Audio

Since I’ve been taking these long commutes, I have been visiting the local library and taking out audio books. Some of them have sucked, but some have been awesome. Since I used to keep track of all the books I read on here, I thought I would just jot them down for memory sake. Meanwhile, I’m still slowly getting through actually reading the last of the Dark Tower books by Stephen King. Oh yea, and I did take a break to read the famous lesbo novel, Tipping the Velvet, which was magnificent.

Trying to remember all of these will be a challenge, but I’ll go from most recent backwards.

Right now, I’m listening to The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. So far its a pretty good book about this young girl who up and leaves her home in Kansas and drives west. Somewhere along the way someone leaves a native American toddler with her and the story has been following her as she stops in a town in Arizona for a while and makes a new group of friends. Its good enough to keep me entertained on the rides.

I just finished listening to The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. I think what I didn’t like about this audio book was that it was read by the author. Her voice was monotonous and at times very annoying. The story was just so so and it could have been better if read by the right actor. I made a mental note while listening to this that I think I’m over reading/listening to books that are sorta anticdotal in nature. I’m not a fan of David Sedaris’ books either.

Just before that, I listened to The Poisonwood Bible. I have to say that this was probably my favorite so far. Its about a family who is led by their missionary father over to the Congo in the 60s. The history of the Congo is factual in the book, but the family is fiction. The story is told from the POV of the mother and the four daughters. The father does not have a voice in the book but instead is painted by the stories told by his family. He is a nutcase and puts his family through hell. The book is heartbreaking at points and totally educational as to what took place in the Congo (no long called that). It was very long, but I found myself not wanting my rides to be over and really wanting to get back in the car to drive home to hear more.

Before that I suffered through Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner. At first I thought I was hating the book because the actors were really bad. But then I realized the acting was bad because the story was badly written. A book about a goody two shoes girl who has no life but then looses a lot of weight just in time for her old friend from school to come back into her life and get her into all kinds of trouble. The story would have been a waste of my time if I wasn’t already driving to and from work.

One that I tried to listen to but then ended up quitting about two disks from the end was Song of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult. The story is told from five POVs and is about a woman who runs away from her husband (who is a famous whale biologist) after they get into a fight and she hits him. She takes her daughter and flees to the other side of the country to be with her brother. I guess the book was supposed to be a bit different because of all the POVs and the daughter is telling the story backwards for some reason, but at some point, I guess in the middle, the stories overlapped. Then I felt like I was listening to the same thing over and over and over again. I literally couldn’t take it anymore and seriously I was probably two more trips away from finishing it, but I just couldn’t listen to it anymore.

I did try to listen to a Dean Koontz book which I can’t remember the name of and I also gave up on that one, but closer to the beginning of it. I love to read Koontz, but listening to it was too weird.

I almost forgot! I listened to a book called Saving CiCi Honeycutt which I adored!! Its about a girl who ends up more of less orphaned and goes to live in the south with her great aunt. The story has no protagonist and is just a nice story about a girl struggling to come to terms with herself and the loss of her mother (who was mentally ill). She ends up in a world surrounded by older Southern women who are all characters in their own way and the story was very sweet and engaging. The narrator was the lead character from the book the Help. So at first it was hard not to confuse the two in my head.

And of course The Help. I listened to that one first and I think it is tied as one of my favorites. Just an amazing story, well written, well acted by the four ladies who read it. A beautiful story again with some interesting history.