Books, the audio version

I found a solution to my reading issues. Books on tape. Or CD. Or MP3 files, rather. See, then I can listen while I scrub the floors or drive to work or fold laundry. Genius.

I looked online for great books on tape and this book was suggested. I had heard this touted as cross between Harry Potter and Jane Austen and had long wanted to read it. I think because it was the first audiobook I had listened to I had many questions at the beginning (Who is this Childermass guy? And where did that other guy come from?) but by the end I was well practiced.

Book reviews seem to critique it for being a little slow to start off, but by the end--after I had spent 32 some odd hours with the story--I felt sad to hear it end. It really is an incredible novel and alternative history. I ended up checking the book out and reading a page here, a passage there. It just kept getting better and better.

I feel there's so much to be said, but instead I'm going to end with this quote, which I found the funniest in the novel:

"The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

'This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?' he said.

'My kingdoms?' exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. 'Oh, no! This is Scotland!'"

I have a feeling it would be even more funny if I were English.



My Dad gave this book to all his children several years ago for Christmas, and though I started it, I just couldn't push my way through. Not that it wasn't interesting. It was just non-fiction.

Tyler, however, read the book recently and refers to it in 87% of his conversation. He is the ideal audience for this book since he currently spends 90% of his work time in crucial conversations--times when tension is high and emotions run strong. I figured to understand what he was saying I needed to read the book.

It was actually a great read and I enjoyed it and have tried to apply the principles. In fact, after I was done with book, I approached Tyler and we had several conversations we've avoided in our marriage for several years--my housekeeping and Tyler's driving. Not bad, eh?

My chief thought, however, was that while these would be good principles to apply at any time in my life, I think I'm more apt to right now. I think I focus more on self-improvement while I'm raising such impressionable little children. I want them to learn good principles for dealing with people, so I feel a greater obligation to be better myself.



I loved the previous books in the series. This one was all right. I don't think that's actually a reflection on the book itself, I think it's more that I was IN the Fablehaven world last summer and needed that fantastical immersion to truly appreciate the series finale. That said, it was a lot of fun.

One other thought. I was CERTAIN that a plot/character twist I had been anticipating since Book Two would happen, and it didn't happen. It was like if Snape had really turned out to be the bad guy. Now, I know enough about character and plot development to know that there's no way he didn't plant plot twist seeds along the way. So I'd love to talk to him and find out why he didn't follow through with it. Was he intentionally trying to throw off the reader? Was he developing the idea that you don't know who to trust? C'mon Brandon Mull. I need some explanation.



This book wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I knew it had been made into a film with Keira Knightley, and I was expecting a saucy romance. But it wasn't. (Note, I'm probably going to spoil it if you haven't read it.)

A couple of years ago I saw a play called "Stones in His Pockets." It was pretty amazing. It had a cast of two actors playing roughly 15 characters switching genders and accents and was generally hilarious. But it wasn't strictly a comedy. I forget the details, but in the course of the play a boy commits suicide and other generally terrible stuff happens. If it were real life, the events would dictate a black tragedy. But the town decides to make the story into a movie, and through the movie of it, they are able to make it a positive experience. Sorry that's a terrible summary of the play. But what I felt the point was is that art is necessary to make sense of life. Art is necessary to make life--a generally depressing and mundane affair--wonderful.

I felt a bit of that them with Atonement. A girl commits a terrible sin--falsely accusing someone of rape--and based on her sin an innocent man (her sister's love, no less) is sent to prison and to war where he will die. Her sister, estranged from her based on her sin, will also die before she can make amends. So the girl spends the rest of her life wallowing in her guilt, trying to make her atonement by writing it, exposing the guilty parties and giving the two doomed lovers a place of happiness. I continued the conversation I had in my head after I watched Stones; can art be a means of atonement? Can art, with it's Greek catharsis, assuage guilt by making sense of it? I'm not sure I have an answer, but I enjoyed thinking about it.



So, I discovered that far too few of the books I enjoy reading are available in audio format. Generally bestsellers get made into books on tape, but while I certainly enjoy some bestsellers, I have very little interest in the autobiography of Barbara Walters. Or even less, Maureen McCormick. Which leaves me with a whole lot of nonfiction. That's okay, there's plenty of nonfiction I've been meaning to get around to for years.

Michael Pollan BLOWS MY MIND. He outlines the history of four domesticated plants--the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato, and examines how these plants have flourished by capitalizing on human desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. I liked it because one of my pet theories of life is self-mastery, or as I like to say it, putting my spirit in charge of my body. He constantly referred to the human desire to revel in carnal pleasure (he referred to Nietzsche and called it the Dionysian tendencies) and the human impulse to organize and master those pleasures (what Nietzsche called the Apollonian tendencies). In any case, I had never thought about how plants play with and exploit those desires and how humanity reacts by organizing (domesticating) nature.

See what I mean? BLOWS YOUR MIND.