loveitallabove

Macbeth by William Shakespeare My rating: 4 of 5 stars Four and a half stars, with one major flaw: the producers chose to do this funny little trick of overlaying Cumming's voices when he was multiple characters, namely three weird sisters when they spoke at once. The result was echo-y and distracting. Otherwise, the whole thing felt like the smartest guy in the neighborhood inviting you over to listen to him read, and you cared: knew the story and really wanted to hear how he delivered. It was intimate and rewarding. It also made me think about how it is a story of Scots and English. View all my reviews

The Stranger by Albert Camus My rating: 4 of 5 stars ...kinda can't overlook how groundbreaking it all feels; very cinematic, too. The version I listened to was translated by Matthew Ward, and read by Jonathan Davis, which was not exceptional, but nor was it a hindrance to my appreciation. View all my reviews

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Really, this is a five-star book, but i have a tough time doing that for historical writing to often; and, as an audiobook, Barbara Caruso makes for a terrific reader. I am preparing for a trip to China in 2016 and this is a terrific way to think about how we got to where we are - summarizing the 20th century's great historical arcs and whats changed since 1972. I must now certainly also reconsider how I think about Nixon, who I think I'd known more through Dan Aykroyd's impersonation than anything else. View all my reviews

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf My rating: 4 of 5 stars Wow. I just finished this...what was it? Was it more conceit than content? There were times when it was so raw and real and other moments where the words became disjointed and the metaphors overwrought. But, man!: "Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself. In spring t...

Beowulf by Unknown My rating: 4 of 5 stars Heaney does the Audiobook and it's pretty great: evokes Tolkien and Joyce together. View all my reviews

Beowulf by Unknown My rating: 4 of 5 stars Heaney does the Audiobook and it's pretty great: evokes Tolkein and Joyce together. View all my reviews

I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai My rating: 5 of 5 stars Got it from a list of Top Audiobooks, here: http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/B... slowly making my way through...this is such an essential story. Glad I got the chance to hear it. View all my reviews

Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom by Rick Hanson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wonderfully enriching. Science and wonder, together with mindfulness? Sign me up! ;) Really: lots of good tips and kind words... View all my reviews

Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier My rating: 5 of 5 stars Coming to a close as bed time reading with my son. And I love that this is our first joint absorption of an art history text. I got it a couple of years ago, hoping for just that. It has been mutually edifying. View all my reviews

Gulliver's Travels: A Signature Performance by David Hyde Pierce by Jonathan Swift My rating: 5 of 5 stars While the book and this reading take some time to warm up to, by the time you get passed the cartoon-like images that wend away in the popular mind around the concept of Gulliver's Travels, and surpass the potential Disney-esque sound and presentation of David Hyde Pierce's voice, the original tone of Swift as an early 18th c. satirist with a seeming encyclopedic understanding for world knowledge by which he can take the ironic tone he does rings out true and loud and so relevant to this age. The Classic nature of this work is inspiring, as true as a surviving Platonic discourse or astounding as Melville's how-the-heck-did-he-do-it-before-the-internet global grasp in his whale book. View all my reviews

Light in August (12 Audiocassettes) Unabridged by William Faulkner My rating: 5 of 5 stars This reading by Mark Hammer is extraordinary, breathing life into every character and navigating time lapses, twists, narrative turns and capturing subtle accents and regionalisms with finesse and caring. At once he is Mitchum's Max Cady and then he is Steiger's Gillespie. At moments you feel a small, half-drunk Faulkner himself etching the Shakespearean prose out in a hard, stubby pencil then banging away all night on a typewriter; and this reader persists. It's just terrific! View all my reviews

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami My rating: 5 of 5 stars Five Star Fiction. Thank you, Mr. Murakami: I will never forget it. View all my reviews

The William Faulkner Audio Collection by William Faulkner My rating: 3 of 5 stars Enjoying the ride, and the language, but its a mixed bag overall in the performances. Carradine's delivery of the novella "Spotted Horses" is breathlessly terrific! Debra Winger just doesn't do it for me, and the Faulkner himself is kinda indecipherable. The readings from "That Evening Sun" ruin the story for its honestly racist interpretation. Still, I listened for love of the story. But, even if Faulkner was a matter-of-fact racist, of-his-age and sublime in his interpretations of the struggles of the legacies of slavery and an impoverished white south, that man reading didn't have no right to make Nancy sound like that. View all my reviews

My Father's Tears and Other Stories by John Updike My rating: 5 of 5 stars I just finished this as a "book on tape," well CDs. It's my first foray into Updike since "Rabbit Run" in high school. The work is drenched with all of the fragile humanity and glistening prose of infidelity, divorce and real talk that has kept me from him all these years. I have been building my own life with an eye on solidity and a desired permanence. I do not need his encouragement. He was a college classmate of my dad's and that has always meant a lot to me. This late-in-life collection displays a craftsman at a pinnacle before the precipice, ripe with similes and metaphors that make you rethink how you process every word and thought yourself. View all my reviews

Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power by Gerald Posner My rating: 4 of 5 stars After a trip to the Motown Museum this summer, and swinging by Michael Jackson's birthhome in Gary, IN, I have been reading a few books on Detroit and Motown. I cried uncontrollably in the Museum. There's something about Motown: Detroit, Gordy, Motown 25 as a watershed moment in my life, what I teach my son and want him to know, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder...so much about what's great and abysmal about the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. The author writes about MJ and quotes him: Shy and withdrawn and so soft-spoken that often people had to strain to hear him, he felt at home only when performing. “I was raised on stage,” he told one journalist. “And I am more comfortable out there that I am right now. When it comes time to go off, I don't want to. I feel like there are angels on all corners, protecting me. I could sleep on stage.” ...

Open City by Teju Cole My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed Open City , especially right now as I an considering writing something longer in a first person narrator's voice about place and that's distinct and indulgently pretentious, the kind of voice that I find satisfying and inspiring when in the mood. And I'm not being sardonic; kinda earnest, in fact. Open City was recommended to me because I was talking about how much I was loving the seemingly meaningless but evocatively detailed prose of Murakami, not knowing how to put my finger on why I was drawn forward into his narratives. The way Cole picks up on the overriding issue of the immigrant in Europe - focused on assimilated Muslims - and America is very right now; and the narrator as a man of many countries who succeeds as a practicing doctor, all the while menaced by memory and even once attacked, is compelling and necessary. Still: when it was over, I did not feel changed, p...