Author: Isabel Miller
Readers: Janis Ian and Jean Smart

Also available directly from Janis Ian’s webstore.

GRAMMY Award nominated for “Best Spoken Word”

Short Review: Touching lesbian love story, set in early 1800s and read beautifully. The two readers each read the portion of the story told from a single point of view. It really works.

Long Review: Originally self-published in 1969, this love story is set in the early 1800s in New England. It tells the story of the love found by Patience White (maiden aunt and painter) and Sarah Dowling (farmer’s daughter, cast in life as farmer’s son for practicality) in a world that mostly believed such a thing was neither possible nor permissible. The story alternates points of views between Patience and Sarah, to great effect. They are such different people, but you can see where their love comes from. The contrast of their backgrounds, and their expectations for their lives, make the story all the more compelling.

I don’t want to spoil the story for you, but it isn’t hard to assume from the premise that there will be plenty of challenges laid in their paths. It is a story of what it means to both fall in love and *be* in love. We are taken into the hearts of Patience and Sarah, but at the same time given a taste of what their worlds were like. What does it mean to fight for love? When is the fight too much — what is worth sacrifice and what is not?

There are so many other things I loved about this book. I loved seeing painting and color through Patience’s eyes. I loved Sarah’s practicality and straight forwardness. The supporting characters are varied and interesting, the path of the story less predictable then you might expect. The author created a vivid world that I really enjoyed visiting.

Both readers do an amazing job, each giving us a glimpse into their respective character’s mind – as well as providing easy to distinguish voices for the other members of the story. The two SoundCloud clips below give you a small taste of each of the readers and a toe in the water of the story they tell. They both made it so easy to get lost in the story. This is definitely a “find more excuses to keep listening” audio book.

The Fault in Our Stars

Author: John Green
Reader: Kate Rudd

Extras: Q&A interview with the author.

Short Review: Heart-wrenching and uplifting roller coaster ride. Brilliant reader does justice to this amazing story.

Long Review: Hazel is 16 and she has cancer. This is her story. Life is different when you are young and dying faster than the average person. Hazel is alive thanks to a miracle tumor treatment. She has to tug an oxygen tank behind her everywhere she goes, even to the church basement for a Cancer Kids Support Group. Enter Augustus Waters, another ‘cancer kid’. A tall, handsome, funny cancer kid. The next thing Hazel knows she is starting to have the ‘teenage life’ her mother is always talking about.

Augustus and Hazel do lots of the things that a boy and a girl do when they are figuring out if they like each other. They talk about books. They play video games. They also do things most teens don’t – they deal with cancer and hospitals and their overprotective parents. On the other hand, I guess lots of teens have overprotective parents, so that one isn’t specific to their health.

The reader does a beautiful job bringing us Hazel’s story and giving voice to those in her life. It seems like getting a voice just right for a teenage girl is a challenge to many readers – but this is thankfully not the case here.

This book made me laugh out loud. It made me cry in public, forcing me to hide my tears while riding the subway to work. While there are definitely dark aspects to the story (cancer inherently brings that along), the overall sense is one of treasuring the moments and appreciating the world around you. I don’t know how to tell you anything else without getting into spoiler territory.

Audio sample available

Author: Ali Shaw

Reader: Heather O’Neill

Short Review: An enchanting mythic fantasy about a woman searching for a cure or explanation for the mysterious ailment that is causing her feet to turn to glass, read beautifully by one of my favorite readers.

Long Review: Ali Shaw was working at the famous Bodleian library at Oxford when he wrote this book. I can’t help but think that that storied collection crept into his first novel. The book is set on the fictional St. Haudaâ€s Land, a remote northern archipelago peopled by unusual people and animals. Ida Maclaird returns to the island seeking a strange man she met there on a previous vacation and an explanation for her unique ailment. She meets and befriends Midas Crook, an awkward young photographer, and asks his assistance in her quest. As the story progresses, Ida attempts to help Midas come to terms with his family and his feelings.

Heather O’Neill is a fantastic reader, and I think her tone and pacing were just right for this book. I was excited to get to listen to her narration again, and enjoyed this book ever more than I did The Likeness.

Shaw’s book is so entrancing because of how he plays with mythic themes. You can tell he’s fully-versed in myth and fairy-tales, but this is no retelling of a classic story. He draws from that imagery and makes gorgeous, subtle allusions, but he creates something wholly new for us. The fantastic animals he invents for the story are particularly interesting, and help establish the strange, magical locale where such unusual things can happen. This isn’t fantasy in the sword and sorcery vein. St. Hauda’s land feels real and modern, though uncomfortably different. And his characters-his characters! I want to know Ida and Midas and Henry Fuwa. I feel as if I could meet them on the train.

I look forward to Shaw’s next book, and I’m crossing my fingers that O’Neill will read the audio version.

Wild Decembers

Available from Audible.com

Author: Edna O’Brien

Reader: Suzanne Bertish

Short Review: A beautiful book, poorly served by bad audio quality and frequent mispronunciations.

Long Review: I’m a huge fan of O’Brien’s work, so I was intrigued to find her fantastic novel on Audible’s site. I was warned of the poor audio quality by other reviewers, but I decided to trudge on and see how I reacted to O’Brien’s rich, poetic prose read aloud.

The audiobook was clearly dubbed from CD to a downloadable file. Some remnants of the CDs remain, such as a direction to change CDs. That I could easily ignore. The hiss, flattened tone, and slubs I can’t. I know enough from hanging out in recording studios to know that someone could have corrected most of the audio problems in this version.

Even more irksome are the repeated mispronunciations of Irish words. I know that Irish is a difficult language to read and pronounce. Oh, how I know. But that’s all the more reason that the reader and editor should have done their homework and made sure to get those words right. Cú Chulainn is as vital to Irish myth as is Odysseus to Greek, and his name just isn’t that hard to say correctly. I could say the same thing of dozens of other words butchered in this audiobook.

Apart from the mispronunciations, Bertish is actually a very good reader, but I found them disconcerting and distracting. I also wondered why an English actress was chose to read such an Irish book. None of the characters who she voices would have her posh accent or diction.

The novel itself is masterful. O’Brien is one of the most important contemporary Irish novelists. Her prose is dense and poetic and beautiful. This exquisite book is set in a small rural town in the West, and it follows the progress of star-crossed lovers and neighbors whose generations’ long feud rattles an entire community. It explores women’s rights and station in 1970s Ireland, changing mores, farming, property rights, legal vagaries, and a hundred other things. I will read it again and again, but I’ll stick to the voices in my own mind henceforth.

Available from Audible.com

Author: Sarah Waters

Reader: Simon Vance

Short Review: An intriguing, unusual gothic novel set in post-war England, read beautifully by Simon Vance. It’s intriguing and gorgeously written, and it asks more questions than it answers.

Long Review: With this novel, Waters takes a step away from her usual focus on sexuality and instead plays with questions of psychology, unreliable narrators, class, and mystery. The resulting novel is intriguing, but some readers may be frustrated by the lack of a clear resolution to the story.

The story opens as a country doctor pays a house call to the ailing maid in a crumbling estate house called Hundreds. Dr. Faraday insinuates himself into the daily life of the Ayers family, owners of Hundreds. He befriends eldest daughter Caroline Ayers, endears himself to Mrs. Ayers, and offers experimental treatments to Roderick, injured war veteran and only son. As the book progresses, Faraday’s presence begins to trouble Caroline and Roderick, and the reader begins to question Faraday’s motives.

Simon Vance is an excellent reader. His pacing is wonderful, his diction is clear, and his differentiation between characters is clear and easy to follow. Dr. Faraday is the speaker of the book, and Vance doesn’t make it clear whether or not we should trust the doctor. I love that Vance didn’t steer the listened towards one view or another in this novel. As some of the residents of Hundreds begin to believe the house is haunted, Vance doesn’t push us towards believing in the ghost or deciding that the supposed haunting is really a devious plot or a strange psychosis. He allows the mysterious to remain just that.

Short Review: A good but flawed book with two narrators of differing skill.
Long Review: This is another book that I enjoy, but which I’m cautious about recommending to others. Where I wallow happily in references to literature and philosophers and film-makers, many other readers may be annoyed by arguably pretentious chatter.

The book centers on Renee Michelle, a concierge in a lavish apartment building in Paris, and Paloma, a brilliant but morbid daughter in of one of the resident families. Renee and Paloma both hide their immense intelligences for their own reasons, and both suffer their own sadnesses. Each of the main characters goes on at length throughout the book about their personal philosophies and studies, which I think may turn off a number of readers. The book is more about thinking and less about doing. It is constructed largely of interior monologues.

Barbara Rosenblat voices Renee Michelle and Cassandra Morris voices Paloma. I thoroughly enjoyed Rosenblat’s reading, but found Morris’s irksome. She has a high and breathy voice, which veers towards shrillness at times. I understand the choice to pick a deeper voice for the adult and a higher voice for the child, but I think Morris’s reading is too extreme. I know a lot of 12 year old girls, and I think most of them have more depth to their voices when they speak naturally. I’m sure the criticism may sound petty, but I found the affect of Morris’s vocal characterization made Paloma less likeable. At times, Morris uses a voice closer to her natural tone. Once we hear that young-sounding timbre with a natural tone under it, the climb upwards in her register makes Paloma sound, well, bratty. Paloma on paper is not bratty–she is wounded and depressed. Paloma as read by Morris seems false and cutesy. I think paper Paloma would want to avoid audiobook Paloma.

Those criticisms aside, I did truly enjoy this book. I think I prefer the book on paper this time around, but only because I love the Paloma and Renee Michelle my own mind voices so much.

Short Review: An intricate, beautiful, arguably overlong book beautifully read by a very talented narrator. This isn’t a book for everyone, but it was definitely a book for me.

Long Review: I decided to listen to this audiobook as part of 12 books in 12 months, a reading project floating out there in the blogosphere which encourages people to finally read at least a dozen of the books that have been haunting our shelves for ages. This one seemed apt, because I’d originally picked up a paper copy of Possession at the beginning of my graduate school program. At the time, I was too discouraged by how sad the protagonist’s life is at the outset. As a new grad student contemplating a transfer to a more fitting but probably less marketable program, it scared me away, and fast.

The book is very dense and incredibly detailed, and as I listened, I wavered between loving the layered detail and thinking Byatt should have edited out more and simplified the book. Possession follows a frustrated, underemployed, unpublished English Literature graduate student working on the (fictional) poet Randolph Henry Ash, who discovers some heretofore lost drafts of a letter to a woman. Roland becomes obsessed with tracking down the unnamed addressee and discovering the nature of his relationship to the woman Ash addressed. He meets Maud Bailey, a young professor and expert on the under-appreciated (and also fictional) poet Christabel LaMotte. The two contemporary academics studiously pick through letters and poems and search for lost or unknown correspondence, and end up uncovering wonderful connections between the historical writers and developing an interesting relationship of their own.

What’s fascinating about this book is how layered it is, and how much attention it pays to topics that are very dear to my heart. It delves into Breton and Scandinavian mythology, poetry, feminist theory, embroidery and knitting (though only touches of those, sadly), the nature of love, the nature of poetry, the nature of translation and retellings of myths (my nerdy heart sings!) . . . it’s so rich. One could argue that it’s too rich. Byatt gives us stories within stories within stories within stories. We get Ash and LaMotte’s letters to each other, wherein they discuss mythology and poetry. We get their original works, which are of course actually Byatt’s original works. We get so very much detail about the vagaries of modern academia, and the fights between feminist academics and “traditionalists.” It’s all just so very entwined.

Byatt was so brave to write this meta-romance. I honestly don’t know how she pulled it off. The greatest danger in works like this is that the supposed masterworks the characters are studying need to be excellent enough for the characters’ interest in them to seem just. Byatt does manage that, for the most part. As a writer and quasi-academic, I felt Byatt’s role so keenly. She wrote those pieces in a way that seemed so familiar to me. It’s odd to be a writer who works in a form and genre that is essentially lost to most readers. This book turned out to be such a fantastic outlet for many forms of the author’s creativity. I think I love it. I certainly love many aspects of it.

Virginia Leishman’s narration is one of the strongest aspects of the audiobook, and I think she truly saved the book for me. Whenever the details were too intricate or the infighting between the academics came too close to home, Leishman’s honeyed voice coaxed me back into the story. She truly has a gorgeous voice. Her diction is precise, her shifts from character to character are clear but not distracting, and her changes in accent reveal a great deal of acting and vocal skill. I will absolutely seek out more books she has narrated.

Short Review: A beautiful book, but difficult to listen to at times. Dr. Morrison is a wonderful reader in small doses, but perhaps should have handed this book over to a pro to read in its entirety.

Long Review: I’m one of those Morrison devotees, reading and re-reading her work, attending lectures and readings—a general obsessive. I studied her work thoroughly as a student, writing a thesis on Tar Baby and leading a class through Beloved. This is the first of Morrison’s books I’ve listened to, though I’ve read all of her fiction and most of her non-fiction. I love her compression of language, her ability to express intense, layered emotion and thought while writing in the non-standard English of communities that are often unfamiliar to the average reader of literary fiction. Morrison’s writing veers towards poetry again and again in most of her books. Ultimately, I think that’s what makes this book literally better on paper. It’s a fantastic book, but I prefer to read it with my eyes.

I don’t think it’s unusual that there’s a separation between the books I prefer to listen to and the books that I prefer to read on paper. Audiobooks are great for lighter books, and particularly for books with a clear narrative arc, at least for me. But when I want to read non-fiction or very dense fiction, I find that it’s frustrating to listen at someone else’s pace, and to miss that visual play of words on a page. When I read Morrison and other writers who use such a compressed style, I stop frequently to consider the last line or paragraph, re-reading as I go, and making sure I’ve puzzled through it all. That’s pretty tough to do with an audiobook, particularly if you listen on the go like I do.

A Mercy is set in 17th century colonial America. It follows Florens, a young girl born on a Portuguese-owned tobacco plantation who is sold as a young girl to a expunge a debt by her original owner. Separated from her mother, Florens comes into the care of landowner Jacob Vaark, his wife Rebekka, and their Native-American slave Lina. The book delves into the multi-racial slave system in play in the colonies, sexual mores, inter-religious strife, economics, betrayal, family, American history, relationships between women. Like most of Morrison’s books it’s thickly layered and meticulously researched.

Dr. Morrison reads her own work. I’m loathe to say this: I think it was a mistake. I’ve listened to Morrison read many times before, and one of her readings is a thing of wonder. But at a reading, she reads a short portion and then responds to questions, and reads another portion and responds to questions. She doesn’t need to read an entire book at such events, so weaknesses in her delivery don’t rankle. The best audiobook readers are great actors and great technicians of speech and pacing—for all of her genius, Morrison is neither of those things.

Despite my complaints, I love this book. I’m happy to have listened to it, and I did enjoy it. But I feel the audiobook only serves as an addition to the book on paper. I think just listening to the audiobook leaves the reader outside of the real story of A Mercy, and it’s absolutely a story worth reading. If you’re only going to read it once, read it on paper.

Short Review: This is absolutely a fantastic audiobook. When next I need to convince someone that audiobooks are worth considering, I’ll recommend this book first. It’s gorgeously written, and beautifully read. Moreover, it’s a book that truly matters.

Long Review: I feel like I gush too much when I review audiobooks here, in part because I’m much more likely to knuckle down and write reviews for the really great audiobooks I listen to. The mediocre ones leave me sad and listless and I’m loathe to criticize the work of writers and readers who didn’t quite get it right. The truly bad ones–those I abandon.

This, however, is one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. It’s the perfect combination of reader, type of story, and quality of writing. I feel almost as if someone studied my brain and designed an audiobook that I would fall madly in love with, and then produced it. Except that any attempt at that would fail horribly, and this book is just too exquisite. It’s beautiful, and heart-rending, and funny, and well-researched, and clever, and important, and informative, and and and . . . I love it.

That said, it’s seriously sad in parts. I’m not generally bothered by that, but I did consider it before diving in. Thankfully, it’s also funny and uplifting and thoroughly true, in the way only excellent fiction can be true.

The main character of the book is Liesel Meminger, a young German girl who, right at the beginning of the story, becomes a stealer of books. Hence the title. The speaker, and I’m not spoiling anything with this, is death. Liesel is a fosterling, raised by the Hubermanns, a working class couple. The story begins before WWII and continues through the years of the war, as the Hubermanns wrestle with the place of ethical people in a terribly unethical state.

The paper book is fantastic, and well worth reading. But the audiobook, oh the audiobook. The audiobook is read by an absolute master. Allan Corduner is a musician as well as an actor, and he’s also both Jewish and openly gay, which I think gives him particular incite into the subject matter of the book. He has the timing, and diction, and delivery abilities of a great actor. He has the sense of music a talented musician brings. But he also has that all-too-heavy personal connection to Jewish survivors of WWII. I’m sure another great actor could have done a good job with this book, but I can’t think of anyone who would have done quite so well.