J. Crowley

Full on horror story.

Revisado: 04-22-18

I generally love full cast recordings so I liked this one. But there were a lot of scenes with everyone screaming and lots of confusion. If horror is your genre, this is for you. If you want a clear plot, you might be better off with the actual book.

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Not an easy book, but fascinating

Revisado: 03-14-18

This audiobook uses 165 voices, which is probably the minimum needed to embody this novel. I coped by listening during my workouts and reading a hard copy at night. The alternation made this sprawling and fragmented novel manageable for me. Saunders explores the nature of life, death, and grief using the framework of the Tibetan Bardo, the space between death and reincarnation. Abraham Lincoln's precious son Willie arrives in the cemetery, bound by his father's love to stay for his father's visits. His arrival triggers changes in an otherwise unchanging community of the lingering spirits. The book interlaces short chapters of stories of those ghosts with snippets from real and made-up contemporaneous memoirs describing Lincoln and the civil war. If you are looking for a coherent narrative, this book has none of that. If you are looking for a book that makes you think and cry, and unexpectedly laugh, the book is well worth your time.

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Welcome to Asperger's

Revisado: 04-20-16

This book is a personal list of coping skills by a self-published Aspie author. With Autistic Spectrum running in my family, I felt virtually obligated to buy this for ideas of how to help. There are some useful nuggets, but this book is largely a set of observations by the author about his own life, with the characteristic lack of self-awareness of a person with Asperger's syndrome. It starts out with a section on "why Asperger's is not a disability, it's a blessing," in which the author touches on his faith to show that he is actually superior to people who think they are neurotypicals. He writes about various coping strategies that seem to work for him, and ends with some truly odd sections on trying to meet women. It might help if he did not call them "chicks." Given that all of his strategies are unsuccessful, I don't think they belong in a self-help book, except to illustrate the logic of people with Asperger's. I suspect there are better books for this sort of awareness. The book is inexpensive and I got it half price, so I don't feel ripped off.

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Coming of age story sabotaged by performance

Revisado: 12-31-15

I read Thomas Tryon's earlier books many years ago and remembered them as eery mystical novels with clever twists, so this sweet coming-of-age narrative was initially something of a disappointment. As the story went on, however, I became immersed in the characters and the relationships. A young boy in Connecticut is nurtured by a dignified woman who lives is a large house across the green. Lady is cared for by her two exotic servants, both from the Caribbean, living in the house she inherited from her long-dead husband. Childless, she gives generously of her time and resources to children, especially the narrator, becoming a sort of adopted Aunt/Grandmother/Grand Dame. The story creates a larger community, mostly of other children but also of the adults who help raise the children in a village where everyone knows everyone else's business. At the end, secrets are revealed, relationships are broken and repaired, and children become adults. Tryon retains his flair for twists that are unexpected but that fit clearly into the narrative. I enjoyed the book.

I did not enjoy the narrative. Church mispronounced words repeatedly, jarring me out of the flow of the book. One example I remember vividly was pronouncing "invalid" in the meaning of "untrue or false" when the meaning was "unwell." These were sprinkled randomly but frequently through the book. Worse, he uses a high-pitched, sing-song voice for the title character, Lady. It undercut the dignity of the character and grated every time. I will avoid this narrator in the future.

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