CategoryAudiobook Reviews

This very pleasant audiobook set in the 1930s was written by a homesick British woman living in California. She later wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Cassandra Mortmain is a 17-year-old girl writing her diary in practice for becoming a novelist. She was living in a Jane Austen world: she lives in the beautiful English countryside with her family in a ruined castle with no money coming in...

The narrator of Sweet Tooth is Serena Frome, telling the story of her time employed by MI5 in the early 1970s. She was the pretty daughter of a bishop, pushed by her mother to go to Cambridge to study maths, though she had so little interest in it she spent all her time reading fiction from Valley of the Dolls to Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt. At age 21 she has a summer affair with a man of 54...

When I read a review on Reading Matters of this lovely book, I wondered how much the movie that I have seen more than once departed from the book. Very little, it turns out. The movie captured much of the charm of the book and had the advantage of the visual beauty. The book was written in 1922 and tells the story of four unacquainted women, each struggling with their own unhappiness, all...

It is the dazzling skill in creating a broad range of scenes that characterizes this book for me. But first, a broad outline. The narrator is the son of a Vietnamese peasant and a priest who of course never acknowledged him. He writes in the form of a confession in an isolation cell over the course of a year.  We first meet him when he is the lieutenant of a South Vietnamese General who is...

After listening to the wonderful audiobook narrator Juliet Stevenson read Mrs. Dalloway, I checked out the print version. Though I found listening to the stream-of-consciousness novel to be an appropriate way to experience this book, I wanted to read parts of it too. Although summarizing this book reduces it to dry ideas, still I must. The events take place within the course of a day, beginning...

A book that includes historical figures of interest among the characters, has a gripping, multi-generational plot, and that engenders interest in scientific topics you didn't know you could enjoy is a terrific book. It begins with the fictional Henry Whitaker whose father was a lowly but talented gardener for Joseph Banks as he was collecting plants for Kew Botanic Garden. Henry was secretly...