involves betrayal.

But I realized by the end of the book, when Keller has not changed at all, but continues to be an amoral killing machine, that in fact the whole book has been a big con.

I know what you're doing, Lawrence Block, and I don't like it.

Wacko Women in 19th Century Literature

When I learned that book club was discussing Madame Bovary this time, my heart sank. I had already read it--when? high school? college? back when dinosaurs roamed the earth?--and who needed to revisit that old chestnut?

But then two things happened. I picked up the book from the library and discovered that I remembered absolutely nothing from the first chapter. It was all news to me. Then the CD version became available, the one with my all-time favorite narrator, Davina Porter, and I just soaked up the story whenever I got in the car.

I still think Emma Bovary was a twit (which was the only thing I remembered from the first time I read it), but this time everything else hit me--all the different pressures on her, the subtlety with which Flaubert painted her personality and her struggles, and the entertaining cast of supporting characters.

By the end, I was horrified at the devastation that her misdeeds had wrought (though not without help from some other players in the cast), and kept having to remind myself that it was only a book, and that I didn't have to be depressed about the desperation of her life.

Horror Story; or, They Sucked the Life Out of This One

The book on CD that I mentioned in the first post was Bram Stoker's Dracula, narrated by Alexander Spencer and Susan Adams. I was looking forward to it, since I'd never read it before.

Alexander Spencer's narration starts out all right--a little affected, but listenable. But by the middle of the second CD, when protagonist Jonathan Harker fully realizes his danger, Spencer gets hysterical and unbelievable.

Then, toward the end of the second CD, the narration switches to Harker's fiancee back in London, played by Susan Adams, who, as I mentioned below, has a high-pitched, breathy voice with a suspect British accent.

I will obviously have to read this in hard copy. The writing is great--it just can't stand up against the voices.

Welcome!

I thought this was worth a try.

Probably just like you, I read a lot, and listen to many books on tape and CD. And I really hate wasting time (unless I choose to). Just today I got through the second CD of an audiobook, and I realized that I was not going to be able to stand that narrator. (More on that in a separate post.)

Luckily, the lovely staff at the Bakerville Library keeps a steady stream of material flowing just for us, and I'll stop by and try something else instead.

But what if someone had warned me? What if someone had nudged me and said, "Psst. If you don't like high-voiced, breathy female narrators, or maniacally emotional narrators of either gender, you might want to stay away from that recording of Dracula." I could have tried something else instead (and in fact I did have an alternative in my hand, before I made my decision), and possibly not wasted my time.

When I have time, I'll post reviews of what I've been reading and let you know what I think of the book or the audio. You can leave comments.

If you'd like to post a review of your book exploits (and I'd love it if you would), please e-mail me (jauclair AT snet.net) with your review, and I'll put it into a post. Please explain exactly why you liked or didn't like the book, so that other people can get the most out of your review. That way I'll know that you happen to like high-voiced, breathy female narrators with fake British accents, and I'll know whether I'm going to like that tape as much as you did.

Or--here's an idea! You can use this space to ask for recommendations for books and audiobooks to take on vacation.

I'm very interested to hear what everyone thinks!


P.S. As with all blogs, comments are subject to my approval. I will go ahead and delete any that are offensive in any way.