Audies Finalists 2011

It’s that time of year again, folks, and the 2011 Audies Finalists (the best of the best in audiobooks) have just been announced.

There are about a bazillion categories for the Audies so A Reader’s Respite won’t list every category here, but we’ll give you a taste of what’s been nominated for 2011.  Each book cover will link you to Audible, where you can listen to a sample of the book narration.

FICTION

Every Last One, by Anna Quindlen.  Narrated by Hope Davis.

Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett.  Narrated by John Lee.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Steve Hockensmith and Jane Austen.  Narrated by Katherine Kellgren.

The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall.  Narrated by David Aaron Baker.

The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake.  Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy.

Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell.  Narrated by Emma Galvin.

 

NON-FICTION

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.  Narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris.

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, by Harry Markopolos.  Narrated by Scott Brick, Harry Markopolos, Frank Casey, Neil Chelo, Kavid Kotz, Gaytri Kachroo, Michael Ocrant.

Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward.  Narrated by Boyd Gaines.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.  Narrated by Cassandra Campbell and Bahni Turpin.

THE POISONER'S HANDBOOK: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum.  Narrated by Coleen Marlo.

 

LITERARY FICTION

The Beautiful Maria of My Soul, by Oscar Hijuelos.  Narrated by Armando Duran.

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen.  Narrated by David Ledoux.

My Life as a Man, by Philip Roth.  Narrated by Dan John Miller.

Snakewoman of Little Egypt, by Robert Hellenga.  Narrated by Coleen Marlo.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell.  Narrated by Jonathan Aris and Paula Wilcox.

 

Head on over to The Audies for more nominations in more categories!  Which were your favorites this year?

A New Audiobook Experience

A Reader's Respite, as most of you know, has a love of audiobooks.  They don't outnumber the books we actually read with our own two Lasik-ed eyes, but we can't imagine a car ride without an audiobook playing.

Testimony, by Anita Shreve, was a bit of a new audio experience for us.  It was the first audiobook we've listened to featuring multiple narrators.  Our verdict?  In this case, we loved it. 

Testimony is the story, doled out in snippets of backflashes by various players in the plot, of scandal in an elite private school in Vermont.  When a video surfaces of a young freshman girl engaging in sexual acts with three (!) upperclassman boys, the scandal has enormous repercussions that go far, far beyond the media hype.

Shreve, in her trademark fashion, uses this novel to expose perspective.  One shocking event, multiple perspectives from different participants.  Nothing is as it seems, at least not to the the outsider.

In our sensationalized, media-ticker, Twitter, scandal-obsessed society, Shreve seeks to expose the complicated human beings behind the headlines.  Each chapter is narrated by a different player, so no wonder A Reader's Respite enjoyed the multiple narrators...we would ever have been able to keep track of them all with a single narrator.

The story is a compelling one and very much recommended on audio, especially if you can follow our lead and download it from your local library!

Floating Libraries

Ever since A Reader's Respite learned that the ship we will be sailing across the Atlantic, Cunard's Queen Mary 2, has an honest-to-goodness shipboard library, we've been fascinated by the concept of floating books.

 Queen Mary 2 shipboard library

Here's a look at some of the more interesting floating libraries we found.....

Epos is a floating library that serves three small, water-locked communities in Norway.  Twice a year in these tiny town, the Epos shows up with 6,000 books aboard for residents to checkout.  Just think how long these people's Library Loot list would be!

Celebrity Cruiseline Soltice offers an eye-popping library with back-lit bookshelves for more "wow" factor.

Princess Cruiseline Sea Princess has an on-board library in which the comfy leather chairs are equipped with built-in audio so passengers can listen to the latest audiobooks.


Carnival Cruiseline ships each have their own library theme....check these out:

The Valor's Neoclassical shipboard library.  Think The Illiad.

The Monticello Library aboard Freedom.  Jefferson would approve!

The Alexandria Library aboard The Splendor

Libraries have come a long, long way, baby.

Move Over, Sookie

A Reader's Respite is more than a little smitten with Amelia Gray, the heroine of her new mystery-slash-paranormal novel, The Restorer.  Amelia, you see, isn't your normal run-of-the-mill cemetery restorer, although this isn't for lack of trying.  Amelia sees dead people.  She can't help it.  Every time she looks around there are the dead people who, for various odd reasons, find themselves stuck in this world unable to move on.

You can't help but feel sorry for Amelia.  After all, she didn't ask for annoying ability.  What she does have, though, are the rules her father gave her when she first discovered this odd ability as a child:

1. Never acknowledge the dead. If you do, they'll feed off your energy like parasites, slowly draining your life away.
2. Never stray too far from hallowed ground, you're safe there.
3. Keep your distance from people who are haunted.  They are a terrible threat and can't be trusted.
4. Never, ever tempt fate.

Simple rules, really.  But for Amelia those rules have prevented her from having any kind of a normal life.  Still, she finds happiness in her job as a respected cemetery restorer and has made a happy, if isolated, life for herself.

But when a murder occurs in a cemetery Amelia is working on, she meets Detective John Devlin, a man haunted by the deaths of his wife and child, the rules go out the window and Amelia is faced with the consequences.  Big consequences.

This novel, the first of a new series called The Graveyard Queen, is a refreshing change from the ubiquitous paranormal teeny-bopper craze that's permeated bookstores everywhere since the Twilight Series hit town.  This is a novel for grown-ups.  And while we wouldn't call it dark, it does have shades of gray.  Amelia is a strikingly honest character, a young woman who has shouldered an awkward burden - this isn't a trait that encourages a personal life, after all.

The murder mystery Amelia finds herself drawn into is no less compelling than Amelia's relationship with the haunted, broody and mysterious Detective Devlin.  The choices she must make are difficult ones and her happiness - perhaps even her very life - is at stake.

So yay for a new series that has such a promising start!  Move over Sookie Stackhouse, there's a new game in town.

Vacation, all I ever wanted….

Wasn’t that a song from the 80’s?  It’s been in our heads all week long.  That’s because A Reader’s Respite will be out of the office on vacation until the first of May.

Where are we going?  We’ll give you some clues….

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If you need anything, please contact our bloggy secretary.  He’s being left behind to upload some reviews we’re leaving behind and to deal with any catastrophes that may occur…..

Who doesn’t love a good series?

A Reader’s Respite loves, loves, loves a good series of novels.  Yes, getting sucked into a series means your reading schedule goes to hell in the proverbial hand-basket, but if the series is a good one, it’s worth the disruption.  In fact, it can be downright bliss.

If you enjoy a good mystery/thriller with sharp, witty dialog and a gritty undertone, you won’t want to miss Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Geranno series.

 

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Geranno grew up as childhood sweethearts on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston.  While their childhood romance didn’t quite work out the way they had planned, they do find that they make a good investigative team.

As private investigators, Patrick and Angie get drawn into the dark and seedy underground of Boston.  And while their caustic wit creates laugh-out-loud moments, don’t for one moment mistake these novels for a cozy-mystery.

On the contrary, each of the Kenzie/Geranno novels is dark, violent and filled with ethical dilemmas as complex as the characters themselves, often leaving the reader wondering just what you would do in the same situation.  This is part of the addiction to this series.

With six books in the series (Lehane says that the latest book will indeed be the last), character development and evolution is a key component to the wild success of this series.  Both Patrick and Angela are complex characters.  Angie, for example, is one tough cookie…a no-nonsense private investigator.  Yet when we first meet her, this gun-toting PI is also an abused wife.  The dichotomy is compelling.

Patrick Kenzie has his own demons to defeat.  His career as a private investigator has left him so jaded that a normal life is all but impossible.  His efforts to find a place of peace are heart-breaking and oh-so-human. 

And while the chemistry between Patrick and Angie is at times palatable, it is in no way gratuitous.  Don’t be looking for happy endings here.  Like the ethical dilemmas they face, Patrick and Angie’s relationship is…well…it’s complicated.

Although many people claim that any of the books may be read as a stand-alone, we don’t recommend that.  Start at the beginning and experience the rare series that demands you  read each book immediately after finishing the last.

The books in the order written:

1. A Drink Before the War (1994)
2. Darkness, Take My Hand (1996)
3. Sacred (1997)
4. Gone, Baby, Gone (1998)
5. Prayers for Rain (1999)
6. Moonlight Mile (2010)*

*Note the eleven year time lapse between Prayers for Rain and Moonlight Mile. 

Genre Fake-Out

A genre fake-out is, A Reader’s Respite has decided, what happens when a novel appears to fall into one genre, but then pulls the old switch-a-roo on the reader and morphs into an entirely different genre.

Now sometimes this is unintentional on the author’s part and those genre-morphing books generally don’t work out so great.  The effect is confusing at best and irritating at worst.

But every once in a while, an author sets out to surprise the reader and the effect is pretty brilliant.

Take Laura Kasischke’s new novel, The Raising.  When the reader first delves into this character-rich novel about a young college man who has lost his girlfriend in a car accident, you immediately assume this is a literary fiction young-man-deals-with-grief novel.

But as we learn more and more about the characters, mostly in sharply written flashbacks, it becomes apparent that this literary fiction is wrapped in a good mystery.  Questions arise: what part did this young man play in his girlfriends death?  Is he as culpable as everyone on campus seems to think he is?  What really happened out there on that desolate road that fateful night?

But wait, our literary-fiction-wrapped-in-mystery turns out to have shades of a ghost story.  Is our young man haunted by his lost love?  Are there other ghosts that roam the campus?

And just as the reader becomes fairly obsessed with this plot, we’re hit with the finale of a thriller.  Is anything really as it seems? Who’s the next victim?

That’s right….what we have here, folks, is literary fiction, wrapped in a mystery, touched by a ghost story and tied up in a thriller.

Kasischke hits a home run with The Raising.  The pacing and tension is near perfect and the layers are so subtle, you don’t see even see them until they are peeled away.  And while we refuse to give away more of the plot than we already have, we will tell you that this is one novel worth your hard-earned book spending money (or at the very least, a trip to the library!).

Meh Monday

Although Monday isn’t the start of the work week for A Reader’s Respite (today is our Friday, as a matter of fact), there seems to be a collective bad-vibe out there whenever Mondays roll around and we’re not immune to it.

So today will be designated Meh Monday and we can take a looksy at some of the meh books we’ve read lately.  Not bad books by any stretch of the imagination, just meh ones.  You know, the kind you read and promptly forget about.

The kind we think you should move to your library list as opposed to your spending-good-money-on list.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat, by Laura Lippman.  Admittedly, this was our first Lippman read and it probably wasn’t the best to start out with.  More of a novella (that part we liked) than a full-length novel, the story features private detective Tess Monaghan, a character Lippman features quite regularly.  As mysteries go, this one was just meh for us.  The characters seemed weak and we figured out the mystery just a few chapters in….that doesn’t mean A Reader’s Respite is a brilliant mystery-solver, just that the mystery presented in the plot was a tad transparent.  Unless someone out there has a good suggestion for a better Lippman novel to start out with, we won’t be likely to pick up another of her novels.

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick.  Yes, another paranormal, teen-angst novel.  But this one featured fallen angels and we thought it held promise.  Not so much, as it turns out.  Of course if features a beautiful but troubled high school girl who falls in love with the dark, brooding and handsome local boy who (did ya see this one coming?) is a fallen angel.  Is he there to protect and love her forever or is he a danger to her?  We ain’t telling.  But the book is the first in a trilogy if that’s any hint.  Trilogy or no, we won’t be reading the next two books in the series.  It’s not a bad novel, just extremely predictable.

The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff.  This meh surprised us.  A Reader’s Respite  thought for certain that we’d fall in love with this magical realism novel, given that it’s suffused with literary lore and features a healthy dose of diary entries and letters between characters….that’s usually just our style.  Instead of love, we fell in meh.  The story of a young woman returning to her hometown in disgrace and reconciling with her past, her mother and her ancestry never really picked up steam.  The characters never really grew on us and their motivations seemed weak at best.  In short, we never really connected with a single one of them.  Groff is, however, a talent with words.  We’d be highly likely to try another of her works….perhaps her short stories might be more to our liking.  Who has read Delicate Edible Birds?

Okay, that’s enough meh for one day.  Carry on and remember:  tomorrow is Tuesday so it can only get better.