This time I dug around in Wikipedia for info on a couple of the people/characters I didn't know. For example, Little Women's Jo.
I don't think I've ever read Little Women. I had an illustrated edition when I was growing up, but it couldn't compete with my illustrated edition of Black Beauty (I really liked animals and stories that made me cry).
I'm listening to this again because I couldn't decide what to get from my Audible wishlist and this was the only thing in my library I had any hope of finishing in the few days before my credit needs to be spent. And also, the narrators are really excellent and make for enjoyable background noise while I'm checking other people's bibliographic records.
I had previously read a few of these online, and liked them. I wanted to read the book but, with my TBR, who knows when I'd ever have gotten around to getting a copy? When Audible had this on sale for a dollar, I was interested but hesitant. How well would it translate into audio form?
Pretty well, as it turns out. One of the reasons I bought this, besides the price, was because the narrators (Zach Villa for the male parts, Amy Landon for the female) were so good. They made all the texting, even the emoticons, sound natural.
I felt iffier about the content. I preferred it when it was characters from famous works texting each other, although Ortberg took a lot of liberties with some of them. For example, the texts between Jane Eyre's Jane, Rochester, and St. John were funny while still, I felt, staying pretty true to the characters, while the texts between Sherlock and Watson, though funny, presented Sherlock as being such a cocaine fanatic he could barely be bothered to think about anything else.
Sometimes it was famous authors or philosophers texting, like Emily Dickinson, Rene Descartes, or William Blake. Those bits included what I'm assuming were direct quotes from their works, texted as though they were the thoughts and experiences they were having right at that moment. It was occasionally funny but often bizarre, and not nearly as clever as some of the texts from fictional characters.
I wish the sections hadn't been quite so mixed up. I'd have preferred it if all the Hamlet sections had been together, all the Daisy Miller, all the Great Gatsby, etc. In audio form it was difficult having to switch gears so much, especially since my knowledge of some of these people and works was often shaky or nonexistent.
All in all, this was an okay two hours and twenty minutes worth of listening. I probably wouldn't have been happy with it if I had paid Audible's member price for it, or if I had used one of my credits, but it was worth the dollar sale price.
(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)
When Joe Talbert has to write interview a person for his biography english class he finds himself at a nursing home. There he meets Carl Iverson, a Vietnam Veteran who is is on terminal cancer release from prison where he has been for 30 years after being convicted of rape and murder. In Joe's interviews with Carl, he goes looking for the facts and truth of the case.
I really liked this book, it surprised me because I hadn't heard of it and it was just suggested in one of my audiobook apps after downloading Pretty Baby. I was really surprised by how much I liked the characters. I liked Joe and his family and their drama. I liked Lila, though I didn't love what Eskens did with her character backstory. While this was a pretty standard mystery novel the characters were interesting and I liked the complexities that they had and I felt like they were fully realized which is frequently missing in these kinds of novels. I'll be interested to see what else Eskens comes out with.
By: Allen Eskens
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