Five More Great Audiobooks

A couple months back I posted five great audiobooks.  Here's five more.

 The Warden. By Anthony Trollope. Read by Timothy West.

This is an underread novel, one of the best by Trollope, perhaps the wisest novelist in the English language. The Warden begins Trollope's famous Barsetshire series, a set of related Victorian novels that all take place in the same rural English county.  These should be read by anyone who has even a tiny liking for Jane Austen novels, the Bronte sister novels, or anything that smacks of Masterpiece Theater or Downton Abbey. 

You should know that Timothy West is the reader of Trollope. He has read several weeks' worth of Trollope novels, I believe.  That is, you could listen to West read Trollope from January to March and not hear all of West's work.  He sounds like a nice English grandfather, a gentleman reading his favorite novels by the fireside.  He is always comforting.

Born Standing Up. By Steve Martin.  Read by Steve Martin.

I have never laughed at anything Steve Martin has done. I am no fan, but I admire his book on his standup comic career quite a bit.  He knows how to structure his paragraphs, his sections, and his book.  As a writer, he knows how to combine and juxtapose seriousness and levity. This book makes me consider attempting to read one of his novels.  The double bonus with this audiobook is that Martin reads his own book.  I am sure that the audiobook is better than the book itself.

Rendezvous with Rama.  By Arthur C. Clarke.  Read by Peter Ganim.

I can also barely tolerate Arthur C. Clarke, yet this reading of his best book (which doesn't say much) is quite good.  What works with this novel is its simple plot: mysterious alien vessel appears, humans investigate.  This novel has been called an exploration procedural, which is a real back-handed compliment for a novel.  In it, the humans simply keep exploring and discovering new aspects of the mysterious alien ship--the explorations and discoveries are the plot.  I was still riveted by the narration.

True Grit. By Charles Portis. Read by Donna Tartt.   

Portis' great novel, in a saner era, would be more widely read and more widely appreciated. It could and should be read in most high schools by everybody. The Coens tried to film it a couple years ago, with mixed success, but it is not a filmable novel really. That's because the first-person narrator, the teenage girl Mattie Ross, dominates the novel with her perspective and voice.  Donna Tartt gets her just right, I think.

All the King's Men. By Robert Penn Warren. Read by Michael Emerson.

Penn's great novel is worth listening to if you have an extra twenty hours to spare, plus great concentration.  This isn't something you'll want to casually listen to while gardening.  But Michael Emerson is perfect for this book. His Southern accent is not great, but he brings a creepy gravity to the narration.  If you know Emerson, from Lost (as Ben Linus) or from Person of Interest, you know how creepy yet sympathetic he can be.  That style works well for the first-person narrator in Warren's novel about the corruptness of early 20C American politics.  

2012 Books Read

Great
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Carlo Collodi - Pinocchio
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana
Homer - The Odyssey (2x)
Stanislaw Lem - Fiasco
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Plato - Gorgias
Charles Portis - True Grit (2x)
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic (2x)
Anthony Trollope - The Small House at Allington
Anthony Trollope - The Way We Live Now
Mark Twain - Huck Finn
Mark Twain - Roughing It
Unknown - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun

Very Good
Jane Austen - Emma
Philip K. Dick - Ubik
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (2x)
Arthur Conan Doyle -- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War (2x)
Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
Herge -- The Adventures of Tintin (Volume 2)
Brooks Landon - Science Fiction After 1900
C.S. Lewis - The Last Battle
Jack London -- The Call of the Wild
Frank Miller -- The Dark Knight Returns
Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Charles Portis - The Dog of the South
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Gary Taubes - Why We Get Fat, and What To Do About It
H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
Gene Wolfe - Fifth Head of Cerberus
Gene Wolfe - The Urth of the New Sun

Pretty Good
Dave Barry - I'll Mature When I'm Dead
Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - Good Omens
Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
Herge -- The Adventures of Tintin (Volume 1)
Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest (2x)
C.S. Lewis - The Magician's Nephew
Larry Niven - Ringworld
Charles Portis - Norwood
Terry Pratchett - Pyramids
George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
Anthony Trollope - Last Chronicle of Barset
Donovan Webster - Aftermath: The Remnants of War
Connie Willis - Bellwether
Tom Wolfe - In Our Time

Okay
Isaac Asimov - I, Robot
Philip K. Dick - Dr. Bloodmoney
Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary
Robert Heinlein - The Puppet Masters
Robert Heinlein - Tunnel in the Sky
Martin Lindstrom - Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy
Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma
Mark Twain -- No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
H.G. Wells - The Island of Dr. Moreau
Connie Willis - Inside Job

Ugh
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl
Max Brooks - World War Z
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
Philip K. Dick - VALIS
Hugo Gernsback - Ralph 124C 41+
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Frederick Pohl - Gateway
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

All of the Above
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
William Gibson - Burning Chrome
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
Gene Wolfe - Peace

Read Aloud with Kids
L. Frank Baum - Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (terrible)
L. Frank Baum - Ozma of Oz (very fun)
L. Frank Baum - The Marvelous Land of Oz (great!)
L. Frank Baum - The Road to Oz (lame)
L. Frank Baum - The Wizard of Oz
Beverly Cleary - The Mouse and the Motorcycle
Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Roald Dahl - Fantastic Mr. Fox
Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach

Tom Waits Says Merry Christmas!

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Recommendation: Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun

Long books are nearly impossible to use in college courses because they eat up too much time.  They need a class all their own.  They certainly can't fit into a survey class well.

Given that, the glaring omission from this semester's science fiction survey class is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, an 800-page experience.

I'd like to recommend it not by describing the work as a whole, but by describing it from a reader's new experience of Wolfe's best book.  Most of Wolfe's writing is unsummarizable anyway, and an almost indescribable experience.

The Book of the New Sun takes place millions of years in the future, on Earth, called "Urth" in the book.  At the outset of the novel, it appears that human civilization has regressed to a medieval world of swords, guilds and monarchs. The narrator, Severian, is a member of the torturer's guild. He seems to have no scientific knowledge, but possesses a deeply theological worldview.  In the early pages, Severian hints that he is writing as the "Autarch," the quasi-monarch of a realm in the Southern hemisphere.  This talk of guilds and monarchy, plus torture, swordplay, and theology, makes Wolfe's work seem more like fantasy than science fiction.  Perhaps humanity used up Earth's resources at some point, and has ever since been living in a quasi-medieval state?

And then thirty pages in, Severian mentions that the moon is covered with green forests.  He wonders what it once looked like, eons ago, when it is said that the moon was once bare rock.

Here the reader (okay, me) is led to consider an important question.  If the technology to terraform the moon once existed, then does it exist in Severian's world?

The answer is yes, but Severian is somewhat ignorant of the technological "magic" of generations past and present. He may also be deceiving the reader about what exactly he knows, as he is clearly an unreliable narrator.

What makes Wolfe's work so fantastic is the effortless blend of fantasy tropes and science fiction.  At times the work seems like fantasy--indeed to Severian it does--yet a casual reader of sci-fi will recognize all manner of sci-fi elements in the book, coded by Severian's ellusive, ambiguous language.  There are spaceships, aliens, androids, time travelers, black holes, telepathy, and much much more in this book.  But if you do not read closely, though, you might not know it.

Consequently, about every fifty pages or so, Wolfe reveals some major clue about the setting and/or the history of Earth that greatly affects the plot and forces us readers to reconsider everything we've already read.  Severian has a habit of revealing a key moment from a scene pages or chapters after he's already told us seemingly everything about the scene.  For example, Severian meets his only friend, Jonas, who appears to have an artificial hand.  Only when Jonas exits the book do we discover that Jonas is actually a robot, who had skin and flesh grafted onto his face and chest after his spaceship crash-landed.  We are then left, after the fact, to re-evaluate everything we know about Jonas.

Do I need to tell you that there are several major secrets about Severian the narrator?  Two are revealed in the book's last seventy pages, and they change everything.

Yet the dozens of deep mysteries in the book -- including the sci-fi elements of the setting, the history of "Urth" -- are actually backdrops to a pretty powerful Bildungsroman as well as a forced meditation on human nature.  I say "forced" because, given Wolfe's setting, whatever he says about humanity is what he thinks is permanent about it.  After all, if he posits a humanity millions of years in the future, he is constantly comparing his audience in the present to his fictional future humans.

For Christian readers, Wolfe is fairly friendly.  He converted to Catholicism while writing the novel, and theologically charged observations pepper the book.   Severian is constantly thinking about the prophecy of the "New Sun," a deliberate double entendre, a prophecy that hints about both a renewal of the dying sun (whose light is gradually diminishing as its hydrogen runs out) and the return of the "Conciliator."  The Conciliator was a man, some say, a powerful prophet who predicted and taught about the New Sun.  Some believe the New Sun will be the Conciliator returned.  Severian also meditates often on the workings of the "Increate," something analogous to the Holy Spirit, a being above all beings who indwells in them and in nature.  So it's no surprise when Severian, as the plot unfolds, becomes an antitype of Christ in many ways. And Severian himself may have something to do with inaugurating the New Sun.

This book is highly challenging, but incredibly rewarding.  It did take 250 pages for me to fully invest in the novel.  While that's slow going for most, just know that this may be the greatest science fiction novel yet written.

Five Great Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a new spin on an old medium.  Long ago just about every story was transmitted orally, sometimes transmitted that way for centuries, before being written down.  That includes parts of the Bible, Homer's epics, and just about every native legend around the world.  So stories, many stories, are made to be read aloud and to be listened to.  Stories don't have to have a book and a reader, but they do need a storyteller and an audience.

The audiobook hasn't been around long, but it has changed the relationship between reader and text.  If you listen to many audiobooks, you quickly figure out that the narrator makes all the difference.  A bad narrator ruins everything.  I couldn't make it through one version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American because the British narrator could not come close to speaking an American accent correctly.  With another book, a Robert Heinlein novel, the narrator paused for a half-second after every sentence, a pause so long that the narrative had no flow and it became progressively irritating to listen to. So with audiobooks, not only must the book be good, but the narrator's performance has to make the book interesting.  And some books, frankly, are not written to be read aloud.

(As an aside, a great reading practice is to read a book/poem/play aloud to yourself if you cannot understand it or find it dull.  This practice can dramatically change the reading experience and may help you understand what you are reading in ways you can't imagine. It also might help you to like a book.)

Audiobooks were extremely burdensome before IPods.  Until the IPod--eons ago--you had to lug around a 6 CD set of one book, and that was only for a book of 200 pages.  Now I can carry around dozens of books on my IPod, or hundreds of hours worth of audiobooks.  So I expect the audiobook medium to improve, hopefully, given that the technological convenience of owning and transporting audiobooks has greatly improved in the past few years. 

I present here five great audiobooks.  I've listened to dozens of them, most okay, some terrible, a few excellent.  Here are some of the best.

Treasure Island. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Read by Alfred Molina.

This is perhaps the best audiobook yet made.  First, Stevenson's story was made to be read aloud. It was also made to be exciting, interesting, captivating--and as it turns out, it is all of those for all ages.  Alfred Molina reads this pitch-perfectly.  Molina is a Shakespearean actor, best known probably as Dr. Octopus in Spiderman 2.  This book won an Audie Award for audiobook of the year.

The Last Battle. By C.S. Lewis. Read by Patrick Stewart.



Serious audiophiles should be aware that, in the mid-2000s, HarperAudio released all seven books in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series. This series was expensive, I assume, because of the voice talent hired to read the books, which includes Kenneth Branagh, Lynn Redgrave, Jeremy Northam, and Derek Jacobi.  I think this is the best of the Narnia audiobook series.  That's partly because I think this is Lewis' best Narnia book, but also because Patrick Stewart does a fine job of reading it while not sounding too much like Jean-Luc Picard. 

Heart of Darkness. By Joseph Conrad.  Read by Kenneth Branagh.

I admire Branagh for a lot of things, but his dedication to audiobooks is near the top of the list.  He's overqualified to read audiobooks, but he does it anyway. What follows are two of his best efforts.  This one is from Audible's Signature series, which Audible commissioned early in 2011 but discontinued pretty quickly. I assume that this series wasn't even close to profitable. The idea behind it was that Audible would hire B-list actors to read literary "classics."  Thus Elijah Wood reads Huck Finn, and Branagh reads Heart of Darkness.  Conrad's famous book is almost all monologue, which is perfect for Branagh, who reads every word in character as if he's been studying the book for years.  This is a performance, a great performance, unlike many audiobooks, which are just simply someone reading words.


The Captain and the Enemy. By Graham Greene. Read by Kenneth Branagh.

One more Branagh narration.  This one is Greene's last novel, one of his five best and his most underrated.  Most readers are intrigued by the first half of the story, in which the narrator, a young boy, is won at gambling by a  mysterious man called "The Captain."  As usual in Greene's later work, there is international espionage combined with meditations on love and justice in the modern world.  This book also features the best use of the "King Kong" story.

Bellwether. By Connie Willis. Read by Kate Reading.

The last of my five, and I feel compelled to include a few ladies, since I have not yet done so.  Willis is a well-known science fiction author, a no-nonsense type who is skeptical of most modern ideologies.  She ably combines the screwball comedy plots of 1930s films with science fiction tropes.  That's an interesting, unusual combo.  This short novel features a female scientist who tries to discover where and how fads originate, and who gets caught up in and amongst blossoming fads herself.  There's a love story and plenty of critiques of modern pop culture.  A fun listen.