Books Read
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The Thirty-Nine Steps
The 39 Steps by John Buchan Published: 1915 Narrated by: David Thorn Series: Richard Hannay #1 Length: 04:10 (100 pages) I think I first heard of this while browsing lists of classic Scottish literature. It’s referred to as one of the earliest spy novels, a man-on-the-run thriller really, in which an ordinary man finds himself wrapped up in an international conspiracy with his country’s safety on the line. This is the first in half a dozen novels featuring Richard Hannay, and it’s been adapted to film multiple times (none of which I’ve seen), the earliest being a Hitchcock film from 1935. It looks like a new adaptation is in the…
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Ballistics: Poems
Ballistics: Poems by Billy Collins Published: 2010 Length: 113 pages After reading Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, Billy Collins stuck in my head as someone to further explore. I enjoyed his poem The Lanyard, which was J.J. Abrams’ choice for the collection, but I also really liked Collins’ choice, Bedecked by Victoria Redel. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and while I don’t actually know what that is, it does sound very impressive. So while we were in Portland last year, I picked up this small collection of his. There were poems in this that I did really enjoy, but I felt…
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle Published: 1892 Series: Sherlock Holmes #3 Length: 307 pages I’ve never been a fan of short story collections. I find I can enjoy a single short story, but reading twelve of them in a row is just too much. By the end of the collection, I remember half of it and don’t care about the other half. So when I decided to read this book, the first collection of Sherlock stories, I thought I’d try a different tactic. Instead of reading it straight through in one go, I read one or two stories between each novel I read and jotted down…
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Laughter in the Dark
Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov Published: 1932 Translated By: Vladimir Nabokov (from Russian in 1938) Length: 292 pages This was written twenty-three years before Lolita and also deals with a relationship between an older man and a younger woman. These are the only two Nabokov novels I’ve read so far, so I’m hoping he does branch out a bit in his other novels, but this was still a much different story than what happened between Humbert Humbert and Dolores. Where Humbert is a calculated predator, Albert Albinus, this story’s older man, is a fumbling and naive fool. He’s a well-off art critic living in Berlin who meets Margot,…
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Heat
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford Published: 2006 Narrated by: Michael Kramer Length: 12:17 (336 pages) I ignored this very popular book for years because I wasn’t that interested in restaurant culture. I love food and cooking, but the day-to-day schedule of a line cook, preparing the same thing every day, wasn’t something I found exciting. My assumption was that this would be the account of Bill Buford spending a month or two in a kitchen, waxing poetic about the strong work ethic and the screaming chefs, but it’s much more than that. He spent…
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Roadside Picnic
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Published: 1972 Narrated by: Robert Forster Translated By: Olena Bormashenko (from Russian in 2012) Length: 07:08 (209 pages) What if aliens made first contact, landing in various locations across our planet for two days, and then they just left. No abductions, no anal probes, no tripods with heat rays, no chest bursters, no communication via music tones and flashing lights, and no floating bicycles. Maybe we were too insignificant a species to acknowledge and this was just a rest stop for them, a roadside picnic, or maybe the aliens have a long-term plan for the planet. Whatever the reason for their leaving, their…
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The Dispatcher
The Dispatcher by John Scalzi Published: 2016 Narrated by: Zachary Quinto Length: 02:19 (75 pages) This is John Scalzi’s latest novella, and it’s somewhat unique in that he wrote it to be published as an audiobook before print. This means he had the audio in mind while writing, and I think it actually did him some good. In his previous writing, he’s had the tendency to get repetitive with using the word ‘said’. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good word. It works well. Stephen King, if you consider him an authority, says it’s the only dialogue attribution that should be used. The problem is that he often writes snappy…
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Amazonia
Amazonia by James Rollins Published: 2002 Length: 510 pages In the first five pages of this book, the main character wrestles an anaconda under water and is sentenced by an Amazonian tribe to trail by combat. We’re also introduced to a secondary character that has a rehabilitated jaguar as a hunting partner and an Indiana Jones whip hanging from his hip, which later he actually uses to flick a gun out of someone’s hand. This novel begins on an absolutely ridiculous level and manages to maintain that for its entire length, which is impressive. Four years prior to the anaconda fight, a scientific expedition travelled into the Amazon rainforest and…
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Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen Published: 1817 Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson Length: 08:16 (251 pages) The only other Austen I’ve read is Pride and Prejudice, and while I did enjoy the writing and the spots of humour, I just didn’t connect with the story at all. I did want to try some of her other work, but I just wasn’t left with a burning desire to seek them out. Catherine is innocent to the point of being a bit dense, and she’s just moved to Bath to stay with relatives and attend the season’s social events. As with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, everyone around her is frantic to…
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers Published: 2014 Series: Wayfarers #1 Narrated by: Patricia Rodriguez Length: 15:41 (518 pages) A couple weekends ago I travelled to my hometown to help my sister and mother pack up and move house, and it was a bit of an organizational nightmare – scheduling problems, movers not arriving, incorrectly sized storage units. It was a weekend rife with potential pitfalls, but we dealt with each problem as it came up. Much of it sucked, but we stayed calm and kept moving forward. In many ways, this story plays out a lot like my weekend did. The story begins with…