CategoryAudiobook Reviews

As part of preparation for painting a room, along with spackling, sanding, choosing paint, and caulking, I looked around for an audiobook to listen to. A quote from Ron Charles, fiction critic at The Washington Post, caught my attention:  “My daughter just graduated from college, but her education won’t be complete till she’s studied Waldman’s brilliant taxonomy of homo erectus brooklynitis...

Snapper was recommended by Nancy Pearl who disagreed with the NPR reviewer who said Indiana was a major character in the novel. The NPR reviewer was right. It is set in southern Indiana, particularly in Evansville, but the countryside, rivers in the area, and Bloomington make it into the story. The narrator is Nathan Lochmueller who observes and records detailed information about birds around the...

This was reviewed favorably by Tony; the comment I recall was that the author’s writing was so good that he often read beyond the spot where he intended to stop. That was what I liked so much about this book too. I listened to it over a long period of time as family was visiting for the month of June, including a highly entertaining 2 1/2 half year old grandson. On the occasions when I...

Once again I am bowled over by A.S. Byatt. The three stories in this collection are gems, with fully realized characters and lovely plot twists that make you smile just at the lowest moment. Of course each has a connection to Matisse that is clever and satisfying and makes you want to rush to a museum to see a Matisse exhibition. First, and I think my favorite is "Medusa's Ankles,"...

Listening to Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited is such a pleasure. It made me happy toiling away in the gym or the kitchen; in fact, I cleaned out some kitchen drawers so I could keep listening. His voice, which conveyed all the characters perfectly without unnatural-sounding stresses and his plummy accent are such a treat.  SPOILER ALERT: The characters are irresistible and...

I saw this described somewhere as a Dave-Eggers-wild-ride-so-hang-on-tight book and found that to be pretty accurate (though I've not read any of his other books).  At first Alan Clay, the main character, seems to be a sad sack, a businessman from a bygone era, successful at Schwinn bikes, having presided over the moving of manufacturing oversees. We meet him as he arrives in Jeddah...

This is the second in the Ruth Galloway mystery series; the first was The Crossing Places, which I read in December. Ruth is an overweight forensic archeologist at a university in Norfolk, specializing in bones and thus is called on for help by police in dating bones that turn up. Three key characters in both books are Ruth, Harry, the brusque policeman she helps, and Cathbad, a cloak-wearing...