Once again Nina Stibbe has made me a happy listener. This is her third book, this one about Lizzie, now 15, getting a job working in a nursing home in the 1970s. (She was 10 when she tried to find a husband for her mother in Man at the Helm.) She applied for the job in order to be able to buy her preferred kind of shampoo and in her interview convinced the woman who hired her (always called...
Often a non-fiction audiobook doesn't work well when the factual material requires slow reading and some repetition. In this case the material is presented through lively stories, most often about individual people. Their experiences illuminate the dizzying changes that have come to China. The author began reporting on China for the Chicago Tribune in 2005, and from 2008 to 2013 wrote...
Oh, what a wonderful book and so beautifully read by Michael Kitchen. I miss it already. Last year I listened to Our Man in Havana and loved it. This one is very different and even more admirable. It has a pleasingly complicated plot with twists as painful as the Guy de Maupassant short story “The Necklace.” In that story a couple makes a great sacrifice to replace a necklace they...
Barbara Pym, a British writer who flourished in the 1950s, is regarded as the quintessential writer of British social comedies and according to an article in The Guardian, one of the most amusing. I have seen her name mentioned in the same paragraph with Jane Austen more than once. So I chose Excellent Women, described as perhaps her best book. Despite being a fan of British women writers...
This audiobook gave me almost 13 hours of pleasant listening as I walked, cooked, or pulled weeds. What a treat. Jane Austen has such nice insights into human behavior and writes so pleasingly. The contrast of Elinor's sense to Marianne's sensibility is appealing and the sisters' devotion to each other is reminiscent of Elizabeth and Jane Bennett in Pride and...
In April this year came news of the escape of Inky, an octopus in New Zealand, from his enclosure, who went down a 50-metre drainpipe and on to the sea. Over the course of a week I heard or read this story several times, told with great interest and much respect for the determination and ability of octopuses to escape. I learned that the plural of octopus is not octopi, as many would guess. This...
When I put this on my TBR list, I noted that Tony found it devastating for a humorous book. It does take a light-hearted approach to the disturbing story of Harriet. It is presented in the style of that old TV show, “This is Your Life,” and tells Harriet’s life by recounting moments throughout her life that are not in chronological order. SPOILER ALERT! As is often the case I...
An epistolary novel made up of letters of recommendation written by an academic in the creative writing department at Payne University is going to be funny and cynical. And this one filled the bill. Jason Fitger, the put-upon professor of a department that is sinking in importance in the eyes of the university administration has much to complain about. He also must allude to his own various bad...
In an effort to displace the thoughts that our political landscape have put in my head, I listened to David Brooks' book about character. The introduction assured me I was in the right place: I was born with a natural disposition toward shallowness. I now work as a pundit and columnist. I'm paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about...
This 2010 Miles Franklin award winning book is a "semi-sequel" to The Broken Shore which I read in 2012. Truth was satisfying in the end, but I found there were many references that I wasn't getting, an experience I don't remember having with The Broken Shore. The main character, Steven Villani, head of homicide in Melbourne, has many demands on...