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Beautiful and Wise

Revisado: 10-28-17

This book has changed the way I think. It's opened my eyes to the possibility of doing good, not just doing no harm, for the good earth.

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Inspiring

Revisado: 06-10-17

... and I'm a man with a large moustache!

This is a book about loving life. The characters are so loving and alive. They remind me of the best real people I know. The narrator is sly and funny. And the reader of this audiobook is wonderful. She crafts the voices of each character so well.

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Beautiful and True

Revisado: 05-24-17

A beautiful meditation on what it's like to change identities, and to be true to yourself; about grief and forgiveness; about the funny problems of conventional life, and unconventional life too. It rings true.

Amazing narration, by an actor so skilled at making not just different accents but different people come alive in the recording.

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Wow!

Revisado: 03-24-17

Wow! Trevor Noah has a real ear for storytelling. Thoroughly enjoyable even if you're not already a fan of his comedy routines -- I've never seen them, but this is one of the best books I've read in the last few years.

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Great Travel Companion

Revisado: 07-28-16

Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands are not splashy tourist destinations in the way of Rome or Melbourne. How can a traveller come to appreciate what goes in behind the facades of the canal houses? What is the meaning of all those men in black hats and lace hanging in the Rijksmuseum? What does an Amsterdam coffee shop have to do with me, if I am not a smoker? Read Shorto's book. This is a pretty perfect brief overview of Dutch history for the uninitiated. It does an excellent job of helping an outsider figure out how the random anecdotes and objects one hears and sees about Amsterdam relate to the Dutch psyche or the Dutch way of doing things. It emboldened me to have my own conversations with Dutch people about their history, politics, and outlook and those conversations made me appreciate how rich a picture Shorto paints (even if he has that somewhat irritating journalistic tic of reiterating his thesis too often). Great reading too!

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Spooky Take on Real World Troubles

Revisado: 11-20-14

The title evokes a fairytale, and the cover calls forth the deep dark woods of northern BC, with its infamous Highway of Tears. In the real world, this is the site of some very bad things: racism, crime, teenage boredom, reckless development, and men who prey on women. This book does an impressive job of working up these real world troubles into a kind of ghost story. There are supernatural hints, just clear enough to add to the foreboding, even if the truly frightening things in this novel are so often the things you'd really find if you spent long enough in the lonesome north. Something has come out of a door in the mountain, and things are now dangerous for the teenagers of this nameless logging town -- but dangerous they always were.

The Highway of Tears, where so many local women disappear into slavery or death, runs through this story, but it is not the focus. It weighs on the characters, and shapes their decisions, but this is not primarily a story about disappearance. It is about what it's like to live with the fear that you or your sister or your lover or your mother might be next.

With that kind of backdrop, a ghost story could easily seem tasteless, even cruel. This book impressed me most because it managed to make a thrilling story that was still sensitive to the pain people really feel.

Just a word about the reading itself: I wish the reader did not slip into falsetto for every female voice he performs. His women characters all sound the same, and all sound stilted. It would have been great to have a performer who could actually perform in a northern Canadian accent, but that might be a tall order, since most Canadian actors try so hard to lose their accents when they end up in American media. The reader is still perfectly listenable, though, and the story makes it worth putting up with the performance.

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For Anyone Who Loves Myth

Revisado: 09-04-14

Garner has thought deeply about myth, but instead of producing a commentary, he has written a novel, thrilling and wise, that links Welsh legend to teen angst and the gulf of adult worry that gapes before the young. This book is never straightforward in how it treats the old stories, but it never loses its way as it guides you deep into the feelings of its characters. A good example of a "kids" book that dares to do things few "adult" books could pull off.

This is a top-quality recording. The reader paints the characters well, and has complete command over the various Welsh and English voices the story calls for.

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Great Idea, Great Prose, Difficult Listen

Revisado: 06-22-13

I love the way McPhee writes: who else would describe a beard as "tetragrammatonic"? But for me picking up on those kinds of literary allusions is a lot easier than trying to understand geology, and this book sometimes seems just too delighted in the swirl of geologic terms to make sense of. Since listening to this, I've looked at a paper copy, and that made it easier to keep the story sorted in my mind, but I have never studied geology, and while listening I found I was often rewinding and relistening and sometimes still not understanding what was going on.

At the same time, I really enjoyed this book. The narration is pleasant. And the organizing ideas of the book work really well. McPhee organizes the book around a series of roadtrips in California, and brings up geological topics as they relate to places you can visit, especially if you live in the Bay Area or the Central Valley. The thing I like best about this book is how most of the geological information arises out of dialogues with the pioneering geologist Eldridge Moores. Moores makes a great character to organize the story around.

Bottom line: as a piece of writing this is great. As a way to learn about geology, it's hard.

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Headspinning

Revisado: 03-11-13

This is one of the most amazing books I've heard or read. It has raw stories of suffering that moved me from deep within, and as portraits of addiction, or self-questioning, or the corrosion that comes from caste and class enforcement these stories are true to life. What makes the book so special is that it swirls these stories into one another, like the half-dreamed conversations of the opium-smokers it depicts. Where does narrator stop and character begin? Which stories are within other stories? Which snatches of verse are quoted song, and which are misremembered, or misrepresented? The novel gives you grit and dream at once. For an author this is a dangerous literary game to play: a novel like this could end up confused, or confusing, and lose the reader's attention, but Thayil pulls it off. The book is gripping, it is clear, and it is compassionate.

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Great reader -- OK story

Revisado: 11-29-12

It was the reader that drew me in. I listened to the ten minute sample and I was hooked. The story is not gripping all the way through. Some of the characters stay frustratingly distant, but Kitty grows and deepens with every page, and watching her navigate her world is fascinating.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas