MJ Walters

Interesting but flawed

Revisado: 07-01-20

The story itself, on the surface about $1000000 nut heist, but really about the social and economic issues of agriculture in this country is fascinating. Unfortunately the recording itself suffers from a very intrusive soundtrack that often drowns out the narrative.

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Horrible sound quality

Revisado: 10-15-19

it's difficult to rate either the story or the performance because the sound quality is so poor that much of the audio is garbled. And background music and noises overshadow the dialogue in many places.

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Remarkable book, great performance

Revisado: 10-14-18

 It's taken me a bit of time to process what I thought and felt about this book. First, it was a surprise to me that I'd never read it. I knew the story, or the basics of it, and have done for years, mostly from familiarity with the various film versions. And perhaps that was part of the problem I had as I listened to this audiobook, so beautifully narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

I thought I knew the story. I thought I understood that Anna and Vronsky were star-crossed, that Karenin was a horrible man, and everyone else was peripheral. But Hollywood tends to strip stories to the bare bone, and often to cater to the lowest common denominator, making a complex novel into a tragic romance. It isn't, at least not to my way of thinking. It's awfully sad, but there's nothing about it that seems surprising now that I have read the whole thing. In fact, my most frequent response to the narrative was "My god these people need medication!"

Anna is a painfully neurotic woman who spends much of her time longing for death. She gets what she says she wants --  to leave her husband and live with her lover -- and then can't allow herself to enjoy it. She makes her life and Vronsky's miserable, and in one final, savage grand gesture, she ensures that he will never be happy again.

I can't say that I felt sorry for him; for me Vronsky is not a noble or sympathetic character. His treatment of Kitty made me dislike him immediately, and I found him shallow, vain, and fairly obtuse throughout the book. I would say, though, that on a superficial level, Anna and Vronsky deserved each other. 

Levin's story is a good counterpoint to Anna's. They're all nerve endings, never able to rest. But Levin is lucky, perhaps because he finds a wife who can help him find contentment and security, or perhaps just because Levin is male. Yes, I'm going to go there. I'm going to poke the novel with my feminist stick because I think it's important to see Anna's neuroses in the light of the society in which she had to live.

She was brave enough to make a choice to disengage herself from a loveless marriage, and to live with a lover and their child, a man who professes love for her, but never seems to be able to assure her of that love. (In fairness, the longer Anna spends being ostracized, the harder it becomes to reassure her of anything.) Vronsky is a childish figure, a man who said early on in the book that he intended never to marry even as he is courting a young woman who has every right to assume his interest in her is about marriage. Apart from being closer to Anna's age, and more physically attractive than her husband, Vronsky really isn't a step up from Karenin. 

Anna could only go so far, only push the boundaries of society to the limits of her own tolerance for being cut out of that society. She relied on an unreliable man to carry her through emotionally. She simply didn't know how to be her own woman, and no one was willing or able to help her, at least in part because she doesn't trust their affection. That, more than anything, is Anna's tragedy.  After Anna's death, it's telling that there is virtually no mention of her in the next chapters, until we get to Vronsky. It's as if everyone is relieved she's gone. 

While there is always gossip that swirls around the male characters, they don't suffer for their shortcomings. Anna's brother, Stiva, essentially deserts his family to the care of his sister-in-law and her husband, and is considered a grand fellow by all his cronies. Levin's attempts to be a man of the people, to work shoulder-to-shoulder with his tenants is viewed as an eccentricity that he does eventually grow out of once he finds a way to be who he must be in order to thrive and support two families. People may say snide things about Karenin's wife, but he's never cut out of society the way she is.

And Vronsky? Hard to say what's going on there, but I suspect it's not nearly as deep as we'd like to believe.  Vronsky excites universal sympathy. Poor man, he's lost so much. We see him going off to war, but my guess is that he will survive, return to Russia, marry and settle down to raise a family, and go into politics. His fling with Anna will become history, a story of how he sowed his oats, but became an upstanding member of society. Anna's real tragedy is that she will be erased for having made the effort to have an authentic life.

Once I got past my impatience with all the fallout from the social mores, I recognized again how brilliant Tolstoy is at painting his characters, how much of their interior lives he lays bare for us. His understanding of human nature is extraordinary. I'm so glad I finally managed to read Anna Karenina. It was gorgeous and sad, and thought-provoking, a remarkable portrait of life in tsarist Russia, and the social changes that were roiling under the surface of everyday life. Please don't sell this book short because you know the movies, it's so much more.

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Masterful translation, wonderful narration

Revisado: 09-23-18

Though I've read The Odyssey several times, it never really clicked with me until I listened to this recording, which I loved so much I'm determined to get the companion recording of The Iliad with my next Audible credit. It isn't just that I do find it easier to follow difficult texts in audio format. Nor was it wholly Dan Stevens' narration, which is superb. But Robert Fitzgerald's translation is masterful, making the text accessible while retaining the soul of it, the deep meanings.

I'm not going to recap the story, y'all know it. Though this time through it felt different to me, both familiar and quite new, so it never lagged in spite of its familiarity. Odysseus is possibly the most interesting personality in all of Homer, a trickster figure who always has an angle. In this translation he's both a man of his time with all the behaviors that we might find questionable now, and someone who transcends time and place. We feel for him, for his anguish at being kept from his home and family. He's both hero/king and regular guy.

If you haven't read The Odyssey and want to, or have tried and found it rough weather, do try the Fitzgerald translation. It does make a difference, as does hearing the poetry spoken by someone who understands the text. 

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Dark and Dangerous

Revisado: 09-23-18

Angela Carter's work is all over the map for me.  Sometimes she disappoints, sometimes she wows me. Sometimes she makes me  think hard about my own work, which is a valuable thing. She is consistently interesting, though, for the lush texture and tone of her work, sensual, often sexual, she doesn't shy away from the dark and dangerous.

This volume contains retellings of popular fairytales, sometimes more than one. Beauty and the Beast gets two separate treatments. The first, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon, is more an update than a reimagining, and it's lovely, but nothing special. But The Tiger's Bride is ravishing, glorious, sharp in tooth and claw, and desire. Red Riding Hood is also tackled more than once, and the most famous of these, The Company of Wolves, was the basis for a film of the same name. I found the tale beautifully written, but a bit disjointed, as if it was a series of musings on the wildness of passion. Perhaps if I'd never seen the film, I'd have been more impressed.

Oddly, the biggest disappointment, for me, was the title story, The Bloody Chamber, a retelling of the Bluebeard story.  I found myself thinking, "That's it?" On the other hand, Puss-in-Boots is an absolute delight, a light-hearted tale told by the cat valet of an amorous lieutenant.

Armitage and Fox do a wonderful job of the narration, making the stories even more vivid and appealing. I was fortunate enough to get the audiobook as Audible's deal of the day, but it's worth the credit, in my opinion.

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Delightful dramatization from Audible Originals

Revisado: 09-16-18

Years ago, a dear friend told me how much he adored Emma Woodhouse. She was one of his favorite characters in literature, and so I was predisposed to adore her too. 

I did not.

Alas, the problem is that Emma's meddling can be hurtful.  She is right on the thin edge of being one of the mean girls, solipsistic to the point that she is certain she knows better than anyone else about matters of love and marriage, and scornful of people who don't have wit, talent, and/or beauty. She's not a bad person, but she certainly isn't a nice one in spite of how often people tell her that she is. I suppose the lesson here is that if people say something to you often enough you'll believe it.

I don't dislike Emma, I simply found her annoying and emotionally unformed, the daughter of an equally solipsistic father. The best possible thing that could happen to her is to be tutored by Mr. Knightly in how to behave to people who have nothing to offer you. To be fair there's a good deal of bad behavior in this book, so I expect Emma's self-involved machinations shouldn't be a surprise. This is a society of people who are so conscious of class and wealth and status that they are often blind to the most basic emotional needs of others.

And yet, the book itself is a delight in part because Austen gives us Emma, warts and all, with her good intentions, and her silliness, and does make us care for her. She rather deftly skewers social pretensions without ever preaching, and has a knack for making things right in the end.

This particular version of Emma is an Audible Original. Audible is making its own audio programs, and offering two free ones per month to members, which I think is a lovely idea. I don't know that they're all going to be as worth listening to as this dramatization, narrated by Emma Thompson, and voiced by a very good cast. But if they're even half as good, it makes my Audible membership that much better.

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Lyrical musings on a lost world

Revisado: 09-13-18

This is not a scientific text. Not even close. What this is, is a lyrical travelogue through ice age sites in America. Childs doesn't show us The Story of prehistoric man on this continent, but rather A Story, filled with possibilities, even probabilities, based on evidence of tool-making, camp sites, kill sites, and his own vivid imaginings of what his experiences in these places might have been like ten or fifteen thousand years ago.

Moving back and forth from his own travels to his recreation of ice age life in the same spots, Childs captures a deep sense of what early man must have endured to be here, and what he must have found to keep him here. Childs tracks the megafauna like mammoths and mastodons, the evolution of knapped stone tools, migration patterns. He thinks deeply about the meaning behind what he finds, and creates what feels like a dialogue with the earth, and the spirits of those who who first walked here.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the discussion of first humans. The dates for the first human habitation of the Americas keep getting moved back in time as research -- often vigorously denied and equally vigorously defended -- unearths earlier and earlier human made objects. While Childs seems to believe the evidence for far earlier habitation, he is careful to present different points of view.  He even mentions the "Solutrean hypothesis" which posits that the earliest human migration to the Americas came from Europe about 21,000 years ago, not Asia. He's quick to point out that the hypothesis is most popular with white nationalists who choose to believe that the origins of the Americas were European not Asia. He is also is quick to point out that even if it was true, something genetic research has cast serious doubt on, Solutrean man would have been very far from modern Europeans and much more like Cheddar Man. 

Childs asks a great many questions, and presents a great many possible answers, but what he gives us is a highly personal view of ice age life, filtered through his 21st century life and experience. He hasn't written a scientific treatise, he's written a love letter to a time and place long gone, but deeply important, and very much to be cherished as what makes the Americas what they are today.

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A good overview of scientific theory

Revisado: 09-11-18

I read a lot of audiobooks about science. I don't always understand everything I hear, but the format does make that easier for me. Holt's collection of essays on science and (to a lesser degree) philosophy range from the easily comprehensible to the sort of things that would make my eyes glaze over if I was reading hard copy, but for the most part he does a great job of making a lot of complex scientific ideas much clearer and more accessible.

His discussions of physics and mathematics, which make up the bulk of the book, made a good deal of sense to me as I listened. Not that I could reproduce the formulae or equations involved. But Holt manages to give a layperson the ability to grasp some difficult concepts with the clarity of his prose.

And then there's the philosophy part which sometimes utterly eludes me because so much of it is counter-intuitive.  Still, it's almost as interesting to hear about the battles over who took credit for what, even if I don't begin to understand the What part, as it is to get the lowdown on Einstein's problems with "spooky action at a distance" which name could have been applied to gravity before science became aware of how forces work, or Gödel's paranoia that people were trying to poison him, leading him to effectively starve himself to death. Certainly some of the most interesting parts were Holt's discussion of the life and work of Alan Turing, who these days seems to be more famous as a gay martyr than as a brilliant mathematician who, in breaking the Enigma code, helped win WWII.

It's one of those books that veers from the chatty and informative to the murkily complex. Some of it is a joy to read, some went the proverbial route of in one ear and out the other. Still, I feel as if I got a great deal of both pleasure and information out of it, and I think that's all I can reasonably expect.

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I love this book, love Montgomery's writing

Revisado: 08-24-18

The Good Good Pig is an even more personal book that deals with the life of Christopher Hogwood, who began life as the runtiest runt of several litters of piglets, and ended up living 14 years, reaching at least 750 lbs, and becoming world famous. Montgomery and her husband Howard Mansfield (who has written a story about Christopher) adopted him and raised him almost like a member of the family. 

 Christopher helped Montgomery through the death of her father and many other difficult times simply by being Christopher, a warm, non-judgemental presence who always had a shoulder to be cried on. Through Christopher, who loved to wander the town in New Hampshire where they lived, Montgomery and Marshall came to know their neighbors, made new and fast friends, and learned the happiness of a pig's love.

As with the previous book, Montgomery writes so beautifully, not just of Chris, but of her life, her friends, her farm, her travels, that I felt swept up in her world and the love she has for all of nature. It touched me deeply, and I finished the book in tears, murmuring "good, good pig; good, good pig," not just of sorrow at the end of Christopher's life, but because of the joy of it, the happiness he gave and still gives through Montgomery's work.

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Wonderful book!

Revisado: 08-24-18

Soul of an Octopus recounts the time Montgomery spent at New England aquarium, getting to know and work with their octopuses, Athena, Kali, Octavia, and Karma, four very distinct personalities whose intelligence and affectionate natures endeared them to everyone who came into contact with them.

Octopuses (not octopi since, as Montgomery points out, you can't put a Latin ending on a Greek word.) are so odd as to appear entirely alien to most of us. They've been wildly misunderstood to be dangerous and vicious, when the truth is that they're smart, inquisitive, playful, frequently gentle, even tender, and often stubborn to the point of mulishness.  Montgomery's account of her years of working with them, of learning to dive and then swimming with them in Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico is a kind of love letter to the species. It's filled with wonder, with humor, and with sadness since an octopus' life span is typically quite short by human standards, and because each of the individuals she discusses are made so real by her narrative, that we feel and understand her joy in them and her sorrow at their loss.

I'd never thought deeply about octopuses before, though I know they were though to be dolphin-level intelligent. But after meeting these remarkable creatures through Montgomery's eyes, I can't help but be more curious about them, about their lives, their thought processes, how they see the world and us. Thank you, Sy Montgomery, for setting me on another learning path!

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