More Books I've Heard

I've listened to a good number of books since October. I stopped obsessing about writing down each title as well as some of the other information, but I remember some of them.

I tried a few Steven King books. Blaze (written under the nom de plume Richard Bachman) struck me as a modern Of Mice and Men. It was fascinating as a tale, and the reader (Ron McLarty) did a magnificent job. Carrie, read by Sissy Spacek, was much more powerful as a novel than as a movie, and Spacek is a fantastic reader – perhaps my favorite female voice over all. I later had the pleasure of hearing her read To Kill a Mockingbird. I also listened to King’s The Gunslinger, but despite a superb reading, I didn’t find the book to be my cuppa.

Sun Tzu’s Art of War was fascinating. With the wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's fascinating to listen to a voice from the past tell us exactly why we're doing such a bad job with our military.

Homer’s Iliad has to have been one of the most boring things I've ever been exposed to. I imagine that the Odyssey is much more captivating, but the Iliad is a long laundry list of battles and soldiers interrupted by several different ways to describe evisceration and death. If it were shorter, then it would have at least been ... well, shorter. I made it thru 5 of the 17 discs.

Mary Wollstencraft’s Frankenstein was a great reading, but I found the book quite frustrating. Dr F is basically a jerk, and his 'monster' is truly a hero who should have been spared great suffering. It felt as if the author didn't have empathy for her creation, sympathisizing instead with the man who abandons his baby in a revulsion. I persevered, but it was hard to listen to the whole story.

David Baldacci’s Total Control was very exciting. It's about a conspiracy to bomb a plane and to subvert the economy, and it was written before 9/11, so it must have sounded a bit far-fetched at the time.

A friend of mine, LJ Ganser, was the reader for Nicholas Sparks’s A Bend in the Road. I loved the reading but ended up hating the book. It's a lot like a Mary Higgins Clark novel where a perfectly good plot is destroyed by the intrusion of supernatural elements. As for the Sparks book, even tho the writing was a bit treacly, I was in tears at the end of the book.

Recently I finished listening to all three biographical or autobiographical books by Rick Bragg:
Ava's Man is an awesome tale about the author's grandfather, a carpenter who makes moonshine on the side and who fathers 7 children. Bragg does an amazing job bringing to life the world of the rural South in the 1900s-1930s.
All Over but the Shoutin'is an account of Bragg's grandmother, Ava. It runs from about the 1920s to the 90s and includes a good deal of information about many of Bragg's other relatives.
The Prince of Frogtown is my favorite Bragg book. This one focuses mainly on Bragg's father, a soldier and alcoholic who once saved baby Rick's life during a croup incident by shoving enough salt down his throat to induce vomiting. The book alters between reminiscences of Bragg's father as well as a fond examination of the boy who becomes Bragg's stepson. I plan to listen to this book again when Emmett and I drive to Minnesota this summer.

I've continued to devour anything by Alexander McCall Smith. He writes the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books as well as the Sunday Philosophy Club series and a few free-standing books like 44 Scotland Street. They're all wonderful, and there is something about his writing that is so deliberate that it makes it feel like you have to exhale, slow down, and smell a few flowers.

One advantage audiobooks have over their paper equivalents is that occasinally you get an amazing reader. No one holds a candle to Oliver Wyman. His readings of the Tim Dorsey series are truly hysterical, perhaps as much fun as the material itself. Wyman’s gifts are so amazing that I had to re-check the cover of one of the books to make sure that there wasn’t actually a female reader handling some of the voices. Wow! As for the actual novels: Dorsey, a former newspaper writer in Florida, writes about his home state with reverence that you wouldn't expect to find in books that follow the life of a serial killer.