Merry Wanderer of the Night:
audiobooks

I was a little late to the party with The Time Traveler's Wife

but fell in love with it. I heard Audrey Niffenegger read a section of Her Fearful Symmetry

during the Iowa City Book Festival last year and thought it sounded fantastic. I love ghost stories and I trusted Niffenegger's ability to create a complicated and original story. Right after the reading though I heard from several others who were disappointed in the book and decided to put it off. And put it off. And put it off some more. In the end I got the audio version of the book because I was afraid reading the book would be too painful.

The story was great. It's about two twins, Valentina and Julia, who move to London from Chicago after their mother's twin dies of cancer. Their mother, Edwina, and her sister, Elspeth, had a falling out sometime that no one really knows anything about. Due to the falling out Elspeth writes in her will that Valentina and Julia must live in the London apartment for one year but their parents cannot come into the apartment. While Valentina and Julia live in London they make friends with Elspeth's lover Robert and another neighbor Martin, who is obsessive compulsive. The characters were extremely well written, unique, and interesting. I particularly loved Robert because he reminded me of Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife.

Valentina and Julia are glued at the hip but throughout the story you learn more about Valentina's desire to separate from her sister and Julia's obsession with taking care of Valentina. You also learn that Edwina and Elspeth had a similar relationship which played a role in their falling out.

Valentina and Julia are not the only people living in the apartment, however; Elspeth's ghost is present and trying to communicate with them.

So I have a story that I think well sums up my feelings about Her Fearful Symmetry. As I said earlier I listened to the audio version of this, which was divided into two parts. I didn't know this when I started it though and when I reached the end of the first half I thought the story was over. I didn't understand why everyone thought the book was so horrible. I thought it was just the right length, and had a great ending. Then I discovered there was a second half to the book. Once I started to listen I understood what all of the groans were about.

The first 80 percent of the book was all good and fine, but I felt the ending dragged and ruined my enjoyment of the characters. Overall I enjoyed the audio, but the reader used different voices for different characters and I found her incredibly difficult to listen to when she was reading Valentina's character. She made her voice very high and mousy, which was fitting for the character but horrible for my ears.

I think the book is worth reading if you consider yourself a big fan of Audrey Niffenegger. Of course, if you consider yourself that you've probably already read it. I'm not sure I would have finished the book if I hadn't listened to it on audio, and I think if you skip this one you won't miss out on much.

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I'm not much for mysteries or thrillers, but I love true crime and true mystery. It adds so much to the mystery when you know the events are true; it always makes me feel like I'm in on a big secret of some kind. Lately I've been listening to audiobooks of books I already have on my shelves in an effort to clean my shelves off faster. I have a lot of time to listen to audio while I am working, so I decided to do this with Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman because I wasn't sure I would really enjoy the book after hearing mixed reviews of it. The audio is read by the author, which was fine. He added a lot of drama to the story with his British accent.

The story is about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, but really more about one of its avid contributors. When the OED started they put out advertisements for readers. People who would read books looking for words and then write quotations where the word appears in an effort to trace the evolving definition of the word. You can see that this would be a tedious process, but the man in the story, Dr. W. C. Minor, had a lot of time. Because he was in an insane asylum.

Professor James Murray, the man in charge of the OED, becomes curious about the prolific Minor because of the volume of letters he sent to the OED. Murray has no idea the man is mentally unwell, and this is where the story really gets interesting.

I can't decide how I really felt about this book. It was a great story and something I'm interested in. There was a lot of drama and intrigue which made it fun and really different from what I expected, which was a straight forward account of the making of the OED. If you're interested in dictionaries and words then I'd say this is one worth checking out, but if you're really not I'd move on. The story got a little slow in parts and I didn't find myself running back to finish it.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the coming-of-age story of Francis Nolan an American girl living in Brooklyn with her family in the early 1900's. This story spans her childhood and teen years, and covers the family's history from 1900 to about 1918. Both of her parents have lived in America their whole lives, but her mother's family is of Austrian descent and her father's family is of Irish descent. Her father, Johnny Nolan, loves to sing and drink, and that is really about all. He doesn't have a steady job, so her mother, Katie Nolan, cleans to make ends meet. While Francie doesn't have a lot she never seems to be too aware of the hardships her family faces.

Francie loves to read and write, and she aspires to be a writer. Her father moves her to a nicer school where richer kids go so she will have more opportunities. She goes the library often and reads several books every day. For one year she tries to keep a journal, but fails. Later on in life Francie's love of reading really pays off for her and helps her find a job where she earns more money per week than her parents did combined every week. This book is a joy to read for a lover of books because there are so many long passages about the importance of education, of reading, and about the joy Francie experiences when she goes into the world of books. I saw a lot of myself in Francie because of that, and also in her teenage years when she tries to spite her mother just for the sake of showing she is grown-up and idolizes her father in spite of his flaws.

The audio version I listened to was narrated by Kate Burton. She did a great job of having different voices for each character and had the early American and immigrant accents down perfectly. I have to say I'm always a little put off by the different character voices some readers do, but I got used to her quickly and looked forward to being read to by her. There was some musical interludes on the audio I listened to, mostly between each book (there are five books each spanning a different time period and with a different focus) which I found extremely strange, but I suppose it provided a nice break between readings. It's a very long audiobook, fifteen hours total, and took me quite awhile to finish but I found that it was a great book to leave and come back to after a few days.

The best thing about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that you spend so much time with the characters in different parts of their lives that by the end of the book you really feel like you knew them and what they went through. This was a great book to read after The Jungle, which I read earlier this year, because it shows a more rose colored picture of early American immigration and what was seen as important to those people. That's not to say the book is without heartache--- because their is plenty of it. At least three times I started to cry while listening to this book at work because Betty Smith wrote such believable characters that you really empathized with them, and because Kate Burton did a fantastic job bringing these characters to life on audio.

I give this book and the audio version an A.

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Michael Chabon is an author I've always wanted to read but just haven't yet, and so being a nonfiction geek I decided to listen to his essay collection Manhood for Amateurs, The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son on audiobook. The collection is a series of essays about Chabon's experience as a husband, father, and son, many of which were failings. He talks about how you never really know exactly how you're supposed to react to a situation, and you can think about it forever but when you're put in the place and time you just do what comes to you. Being a woman, I've never had a lot of these experiences and never will, and Chabon interestingly acknowledges that he will never be a woman, and therefore never a wife, mother, or daughter.

As far as the audiobook goes, Chabon reads it which I always like (by that I mean I like it when authors read their own work, not when Chabon reads everything), but his voice doesn't have a lot of fluctuation so at times it gets a little boring to listen to. Other than that, I thought the audio was great. I most enjoyed his essays about being a husband and father. He had this great experience where he was at the store with his kids and a woman came up to him and said, "You're a great father, I can just tell." He really explores that and it turns into a wonderful essay about how any time a man is alone with his children grocery shopping or whatever he is automatically a wonderful father, but when women do it they're just doing what they're supposed to do and don't get any praise for it. Basically, Chabon admits multiple times throughout this book how easy it is to be a man- not that it's easy all the time.

Another favorite moment for me was when his three children ask him what marijuana is, and if he has ever smoked it before. It's a great conundrum, because if tells his kids marijuana is bad and then ten years later they all find out that he did smoke pot in his younger days then they will lose respect for him forever. So he is honest, and he tells his kids that he has smoked pot before, but that he hasn't done it recently, which is true. There are many other moments like these that I'm sure I can't even begin to appreciate because I'm not a parent, but I enjoyed them as someone who has parents.

Some of the transitions were a little difficult to follow, although that might have just been the audio. I feel like there were times when he was talking about being a father and then all of a sudden he was talking about being a son, and they were just unexpectedly next to each other. Obviously all three of those things transfer because your experience as a son has an effect on your experience as a father, and maybe if I read the book version I would be able to see the connections he made between the essays.

Overall I give Manhood for Amateurs a B.

If you'd like to give Michael Chabon a try too, then check out the readalong of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay I'm hosting until the end of this month!

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As someone who has taken a lot of nonfiction writing classes I've heard endless excitement over David Sedaris. In high school I was often given recommendations to read him because I loved authors like Chuck Klosterman and Nick Hornby. But for some reason I've never really felt that driven to read Sedaris, maybe because he gets so much attention and there are a lot of great nonfiction writers out there who don't. At a coffeeshop my friend talked about how much fun she had listening to Sedaris recordings after she finished one of his books, so I decided to take the Sedaris plunge but simply listening. I listened to Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

while at work last month and was often laughing out loud at his outrageousness.

Dress Your Family is really a memoir of Sedaris' family. They're all rather bizarre and he imitates them flawlessly-- particularly his brother who has a very thick Southern accent and is basically the epitome of "white trash." Sedaris acknowledges his family member's strangeness, but I think he manages to make us see them as real people and not just characters. What moves them beyond character and into the realm of real person is their relationship to Sedaris and their relationship to their family. Sedaris acknowledges his own quirks in this book as well, and is very self-deprecating. I particularly enjoyed his memories about being a teenager and wanting to be a total hippie, which was very funny, and also his stories about coming out as a gay man in a family that was proud of "manliness."

While the book was hilarious as a whole, I felt the last few essays didn't quite fit with the whole book. There was an essay about Santa Claus in the Netherlands, and while I could kind of make the connection to family I was a little put off by the whole thing. It was very frustrating because I really enjoyed several of the essays I didn't felt fit with the book, in fact I enjoyed some of them more than the essays I did think fit, but overall it was jarring and difficult to reconcile in the end. As an audiobook I thought this was a great listen, and something that was really hard to ignore. I feel like that is something a lot of people have said about audiobooks, they are easy to ignore. I have experienced that a little, but never with this one. A great choice for the reluctant audio listener.

I give this book a B.

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This semester has been absolutely crazy. I'm working at the library, I have a writing internship with a nonprofit, I'm volunteering at the Women's Resource and Action Center, I'm taking 6 classes (16 hours), and I'm living off campus for the first time. In short, I am exhausted. All of this running around has definitely been getting in the way of my reading time. Last night I sat down and read a graphic memoir, The Imposter's Daughter by Laurie Sandell

, just to feel like I'd read something. One of my friends told me I should be Wonder Woman for Halloween because she can't imagine how I manage to get all of this stuff done, and I'm wondering how I manage to do it too. I'm planning on changing my work schedule in a week though, so hopefully that will give me a little bit more free time. At the very least I shouldn't have to wake up so early every day.

One great thing about my job though is that it gives me time to read. Sort of. I started listening to audiobooks at work in addition to my favorite podcasts and I've finished two books so far, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

by David Sedaris and Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon. I really enjoy the experience of listening to an author read his or her work and so far that is the only experience I've had with audiobooks. Over the summer I listened to a Bill Bryson book that he narrated. I've decided to mix things up a little bit though, and I got the audiobook for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This is obviously not narrated by her and it's also about twice the length of any other podcast I have listened to. Fifteen hours, I actually had to download two separate files from Audible. I never really thought I'd be an audibook person, but with the job I have now I'm grateful for them because I'm getting paid but also getting some reading done.

But I must say, listening to an audiobook is just not the same as reading a physical book. When I'm done with an audiobook I just add it to my list of books read this year, write a review, and that's it. But when I finish a physical book I actually feel a sense of accomplishment. I can put the book back on the shelf, or drop it back off at the library. I get to feel the relaxing experience of reading. Of sitting on the couch with a good book in my hands. I get to watch as the pages dwindle down until I'm only 50 pages from the end, 30, 15, 5, 1. That is so exciting. On my iPod I see I have four hours left, or two, or fifteen minutes, but I just don't get that same sense of putting the book back on the shelf. I don't have anything against audiobooks, I really need them in my life right now because otherwise I would be getting zero reading done, but I do miss being able to sit down and read, read, read.

How do you feel about audiobooks versus physical books?

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In my post about the Audiobook I mentioned that The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

was my first audiobook. For this review I'll talk a little bit about the book itself and then I'll talk about the actual audiobook. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is a memoir about Bill Bryson's childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, during the 1950's. It's about Des Moines, but not just about Des Moines. It's about a time when moms stayed at home and made meals out of magazines, kids could ride their bikes downtown without parental supervision, and all the restaurants you went to were locally owned. Basically it's about a world that doesn't exist today, and maybe about a world that never really did exist in real life.

A disclaimer, I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, too, although I grew up in the 1990's. Because of that I enjoyed this book a lot. It was insane for me to hear about all the restaurants and stores that used to exist in Des Moines and are no longer there. Des Moines has changed a lot even in my lifetime. The East Village used to be a really dumpy somewhat terrifying area, and now it has tons of hip boutiques and ethnic restaurants. I worked in the East Village this summer and I never ran into a pan handler, which used to be unheard of. Some of the things he talks about I knew existed at one point, or they closed during my lifetime, but most of these things I'd never heard of, never thought of, never seen. Bryson talks about how Des Moines used to be, and how America used to be, this wholesome, local business thing. And while he was a part of that, he was also a bit of an outsider. Both of his parents worked, which was unusual for Des Moines at the time, and they both worked as newspaper writers, which was a different career than most people in Des Moines had at the time. Because of this I think he can give a unique perspective on that world and how people, or even how he himself, reacted to his family.

The audiobook itself is wonderful. It's narrated by Bill Bryson who is obviously from Iowa so he says very Iowan things, like warsh instead of wash, but he's lived in England for quite awhile and so he has a bit of a British accent as well. He is a great reader and has great delivery with his jokes. I listened to this audiobook while walking or driving and I caught myself getting stared at because I was laughing hysterically at what he was saying. It feels a lot more like he is telling you about his life than reading a book he wrote to you.

I give this audiobook an A.

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I would classify myself as a walker. I love walking long distances, five miles are so, just to see that I can walk that far. Sometimes in the blazing heat I ask myself why I do it, and I want to return home, but I press on. Walking is the perfect way for me to escape from the world and the people who are around me, and it makes me a happier person. I love listening to music when I walk, and I frequently listen to book podcasts, but I had never listened to an audiobook until this summer. I really had no interest in them either, but I knew that my new job (the one I just started this week) was very iPod friendly and I figured I might as well try to get some reading done while I'm at work! So I got my first audiobook to try out, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. I listened to it mostly while I was walking, although sometimes while I was driving, and I actually really enjoyed the whole experience. I'll review the book at a later date, for now I just want to talk about audiobooks for those who love them and for those who are unsure if they want to try them out.

I decided to go with the Bill Bryson book because he narrates it himself. This was attractive to me because I love going to readings to hear authors read their work. It was a really good fit and I'm glad I started out with an author narration. Eventually perhaps I'll move on to a different narrator. One of the main reasons I've stayed away from audiobooks until this point is that I really dislike being read to. I find it extremely hard to follow and feel like I lose a lot of information. When I came away from Bill Bryson's book I didn't feel that way at all, but perhaps that is because it's all about Des Moines, Iowa, which is where I am from so I was very interested in it. I like to think that's not the only reason though. It seems like what I really dislike is being read to badly, because then it's easy to drift off and think about something else. An engaging narrator can hold my interest and make the audiobook feel more like a friend telling me a story at lunch than like a person reading to me.

The place I actually most enjoyed listening to the audiobook was in the car, which surprised me. When I'm walking I have a tendency to think about anything that is bothering me and it's a more reflective practice than driving. In the car I really have nothing to focus on but the road so it's easier for me to lose myself in an audiobook. I think this will be the case with my job as well, because it's a lot of repetitive tasks and I think I might really enjoy listening to an audiobook for awhile to get me away from how mundane everything I'm doing is.

Do you listen to audiobooks? Why or why not? What do you like about them or dislike about them? Where do you listen to them?