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What can ruin an audiobook

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Based on Janssen’s quick review of Jordan Sonnenblick’s Zen and the Art of Faking It, I knew I had to pick it up and listen to it.

This is the story of San Lee, who has been moved around the country because of his father. This time, though, dad’s out of the picture and it’s just he and his mother starting a new life in the middle of Pennsylvania. He’s in 8th grade, and after never being a real part of anything in his old schools, he is bound and determined to be known as something other than “the new kid.” When he meets Woody — a free-spirited, fun girl who he thinks is totally cute — he has to get to know her. And how does one impress a girl who spends her lunch periods playing her guitar and singing Woody Guthrie songs?

He becomes a Zen master.

It won’t be hard to fake it, being Asian and all. And because his old school in Houston had already had their world religions section in social studies, he was leaps and bounds ahead of the other kids. So, San will become the master.

Zen and the Art of Faking It was really funny. The entire first disc I spent laughing pretty endlessly, especially when San discovers the public library. Maybe it’s because his experiences are so stereotypical (or in some worlds, true), it was just a riot to hear him sneaking in to learn about Zen Buddhism. Oh, and there was NO respect for privacy here, either, making it doubly funny.

But here’s where things got tricky for me: I must have misheard something in the audio at the beginning, and the entirety of the story, I was under the impression that San Lee was 15. We hadn’t yet learned he was in 8th grade (a fact that I seemed to miss early on and caught in the last disc), so for the entirety of the book, I found myself having a very hard time believing San as a 15-year-old. He seemed much too young, too naive, too — willing to be embarrassed — to be 15.

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of any audiobook, especially when you listen in the car, is that you cannot easily flip back and confirm or negate your suspicions. Since the age fact was a small one, buried at the beginning of the story (within a rather lengthy exposition unraveling a lot of San’s history), I couldn’t easily skip backwards. Instead, I let myself go with it the entire time and believe that San was 15. I thought to myself this would be a point I’d make sure to hit when I reviewed the book, writing in my head to note that while I enjoyed San as a character and felt he was quite well-done as an awkward and relatable teen boy, I thought his depiction at 15 was entirely inaccurate, as he read much more like a 12 or 13 year old. Instead, when I hit the note at the end regarding graduation from 8th grade, I wondered if I had made a huge mistake.

I confirmed with Janssen, who indeed informed me she thinks that Sonnenblick says he’s 13. I believe her, and I don’t believe my ears.

Sometimes, listening to the audiobook is a disservice. You can’t easily refer back to prior points, and if an author doesn’t dwell long on a point, it’s easy to let that point be a sticky one for you as a listener. We all know that because of how we’re educated in school, our listening literacy isn’t as high as our visual or reading literacy, so it’s easy to be tricked some times. Even though I’ve been listening for a while now, I still get tripped up. I get “new comers” syndrome.

In terms of the production of Sonnenblick’s book, there were some editing concerns, but not enough to get distracting. It was easy to figure out where new recording sessions were strung together and one or two times, I did have to adjust my volume because the sound quality shifted. But our reader, Mike Chamberlain, is an expert and does a great job of being a 13-year-old San. He captures the humor so well, as he himself acts unaware of how funny he is. That’s exactly what makes it work. Interestingly, he is also a reader on the next book I’m going to listen to, All Unquiet Things, and I’ve heard him before on In the Path of Falling Objects, a book where I couldn’t quite believe him as a reader. It’ll be interesting to see what the contrasts are again.

You can get a sneak listen right here. I *especially* love the part about learning about the second half of our country’s history — you know, what happens AFTER the Revolution (isn’t that the truth?):

AudioSynced Round Up — Welcome to May!

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Welcome to the third edition of AudioSynced, a monthly round up of all things audio. If you posted a review or any audiobook thoughts during the month of April, share them here and I’ll post them. Didn’t get a chance to think about audiobooks in April? AudioSynced will be back at Abby (the) Librarian next month!

Before diving into this month’s reviews, here’s a little audio news:

  • Want the latest on your favorite audiobook publishers? Get on Twitter. You can follow @RecordedBooks, @BBCAudiobooks, @FullCast, @LLaudiobooks, @Audiobooknews, and @SpringBrookAud
  • Spearheaded by Springbrook, here’s a place to connect to all things audiobook on Facebook, too.
  • Betsy at Fuse#8 just wrapped up her Top 100 Children’s Novels poll here, and now, it’s time for YOUR vote on the top 20 Children’s Audiobooks. You have until May 30 to enter, and all those who submit their top 10 will be entered to win a grand prize. Sweet deal!
  • News from the library scene: Overdrive’s created a FREE app that allows you to wirelessly download audiobooks from your library on to your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. This will make listening to them even easier, guys!

Now on to a collection of reviews. Let’s start with children’s and young adult books. This month we got a ton of classics — how fun to relive them. Not only that, but how cool the synergy that nearly all the children’s reviews, which are the bulk of this month’s audiosynced, are the classics?:

  • Jess Kennedy at Traveling Classics offers us a few goodies this month. Check out her blog for a handful of audio reviews (including Peter Pan and How to Train Your Dragon) and a few other cool features about narrators themselves.
  • Mel at Mel’s Books and Info offered up three reviews of teen lit this month, Carrie Ryan’s Dead-Tossed Waves, Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize, and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan.
  • Jen at Nerd Girl Talking brings us two reviews for the price of one: Agatha Christie’s The Big Four and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland.

And now for our adult reviews — both of the fiction and non-fiction variety:

AudioSynced: Thrillers!

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One of my goals this year is to read every title on our state high school awards lists, the Lincoln List and the Read for a Lifetime list. I’ve read a healthy number, but certainly not all, so I set in to listen to one on audio I thought I’d have a hard time digging into in print form: Harlan Coben’s Hold Tight. Coben is a very popular author of thriller-mysteries, which is exactly what this title was. And if you know anything about me, it’s not really my genre. But thanks to a fantastic audiobook, I quite enjoyed it and would certainly go back for more.

After the suicide of his friend, Spencer Hill, Adam Baye has become more and more distant. Rather than handle it idly and face the potential same consequences as Spencer’s parents, Mike and Tia Baye — Adam’s parents — choose to install spying software on their son’s computer. They never thought of themselves as the type to distrust their son, but they didn’t want to take any chances here, either. A suspicious message appears a few days after the software is installed that worries his parents and prompts them to take action.

Oh, and Adam has now gone missing.

As any parent trying to put together the pieces in the death of her son, Betsy begins to seek an answer through Spencer’s networks. In browsing online, she stumbles into an online memorial set up by his friends; it is here she finds a photo taken the day Spencer killed himself. Adam may be in the photo, too, but it’s a little hazy and she knows she needs to talk with Adam to find out more. It is clear he had something to do with this.

Hold Tight weaves together many family lives into a fast paced story that never once left me a bored listener. I felt for the Hill family, but at the same time, the actions of Betsy left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I was at once able to sympathize and understand the Baye family’s spying decisions, but when things really get rolling and the mystery began to unravel, I got angry with them. It was too little too late and a clear violation of privacy.

What Coben does in his book that just worked so well for me was building characters you both love and hate at the same time. As a listener, I was able to hold contradictory thoughts about these characters and even with the story was over, I still feel the same way. Not only that, but Coben’s magic is developing a large number of plot lines and keep consistently interesting characters; he manages, of course, to make them work together in the end, but throughout the experience, I kept trying to anticipate how things would merge and it was never as expected. A true thriller.

Listening to this book was the right way go to. Scott Brick narrates much like you’d imagine a 40s radio broadcaster to read — there is mystery, a little jazz lilt, and a feeling like you’re in that smoky bar getting the facts first hand. He gives a semi-voiced reading, though the semi is very true: only a couple female characters have a different sound to their narration. It never feels weird nor do the transitions ever get confusing. I quite preferred this stripped down audio production, as it let the story tell itself. Brick didn’t need to make the story; he just delivered it. The sound and editing were consistent and seamless.

Hold Tight definitely will appeal to fans of thrillers and mysteries, but I think people who aren’t connoisseurs of those genres will find a lot to like here. There’s great writing, strong and interesting characters, and a lot of ethical issues with which to grapple. I never felt this got overly dramatic or stretched on too long. Quite frankly, when I got to disc 9 of 10, I really was concerned the story wouldn’t wrap up and I’d need to quickly seek out the second book in the series. Luckily, I was proven wrong. This is a standalone, powerhouse of a story.

As far as being on the state list for teens, I think this will be a big boy hit. But it might be a hard sell to many readers. I’d find it difficult to recommend this title to a teen I didn’t know well because there is a lot of violence, a lot of adult situations, and more that wouldn’t make me too comfortable to blindly recommend. For the older teen boys, though, those might be the exact reasons this will be an easy sell (not to mention Adam and Spencer are 16 or 17) and the bonus is that Coben’s written quite a few more books in the genre. Love one, look for more, right?

AudioSynced: War Dances by Sherman Alexie

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I love Sherman Alexie. I read many of his short stories and poems in college, and I’ve read both Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian and Ten Little Indians. When I saw my local library had his latest collection of poetry and short stories available as an audio book, I knew I needed to pick it up. Aside from the fact I like his writing, I knew, too, he reads his own work. I knew Alexie had a very distinct voice, and I knew that would make this audio book really stand out.

And it did.

While leery at first of trying to listen to an audio book of short stories — my thought was that the story breaks would be difficult to follow — War Dances changed my mind. And quite frankly, listening to poetry aloud is the way it’s meant to be enjoyed for many, and Alexie writes his in the way that’s meant to be performed.

War Dances, like Alexie’s other books, made me both want to laugh and to cry throughout. The mixture of poetry and prose moves seamlessly, and what really works well in the audio is that Alexie just reads with his own personal reading voice. He doesn’t give any of his characters separate voices, though he does change his intonation slightly to distinguish dialog from description.

A couple of pieces stood out to me distinctly. A short story, actually one of the lengthier ones in the collection, follows the loss of hearing of the main character. In this story, he describes the process of losing his hearing by reflecting on his own father’s life and end-of-life illness. The sound of hearing loss was like that of a colony of cockroaches taking up residence inside him. What I loved about this story was its homage to Kafka and how Alexie turned a well-known tale into something entirely new and refreshing. The allusion’s slight, aside from the introductory quotation, but it is a story enjoyed on so many levels.

Like many of the GoodReads reviews mentioned, the poem “Ode to a Mixtape” was wonderful. That, along with the poem about giving up one’s seat on an airplane were picturesque and such amusing insight into our culture today. All of the poems in War Dances can and would be enjoyed by those who aren’t normally “poetry people” since they are easy to grasp and quite memorable because of the emotion they provoke in the listener.

What this audio book does, though, is give you raw Sherman Alexie. He has an incredibly different and perfect reading voice. Alexie has a tiny bit of a lisp and a bit of an accent. Lucky for you, WHYY Broadcast has an interview with Alexie on their website that gives us a reading of the first poem in War Dances. Listen to the incredible lilt of his voice. Four hours of his story telling could have been forty hours for me, and I would have still listened in. There is something really engaging in his imperfect voice that made me care about what he was saying and want to listen to more. Oh, and please ignore the commentator on this one – it seems clear to me she didn’t read the book before interviewing him.

Don’t believe this will be an easy collection to read or understand. There are some very difficult to grasp scenes, and the language at times is not necessarily what you like listening to. But those moments are what makes Alexie’s points — this is a book of stories about ourselves, the disgusting and the beautiful, the racist and the too-politically-correct, and moreover, the story of art and writing. The man is brilliant and certainly a modern master of writing.

I was sad to finish War Dances. It was short, but it was enough to whet my need to seek out some of Alexie’s backlist on audio — but only if it is read by him.

Audiosynced: When the narrator doesn’t work

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In the effort to keep abreast of the hot titles circulating and in hopes of making it to my local library’s book club (which didn’t happen), I finally got hold of Katherine Stockett’s The Help on audio. Notice the “finally” in that statement, and you will understand why I didn’t make it to the book club.

I’m still not quite done with listening to it, as it is 15 discs long. It is, as Janssen put it, a quick read but because I’m listening, it is taking longer than I’d hoped. But, I’ve heard enough to discuss a little about what’s working and what isn’t.

The Help, for those of you in the dark, is a story told through multiple voices about being “the help” in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter, a white woman, is interviewing the local help to write her first book, and presumably, the help — African American women who do the housework for wealthy and/or helpless white women — are giving her insight into their lives. Stockett’s story uncovers a myriad of worlds within worlds, and the story itself is fascinating as it is at once the story and a story about a story. The voices and the setting are engrossing and engaging. And, obviously, since it’s southern fiction, I’m pretty much in love. It’s quite a painful story, but it is done so tactfully that it never feels like it panders or lessens the real issues at stake.

On audio, there are multiple narrators: Cassandra Campbell, Octavia Spencer, Bahni Turpin, and Jenna Lamia. Does the last one sound familiar? It should.

Let me say, I think this is absolutely one of those books that is better read to you than read silently. The narrators really set the scene and with their deep southern accents and their dialects, it is unmistakably 1962 Jackson, Mississippi. I’m finding myself falling into the story deeply and really caring about each of the characters. I feel along with Aibilene and Minny, as well as Skeeter. In the scene with Minny in the bathroom after discovering why her employer has been so sullen, the audio heightens the tension and the fear and shame in a way that would no way compare in print. This was a moment I literally needed to stop the car and stare off in shock because of the utter emotion the audio imbued in the scene.

Though I’m mostly enamored with the audio, there is one thing bothering me: Jenna Lamia’s performance. She was amazing on Saving CeeCee Honeycutt as an 11-year-old girl. But in The Help, she plays Skeeter, a 23-year-old college graduate and she sounds identical. Her voice is much too young and immature for the role; even though Skeeter IS immature, the voice is not quite deep enough for me, and I find that this is impacting the experience of the book itself. Readers for Aibilene and for Minnie are so strong and spot-on with age, location, and race, but Skeeter stands out in a less-than-spectacular manner.

Despite Lamia having a large part of the book, I am going to continue listening for the sheer pleasure that listening to the book has brought into the story itself. I’m afraid that Lamia’s earlier performance has tinged my listening to her, but I do think even without thinking about her as an 11-year-old, I’d still believe the voice is much too young for this story. Though she’s a hot name and does a fantastic southern voice, I think that the reading could have been better done by someone else.

I often wonder if I had made the book discussion, whether or not anyone else listened to the book rather than read it. I think that the book groups who can talk about the listening experience would have a great additional element to discuss when it comes to the story itself. Who reads and how they read it really does make a huge difference, and for me, I’m going to remember this book for being 2/3 well read and 1/3 a bit too juvenile. I do have to say, though, I am very glad that the producers didn’t rush this one out as soon as it became a hit. It’s clear as a listener this was a well-planned audio book production, as there are no quality issues with sound or rendering. It flows smoothly and it is quite easy to follow whose perspective we are in.

Have you listened to this one? What do you think? Do you think your experience with the book would have been different with a reading versus a listening?