Audio Listens Winter 1998

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Ursula LeGuin, The Beginning Place

I love Le Guin's essays and occasionally her fiction. This was weak and only desirable because Recorded Books Incorporated and Rob Inglis, the narrator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, read it.

Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs

I didn't listen to much of this. I've enjoyed Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God and his short stories, so it's not him, but Books on Tape productions bite.

A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden

Hooray! Byatt wields an arcane enough vocabulary that I want to read her, and I have discovered that if I read while listening, I don't get eyestrain! Maybe the voice tones down the churning of the motor. I don't know. But I do love A.S. Byatt and once again, the breadth of her knowledge staggers me. She drops a hint ofTwo Bad Mice as readily as a morsel of Macbeth. If she wants to expound, she does so, readably and a lot more seamlessly than Sophie's World (which was great despite its awkward narrative technique and chunks of ideas tossed in as obvious as blueberries in pancake batter, and as welcome). But finally, I have begun the quatrology. After that, the two Davies trilogies. If I can find them.

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

I first discovered Margaret Atwood in a book review in something wretched like Mademoiselle. It was during finals spring of junior year, when Cat's Eye was first published, and I usually bought myself a magazine I was ashamed of afterward. I thought it sounded intriguing, and then, without mentioning it to CLH, she bought me it for my birthday. I believe I asked her whether she'd seen that magazine review; she hadn't. I like Cat's Eye much more on second reading. Maybe I'm older. Maybe audio books tax me less: I would never have read Moby-Dick or Robertson Davies without the audio format. Anyway, the reader suits Atwood. She enunciates in a precise, cynical tone that suits the novel.
Spoiler: What I remember disliking about Cat's Eye before is that of all the popel and events Elaine might have latched onto as her Greatest Influence, in the last paragraph, she chooses Cordelia. At hazard, when her brother or her art teacher might have made as much sense. I understand it more now. Cordelia taught Elaine to have her impenetrable core. Cordelia stripped Elaine of trust and confidence. There's no measuring the profundity of that impact.
Recorded Books Incorporated, read by Barbara Caruso.

Copyright © 1998 ljh