Today is the first day of We’re Listening: Audiobook Week 2013. Hosted for the fourth year by Jen at Devourer of Books, Audiobook Week runs June 17–21. It’s a fun way to find audiobook reviewers and see what everyone’s listening to. Click here to see other posts on today’s topic, My Audiobook Year.
Are you new to audiobooks in the last year? Have you been listening to them forever but discovered something new this year? Favorite titles? New times/places to listen? This is your chance to introduce yourself and your general listening experience.
I’m an old fan of audiobooks for listening to in the car and around the house, but as the books I wanted to listen to became harder to find on cassette tape and I was facing a transition to CDs, my audio addiction started to seem like a problem. Where it had been so easy to pop a tape out from my old car’s tape player and pop it into the one in the kitchen, now I had to have one audiobook on tape for the car and listen to a different one on the CD player inside. CDs don’t save your place for you like cassette tapes did, and I was spending way too much time fiddling around or writing notes on where I had left off.
I wrote about this last year, too, but the truly inspired gift of an iPod Touch from my husband made listening to audiobooks so convenient! How could I not have one going pretty much whenever I was alone even for just a few minutes? But the earbuds were kind of a pain. This year, my latest audiobook-enabling device is another inspired gift from my husband – one of those Jabra Bluetooth headsets that clip on over one ear. (You may still hear a couple of Borg jokes even though these have been around for a while, but the convenience of these babies makes it worth it.) No more dangling earbud cords to catch on things. No more having to switch from car stereo to earbuds. Much more multitasking!
One downside about audiobook listening becoming easier and easier is that I only write, on average, I’m guessing, one review for every six audiobooks I listen to. I start the next one right away and never get around to reviewing the last one.
Briefly, then, here are just a couple of my favorites since last Audiobook Week:
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Read by the author
Penguin Audio
Sept., 2012
9781611761108
5 hours on 5 CDs
The author reads This Is How You Lose Her, a collection of linked stories related to failed relationships, so every inflection or stress is how he hears the sentences in his head. This literary authenticity and the author’s clear, comfortable familiarity with his own words more than justifies not having a professional audiobook narrator do this one.
The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjahlian
Read by Alison Fraser and Mark Bramhall
Random House Audio, 2011
978-0-307-94077-3
This creepy story of an airline pilot traumatized by a plane crash moving with his wife and young twin daughters to a house in rural New Hampshire would make a good book club choice for October. The dual narration is great, switching between the perspectives of husband and wife.
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There were so many excerpts from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother audiobook by Amy Chua that I wanted someone else to listen to, that I was sorry I didn’t listen to this when it came out (in 2011) and everyone else was reading and talking about it. If I had known it was funny, I would have tried to get to it sooner. Whether it was marketing that pushed it as a parenting book, reviewers who got the wrong end of the stick, or just my being misled by the shocked uproar over this book, but I didn’t know it was intended to be humorous.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a memoir of parenting, but in the way that essays by David Sedaris are memoirs about his own experiences. Pretty nearly everything is exaggerated to the extreme for effect. So, even though readers know 1.) that Amy Chua’s two girls never called Child Services on her; 2.) that the author is a highly respected lawyer married to a highly respected law professor; and 3.) that many arguments can be hugely funny later even though seemingly serious at the time – there were still so many readers posting catty commentary like “What was Jed Rubenfeld doing while wife Amy Chua was calling their children garbage and threatening to burn their stuffed animals?” (Daily Beast) or readers worried about the mental well-being of the two daughters, that I thought the book was intended to be a serious espousal of strict parenting. (From what I can tell, BTW, the two daughters are more than able to handle their mother. And, anyway, she’s given away her parenting secrets now.)
If you have trouble seeing the humor in, for example, The Grinch who Stole Christmas TV show because you feel so sorry for Max the dog even though you know that in the end all will be well, the Grinch’s heart grows several sizes, and, after the story ends, the Grinch might even publish a best-selling book about his personal growth as a dog-owner and Who-advocate – then this book with its epic, knock-down-drag-out battles between mother Amy and daughter Lulu over violin practice and older daughter Sophia’s scorned efforts at peacemaking is not for you. Like the original Grinch TV show, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a sharply worded, cleverly constructed cartoon.
The author narrates the audiobook, which lends it authenticity, and she does an excellent job of it, although you may notice her being extra careful to enunciate at times, something that isn’t usually obvious with professional audiobook narrators. Listen to an excerpt from Penguin Audio here.
For a balanced take on the distinctions between “Western” parenting and “Asian” parenting made in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I like this Telegraph article, The Discipline of a Chinese Mother from UK novelist Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It.
Here’s one infamous scene from one of Lulu’s refusals to practice her violin, described in Chapter 11:
She punched, kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have The Little White Donkey perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army. Why are you still here?” I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic.
Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu – which I wasn’t even doing, I was just motivating her…
The book had a little too much about music practice for me (Amy Chua is clearly a classical music lover.) and a little too much about the family pet Samoyed, but I thoroughly enjoyed the author’s journey through a hellish period of motherhood to come out the other side a little older, wiser, and not so over-confident.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Chua, Amy, author & narrator
Penguin Audio, 2011
9780142429105
6 hours, 5 CDs
Disclosure: I borrowed this audiobook through my public library system.
Sound Bytes is a weekly link-up of audiobook reviews hosted by Jen at Devourer of Books.
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In Cascade, a memorable first novel by short story writer Maryanne O’Hara, a small town faces the loss of itself and its history for the sake of urban progress and the promise of cash from the state government, which wants to flood this part of western Massachusetts to make the Quabbin Reservoir to improve the supply of drinking water to Boston.
If the state decides on Cascade rather than the smaller town of Whistling Falls, all of Cascade’s homes and buildings need to be demolished or moved – including the Shakespearean theatre that had belonged to Desdemona (Dez) Hart’s father, which had seen famous actors and actresses stride its stage in 25 seasons of brilliant summer productions. Now it’s 1935 and the theatre has gone dark. The country is struggling out of the Great Depression, and her father – the founder and guiding light of the theatre – died suddenly, months before.
Daily, the newspapers publish photographs of men in bread lines and entire families fleeing storms in the Dust Bowl, so Dez knows she should count herself lucky to be married to Asa Spaulding, with his still-thriving drugstore business and nice house in Cascade. But she misses her art classes and her life in Boston – given up in haste after the stock market crash and her father’s near-bankruptcy – and has to watch her friend Abby head off without her to paint and live a cosmopolitan life in New York City, the life they had planned to start out on together. Dez’s own passion for painting hasn’t left her, but the only person in Cascade who she can talk to about it is Jacob, an artist (an art instructor!) who travels down to Cascade from New York on Thursdays to wind up his deceased father’s business there. Gossip begins soon enough about Jacob’s visits to Dez during the day, even though at first it’s just for long conversations about painting and painters.
The blurb from People on the cover of the softcover edition sums the book up nicely:
Gorgeously written and involving, Cascade explores the age-old conflict between a woman’s perceived duty and her deepest desires.
Dez’s story is set in the 1930s but has a contemporary feel to it, as Dez wavers in indecision over the “right” thing to do – about her marriage, her art, her loyalty to her dead father, and her secret hope that the flooding of Cascade might set her free.
If you liked The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro, especially for its main character’s moral dilemma and its insights into the meaning and value of works of art, you should also like Cascade. Both books are 2013 Massachusetts Must Reads.
Cascade
O’Hara, Maryanne
Penguin
April 30, 2013
9780143123514, soft.
368 pp.
$16.00 US, $17.00 CAN
Viking
August 12, 2012
9780670026029, hard.
$26.95 US
Disclosure: I received a free, signed copy of the softcover edition of this book at a library conference.
Other opinions of this book (all very good to excellent):
Bibliophile by the Sea
The Bluestocking Society
A Bookish Libraria
The Picky Girl
The Relentless Reader
Unabridged Chick
The Worm Hole
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1. Love–Fiction. 2. Dating (Social Customs)–Fiction. 3. High Schools–Fiction. 4. Schools–Fiction. These library catalog subject headings usually signal a YA love story, often one that teachers and high school librarians will love, and so it is with Eleanor & Park, the second novel by Rainbow Rowell.
Eleanor & Park is a love story set in high school in 1986, a little before the time the author herself graduated from high school, I’d guess. If you were in high school in the 80s, the many music references in the book may resonate more with you than they did with me.
Park is a boy whose half-Korean attractiveness and martial arts talent keep him close enough on the fringes of popularity to remain below the radar of the dominant crowd at school, always on the lookout for outliers and the strange. He lets the new girl on the school bus sit down when no one else will. Right from the first moment he sees her coming down the aisle, Park realizes that Eleanor will be nailed as an outlier. Eleanor is wearing clothes of her own styling; is a bit overweight and towers over Tina (the petite leader of the pack); and has a huge mass of curly hair, in a highly noticeable shade of red. What makes him scoot over for her to let her sit down, he wonders even as he does it. Why endanger his own status when he’s only got one year left of obnoxious high school life to endure?
Eleanor and Park slowly, almost reluctantly connect through a shared love of Watchmen (back when graphic novels were still comic books, and were not cool) and music, the less pop the better. Eleanor has a very troubled home life, including a nasty, abusive stepfather she has already run away from once. Park has a more stable, loving home environment but his father sets unreasonable standards for him – making Park learn to drive a stick shift before he can get his license, for example.
Hugely popular YA author John Green gave Eleanor & Park a glowing review in The New York Times, making Eleanor & Park the new YA/adult crossover phenomenon – the book to read after you’ve read The Fault in Our Stars. Eleanor & Park is a heartbreaking love story that succeeds in making believable the idea that, even in the throes of the most horrendous high school experience, there is the possibility of finding the love of one’s life.
Eleanor & Park
Rowell, Rainbow
St. Martin’s Griffin
February 2013
978-1-250-01257-9
336 pp
$18.99 US / $21.99 CAN
Disclosure: I borrowed this book through my public library system.
Other opinions of Eleanor & Park (all excellent):
Devouring Texts
Estella’s Revenge
The Picky Girl
Stacked
Your Friendly Librarian
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Audiobook Jukebox: Your link to audiobook reviews online
June 17–21
SoundBytes
