(Audio)Book Talk: SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS, by Aisha Tyler

Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation
Aisha Tyler (Twitter) (Facebook)
Audiobook read by the author
It Books/Dey Street Books (July 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 0062223771 / 9780062223777)
Nonfiction (memoir/essays/humor), 256 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Harper Audio, July 2013, ISBN 9780062263322; Audible ASIN B00D98KXPW)

“They say” that when you look back over your life, you’ll have more regrets over what you didn’t do than what you did. I don’t completely agree–if what you’ve done was immoral, illegal, and/or caused irreparable damage, I think some regrets are entirely appropriate. But for the many decisions and opportunities that don’t fall into any of those categories, I think it could be a good argument in favor of taking big chances. I’m trying to keep it in mind more, as I’ve reached a point where there’s (probably) more of my life to look back over than waiting ahead of me.

Aisha Tyler’s Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation would argue in favor of the “doing and not regretting.” Her collection of comedic essays drawn from many of her own learning experiences also seems to be offered in the spirit of “Let someone else make the mistakes, so you don’t have to make them all yourself.”

Tyler notes in an introductory passage that Self-Inflicted Wounds is not autobiography, although it is autobiographical. That’s accurate, but Tyler’s personal details—child of divorced, hippie-influenced parents in the San Francisco Bay Area; hard-working student and unexpected Ivy Leaguer; self-made comedian, TV/podcast host, actor, and writer; voracious reader and champion of nerdery, comedy, and profanity—give readers a good sense of the perspective her unique background has given her. Elements of that background obviously influenced her choices, but they also clearly nourished the intelligence, drive, clear-headedness, and positivity that have enabled her to–as she references a motto from her days at Dartmouth–“boot, then rally,” reassessing and moving forward from the setbacks, over and over again. Tyler’s experience as a stand-up comic seems to have influenced some of the “tales of epic humiliation” she chooses to share—there are a lot of drinking-related stories—but she holds on to the common thread.

The ability to laugh at yourself is another factor in recovering and learning from what goes wrong, and Tyler is pretty comfortable with doing that. That comfort level gives Self-Inflicted Wounds a genuinely encouraging tone; it’s not “self-help,” but it comes across as helpful in a similar way to Patty Chang Anker’s Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave. The tone is enhanced by Tyler’s reading of the audiobook; her voice has the authority and directness that Archer fans know from her character of Lana Kane, but softened and more approachable, and I would absolutely recommend reading this one by ear. Self-Inflicted Wounds is fast, funny, and frequently insightful.

Rating: Book and audio, 3.75 of 5
Other opinions, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Book description, from the publisher’s website

In Self-Inflicted Wounds, Aisha Tyler, comedian, actress, and cohost of CBS’s daytime hit show The Talk, recounts a series of epic mistakes and hilarious stories of crushing personal humiliation, and the personal insights and authentic wisdom she gathered along the way. 

The essays in Self-Inflicted Wounds are refreshingly and sometimes brutally honest, surprising, and laugh-out-loud funny, vividly translating the brand of humor Tyler has cultivated through her successful standup career, as well as the strong voice and unique point of view she expresses on her taste-making comedy podcast Girl on Guy. 

Riotous, revealing, and wonderfully relatable, Aisha Tyler’s Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation is about the power of calamity to shape life, learning, and success.

Opening lines (from the Introduction–note that this book also has a Preface and a Prologue):

"I am not a psychologist, but I do know some shit about people.

"This is not a boast. This is just the truth.

"If you were to question why the hell I think I can write a book about human failure and its power to transform people with the strength of its sheer awesomeness, I would have to plead no contest. I am uniquely unqualified to pontificate on the behavior of others and its significance.
My undergraduate degree is not in psychology, or human behavior, or sociology, or even anthropology. My undergraduate degree is in government, with a double minor in environmental studies and drinking shit.

“I have no letters after my name. (Other than H.N.I.C., which is a very easy degree to get.)”

 

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(Audio)Book Talk: THE MARTIAN, by Andy Weir

The Martian: A Novel
Andy Weir (Facebook)
Audiobook read by R.C. Bray
Crown (February 2014), hardcover (ISBN 0804139024 / 9780804139021)
Fiction (science fiction/suspense), 384 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Podium Publishing, March 2013; Audible ASIN B00B5HO5XA)

The Martian is almost certainly one of those books that I wouldn't have noticed in my pre-book-blogging life, and given that my pre-book-blogging reading life didn’t include audiobooks, I absolutely wouldn’t have read it by ear even if I had become aware of its existence. I started seeing excited reviews of this novel on the blogs a few months ago, and although I only skimmed many of them–I went into this one without a clear idea of what the title actually meant–I made some mental notes about it; and when the audiobook won the 2014 Armchair Audies “Listeners’ Choice” Award, moving it up in my listening queue was an easy decision. (Can I just say, not for the first or last time, how much I appreciate what book blogging has done for my reading life?)

The Martian begins on Sol 6 (a “sol” is the length of day on Mars) with NASA astronaut Mark Watney’s first log entry after being left for dead on the Red Planet by the rest of the Ares 3 mission team. Mark understands that decision—the entire team could have died if they’d stayed behind—but he also understands that he’s not dead. Yet. Once he does the math–how much food he has, how long until the next Mars mission is scheduled–he sees that he’ll most likely get there eventually. However, Mark’s drive to survive, and the ingenuity he employs in applying his skills as an engineer and botanist to that goal, is a bit of a surprise to him. NASA’s eventual discovery that he’s still on Mars, and clearly not dead, is an even bigger surprise, and their necessary response to that discovery–finding a way to bring him home–will bring more surprises, some of which will be quite unwelcome.

To be honest, I had a few doubts in the early going that this novel was going to work for me, but just as Mark’s log entries were starting to feel a little tedious–they weren’t boring, but was the entire story going to be told this way?–author Andy Weir switched gears. The narrative expanded to include the Earth-based NASA team and Mark’s fellow crew members on the Hermes space station, and as these strands became braided more tightly together, the suspense built and I grew more invested, both intellectually and emotionally, in The Martian. Strangely and surprisingly, building out the cast of characters made the central one that much more interesting to me. I really grew to like Mark, and his log entries proved to be both genuine expressions of personality and engaging accounts of an inspired survival mission that took me on an emotional roller-coaster ride.

I’m not sure I would have found this one quite as affecting in print, but I absolutely understand that “Listener’s Choice” selection. The Martian was my first experience with narrator R.C. Bray, but I’m pretty sure that seeing his name in an audiobook’s credits will be a recommendation for me in the future. I really enjoyed his character-voice work, and his reading of the tightly-plotted final section had me nearly breathless. (I listen to audiobooks while driving, so this may not have been entirely safe.) When the book ended with the “Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program” message, my answer was an enthusiastic Yes.

Rating: Book, 3.75 of 5; Audio, 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Book description, from the publisher’s website

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. 

Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. 

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. 

Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. 

But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

Opening lines:
"I’m pretty much fucked.

"That’s my considered opinion.
"Fucked.

"Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.

"I don’t even know who will read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now.

“For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, ‘Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.’”

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(Audio)Book Talk: CALL THE MIDWIFE, by Jennifer Worth

Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times
Jennifer Worth
Audiobook read by Nicola Barber
Penguin Books (2012), Trade Paperback (ISBN 1611749247 / 9781611749243)
Nonfiction: autobiography/memoir, 352 pages
Source: purchased audiobook (Highbridge Audio, 2012, ISBN 9781611749250, Audible ASIN B009899R76)

I don’t often buy audiobooks on a whim, but after I finished listening to The Cuckoo’s Calling I was craving more British narration, and when Call the Midwife popped up as a suggestion on Audible, I decided to take them up on it.

Written several decades after Jennifer Worth’s experiences as an in-home nurse/midwife in 1950s London, Call the Midwife felt like old-school memoir to me—that is, the kind of book produced by someone going about “writing their memoirs,” because they have all these great stories to tell. In fact, given that this is the first of three volumes, Worth literally did “write her memoirs,” and she does have plenty of stories. The book feels more like a collection of anecdotes than a structured narrative, and as such, it was easy for me to see why it became the source material for a very popular British TV series.

Worth’s experiences as a young midwife in the downtrodden East End of post-World War II London brought her into contact with many families—some large, some small, most poor—and a slew of colorful characters, whose lives she portrays sympathetically and vividly. She gives readers a real feel for the 1950s in the London docklands, a time and place that feel much further away than they really are, and what she says about mid-twentieth-century women’s healthcare offers new perspectives on some current debates. However, while Worth includes generous amounts of historical and social context, Call the Midwife is ultimately a personal story…and in that respect, I found it a little disappointing.
There are a few lengthy sections in which she narrates the personal histories of patients—stories from before she knew these women. While those stories are interesting on their own merits, they engaged me less than those of births that she attended and the families whose lives more directly affected hers, and I didn’t find enough of her own story here to satisfy me. I still have too many questions about the person who should have been at the center of this.

Perhaps those questions are addressed in the other two volumes of Worth’s memoirs—and if they’re also available on audiobook and read by Nicola Barber, I just might decide to find out. Listening to Barber’s voice work was an absolute delight, and I’d love to hear more of it. Call the Midwife was a fine audiobook experience, and an often fascinating glimpse of recent history.

Rating: Book, 3.5 of 5; Audio, 4 of 5

Another Take: Capricious Reader

Book description, from the publisher’s website:

At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post war London’s East End slums. The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies all over London—from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives to the woman with twenty-four children who can’t speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city’s seedier side—illuminate a fascinating time in history. Beautifully written and utterly moving, Call The Midwife will touch the hearts of anyone who is, and everyone who has, a mother.

From Chapter One:

"Why did I ever start this? I must have been mad! There were dozens of other things I could have been–a model, air hostess, or ship’s stewardess. The ideas run through my head, all glamorous, highly-paid jobs. Only an idiot would choose to be a nurse. And now a midwife…
“Two-thirty in the morning! I struggle, half asleep, into my uniform. Only three hours sleep after a seventeen-hour working day. Who would do such a job? It is bitterly cold and raining outside. Nonnatus House itself is cold enough, and the bicycle shed even colder. In the dark I wrench at a bicycle and crack my shin. Through blind force of habit, I fit my delivery bag on to the bicycle, and push it out into the deserted street.”

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(Audio)Book Talk: THE CUCKOO'S CALLING, by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

The Cuckoo’s Calling (A Cormoran Strike Novel)
Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling)
Audiobook read by Robert Glenister
Mulholland Books (2014), Paperback (ISBN 1478980826 / 9781478980827)
Fiction, 464 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Hachette Audio, May 2013, ISBN 9781611134933; Audible ASIN B00CTQ2ZS8)


True confession time: I doubt I would have paid any attention to The Cuckoo’s Calling if I hadn’t learned that “Robert Galbraith” was a pseudonym, and that this detective novel was a no-longer-secret side project for J.K. Rowling. I became interested in the story behind the story pretty quickly when that news broke. I didn’t get as interested in the story itself until some time later–and by the time I did get interested, I’d come across some good reviews of the audiobook, so I thought I’d read it that way.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a detective/mystery novel, which means that unraveling the plot is more than half the fun–and since I don’t want to spoil your fun, I won’t say too much about it. The novel opens with a dead body in the street on a snowy winter night–did reknowned supermodel Lula Landry jump from her balcony, or was she pushed over? The police have said it’s a suicide, but the victim’s brother isn’t accepting that, and he’s making a pretty generous offer to down-and-out P.I. Cormoran Strike to launch an independent investigation. With only one other active client and no home but his back office, Strike can’t turn down this dubious case–or the assistance of his temporary secretary, Robin Ellacott.

The novel felt like it was a little longer than it strictly needed to be, but I didn’t guess the final twist too far in advance of the revelation, and I appreciated that–it’s never satisfying to solve a mystery too soon. I appreciated even more that the novel didn’t skimp on character development, particularly that of the detective and his assistant–I really enjoyed getting to know them both.

I’m not sure I would have liked this one quite so much in print, but I really enjoyed actor Robert Glenister’s reading of The Cuckoo’s Calling in audiobook, especially his character voices. If I stick with the Strike series–and he continues as its audio narrator–I’m pretty certain this will continue to be my preferred reading format.

It seemed to me that J.K. Rowling probably have had a lot of fun writing this…especially given that at the time, almost no one was aware that she was writing it, so she must have had an unexpected amount of freedom. That freedom is not likely to accompany the writing of future Cormoran Strike novels–the second in the series, The Silkworm, is out this month–but I hope that won’t hold her back. Rowling’s already responsible for one genuine worldwide phenomenon; we don’t need another Harry Potter, and I think this establishes that she doesn’t need one either. (That said, am I the only one who envisioned Strike, based on the character’s physical description, as a somewhat more refined Hagrid?)

Rating: Book, 3.5 of 5; Audio, 3.75 of 5

Other opinions, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Book description, from the publisher’s website

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office. 

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man. 

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this. 

Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Opening lines:

“The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.”

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(Audio)Book Talk: A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, by Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson (Facebook)

Abridged audiobook read by the author / Unabridged audio read by Richard Matthews

Broadway Books (2004), trade paper (ISBN 076790818X / 9780275980528)

Nonfiction: science, 544 pages

Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio, 2003, ISBN 9780739302958; Audible ASIN B00009OYYM)

My first experience with Bill Bryson was 2010's Home: A Short History of Private Life, and I knew it wouldn't be my last. I also knew it wasn't Bryson's first experience with "short history," and when I took my long-overdue first steps into the land of audiobooks a few months later, his own reading of his 2003 work A Short History of Nearly Everything was one of my earliest purchases. Audiobooks don't tend to languish in TBR Purgatory for as long as print and ebooks do, as a rule, but it took me almost two and a half years to get around to that one. Honestly, the premise seemed just a bit intimidating, as you might imagine from that title--"nearly everything" covers a LOT.

However, once I finally dove in, I was disappointed and chagrined--not by the book, but by the discovery that, as an audiobook noob, I'd purchased an abridged version. I was so not disappointed and chagrined by the book itself that I remedied the situation in the most appropriate manner: I downloaded the full, unabridged version, and began listening to it immediately after I finished the short one. The full version is not read by the author--which may be another reason I passed it up originally--but that turned out not to be all that much of a drawback, as it allowed me to focus more on Bryson as a writer. (I have to admit that Bryson's voice as an audio narrator is a bit unexpected and something of an acquired taste, and although I'm mostly on board with it, I appreciated hearing his words read by Richard Matthews--more than I expected to, if I'm being honest.)

A Short History of Nearly Everything does not misrepresent itself; it ranges from theories on the origin of the universe and how long ago that (probably) really happened, to the structure of atoms and cells and the most basic, essential foundations of life and its evolution on Earth (which is all we Earthlings are really able to study at this point.) The book was originally published in 2003 and is therefore missing a decade of scientific developments, including the identification of the Higgs boson and the demotion of Pluto from "planet" rank. However, I think that's an inherent hazard of writing history on any topic, let alone science, without confining the discussion to "historical" time periods, and I don't think that the book suffers for it. Bryson's emphasis on the often obscure people and personalities who have developed and documented our understanding of the physical world, and his meanders down narrative sidetracks for further exploration, make it all work.

Having now spent more time with A Short History of Nearly Everything than just about any audiobook I've read yet, I would actually recommend the approach I took by accident. While Bryson is not a scientist and his work is very approachable, the abridged audio serves nicely as a highlight reel, introducing most of the key names, events, and ideas that are explored more fully in the long version. Even in plain language, there are some complicated concepts here, and if you're more oriented to processing information visually, there's an added level of challenge to reading this by ear; keeping the first listen in mind as a detailed outline for the second reading helped me a lot. (It also helped that there's overlap in the material here with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which premiered while I was listening toA Short History of Nearly Everything, and which we're still watching; you could make a nice little self-instruction course out of this combination.)

I've now read Bryson on a variety of subjects, It seems to me that he's one of our best contemporary storytellers...and he can make an engaging, compelling story out of just about anything. It's a rare gift. The way that A Short History of Nearly Everything made me recognize, appreciate, and rejoice over just how remarkable it is to be alive--in this here and now, with the knowledge we have and the potential for so much more--may be an even rarer one.

Rating: Book and Audio, 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Book description, from the publisher's website

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

From Chapter One:

"NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small. 

"A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least. 

"Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe."

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(Audio)Book Talk: THE HEADMASTER'S WIFE, by Thomas Christopher Greene

The Headmaster's Wife

Thomas Christopher Greene (Facebook)

Audiobook read by Kevin T. Collins, Tavia Gilbert, and Stephen Hoye

Thomas Dunne Books (February 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 1250038944 / 9781250038944)

Fiction, 288 pages

Source: Purchased audiobook (Audible Studios, February 2014; ASIN B00IMNIZK4)

I decided to read Thomas Christopher Greene's The Headmaster's Wife because of solid recommendations from trusted bloggers and a lifelong weakness for boarding-school stories with New England settings, despite some misgivings that it might have some elements that cut a little too close for my taste. I chose it on audio because that would allow me to get to it sooner, and because after spending the better part of a month listening to the history of nearly everything, I wanted a book that would go quickly. This novel definitely met that last qualification; I finished listening to it in under a week, during a week when I wasn't making my daily eighty-mile round-trip commute.

Several reviews have suggested that this is a book that is best read without too much advance knowledge of the story, and so I will try not to tell much more than what's revealed in the publisher's description quoted below. However, I'll share a few bullet-point observations:

• The novel's structure is critical to its effect and its effectiveness (which are not precisely the same thing). It's divided into four sections--long, short, long, short,with each section taking a different narrative voice. The first of the short sections confirms something that the reader may have come to suspect during the first long one. The third section reimagines and reshapes the first.
• I was increasingly uncomfortable with the depiction of events in the first section until I decided that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator...and at that point, I actually became more invested in the story.
• Greene's strength as a writer here seems to lie in evoking atmosphere: in the vividly described New England settings; in the turbulent, wracked emotional lives of his characters; and in the tension that quickly sets in and propels the reader through the narrative. The Headmaster's Wife could be classified as mystery, but that's more due to the way it unfolds than strictly on the basis of plot.

I was taken aback at first to realize that the audiobook version of The Headmaster's Wife has three readers--none of whom I've encountered before--but as the novel's structure emerges, the reason for this becomes clear, and while I'm still not sure it was entirelynecessary, it definitely works.

It sounds contradictory, but nearly everything I read about The Headmaster's Wife before I read the book itself had me prepared to be surprised. And I was--perhaps not so much by the story itself, but by the way it was told and the effect it had on me. I'll join the chorus on this one and suggest that you let it surprise you, too.

Rating: Book, 4 of 5; Audio, 3.75 of 5

Book description, from the publisher's website:

Inspired by a personal loss, Thomas Christopher Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man’s memories of his life and loves. 

Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont’s elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges. Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family. Beautifully written and compulsively readable, The Headmaster’s Wife stands as a moving elegy to the power of love as an antidote to grief.

Opening Lines:

"He arrives at the park by walking down Central Park West and then entering through the opening at West Seventy-seventh Street. This is in the winter. It is early morning, and the sun is little more than an orangey haze behind heavy clouds in the east. Light snow flurries fill the air. There are not many people out, a few runners and women bundled against the cold pushing strollers. 

"He walks down the asphalt drive and when he reaches a path with a small wooden footbridge he stops for a moment, and it is there somewhere, a snatch of memory, but he cannot reach it. An elderly couple comes toward him, out for their morning walk. The man gives him a hearty good morning but he looks right through him. What is it he remembers? It is something beautiful, he is sure of it, but it eludes him like so many things seem to do nowadays. 

"If he could access it, what he would see was a day twenty years earlier, in this same spot."

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(Audio)Book Talk: FANGIRL, by Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell (Twitter) (Facebook)(Tumblr)
Audiobook read by Rebecca Lowman and Maxwell Caulfield
St. Martins Griffin (September 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 1250030951 / 9781250030955)
Fiction (YA), 448 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio, 2013, ISBN 9780804121286; Audible ASIN B00E9YYT64)

It doesn't happen often--at least, not for me--but sometimes you go into a book just knowing it's going to hit some of your sweet spots. Like so many other readers, I fell hard for Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park. I already knew how vividly and realistically she could render characters, and as a self-professed, late-blooming "fangirl" myself, the premise of her most recent novel was a real hook for me. In addition, Fangirl's audiobook was read by Rebecca Lowman, who has become on of my favorite narrators. I expected a good reading experience from Fangirl, and it surpassed my expectations.

Up until a few weeks before she left for college, Cath Avery largely defined herself in three ways: a twin, a fan, and a girl without a mother. Her foundation is shaken when she learns her sister Wren doesn't intend to share a dorm room with her at the University of Nebraska. Her world is rocked when she finds out that her mother--who left their family when Cath and Wren were in third grade, on September 11, 2001--has been in contact recently with both her father and her sister. And the story of young magician Simon Snow is just months away from its final installment--what will Cath's life be without the series of books and movies that she's not only grown up with, but which has allowed her to explore her own creativity through writing fiction inspired by it?

Eleanor and Park was an unconventional high-school love story; Fangirl is an unconventional coming-of-age college story crossed with a first-love story and flavored with modern Internet-based fan culture. I think that's a pretty ambitious undertaking, and I think it succeeds at just about every level. I spent a few months lurking around a Harry Potter fanfiction site a few years ago--reading only, never writing--and based on that brief experience, it seems to me that Rowell really gets that angle of the story. Perhaps she could have said more about fandom, but I think she's employed it appropriately for the story she really wants to tell--and the fact that Fangirl has inspired a fanfiction archive of its own strikes me as a most appropriate accolade to that.

But even more than "getting" fandom, Rowell gets what makes characters fully realized and deeply human, and I especially appreciate her ability to depict complicated relationships in dialogue that rarely rings false or calculated. Rebecca Lowman (literally) gives voice to it all perfectly, although there were fleeting moments I forgot I wasn't listening to her reading of Sisterland, another Midwest-set novel involving twins. She and Rowell are quickly becoming a go-to pairing for me, and Fangirl made for a delightful week of reading by ear.

Rating: Book and audio, 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Book description, from the publisher's website:

Cath is a Simon Snow fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan, but for Cath, being a fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving. 

Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere. 

Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to. Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

Opening Lines:

"There was a boy in her room. Cath looked up at the number painted on the door, then down at the room assignment in her hand. Pound Hall, 913. This was definitely room 913, but maybe it wasn’t Pound Hall—all these dormitories looked alike, like public housing towers for the elderly. Maybe Cath should try to catch her dad before he brought up the rest of her boxes. 'You must be Cather,' the boy said, grinning and holding out his hand. 'Cath,' she said, feeling a panicky jump in her stomach."

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(Audio)Book Talk: DEFENDING JACOB, by William Landay

Defending Jacob: A Novel
William Landay(Facebook) (Twitter)
Audiobook read by Grover Gardner
Bantam (2013), Paperback (ISBN 0345533666 / 9780345533661)
Fiction (genre: suspense/legal thriller), 448 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Blackstone Audio, 2012; Audible ASIN B0073OGZNM)

SGW at The Cue Card neatly summed up this novel very much as I would have, so I'm just going to quote her:

"Defending Jacob has all the elements of a riveting Presumed Innocent courtroom crime drama. It reminded me a bit of the 1987 Scott Turow classic mixed perhaps slightly with Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin--it’s just a bit different and maybe not as intense."

Neither of those comparisons should be construed as an insult, in my opinion. I'm not a big genre-fiction reader, but when I have read genre, the legal thriller/"courtroom drama" has been one of my favorites, and Presumed Innocent is one of the best examples of it I know. And the brilliant, shocking We Need to Talk About Kevin was on my 2013 Books of the Year list.

The ...Kevin resemblance jumped out at me fairly quickly, and for one reason in particular: the mothers in both novels were able to see their sons as capable of committing horrible acts of violence, while the fathers downplayed or denied the possibility. Other than in tone, I didn't connect Defending Jacob with Presumed Innocent until very late in the story.

While listening to the audiobook, I had commented that the characters were annoying me, but I couldn't have articulated exactly why at the time. I realized later that it was because their interactions with each other were frequently so true to life--conversations where one person didn't really listen to the other, and behavior based on assumptions and lack of self-awareness--that they were just frustrating the devil out of me. I don't know whether I've ever told characters in an audiobook to "shut up and listen" more than I did during Defending Jacob, but I think that's a good indicator of how well-developed the human drama of this novel is.

I think author William Landay's choice to use Jacob's father Andy as the first-person narrator is effective for the emotional impact, but in other respects his role in the story feels dramatically contrived. For that reason, I think the novel might have worked better for me overall in third person and/or with at least one other perspective. That said, reading in first person can make an audiobook performance both more intimate and authoritative, and I thought Grover Gardner handled it extremely well.

Now for the twist: I realize I may be sounding fairly negative about this novel, but I don't mean to at all. Defending Jacob is a compelling blend of legal and family drama, and even if its characters did annoy me, I was eager to see how their story played out. The novel is a little overloaded in some respects--I felt like there didn't need to be quite so much Barber-family backstory to establish one of the central themes--and a bit underdeveloped in others, but it raises some big, thorny questions that would make it a great book-club pick.

Rating: Book, 3.5 of 5; Audio, 3.75 of 5

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Book description, from the publisher’s website:

Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney for two decades. He is respected. Admired in the courtroom. Happy at home with the loves of his life: his wife, Laurie, and their teenage son, Jacob.
Then Andy’s quiet suburb is stunned by a shocking crime: a young boy stabbed to death in a leafy park. And an even greater shock: The accused is Andy’s own son—shy, awkward, mysterious Jacob.
Andy believes in Jacob’s innocence. Any parent would. But the pressure mounts. Damning evidence. Doubt. A faltering marriage. The neighbors’ contempt. A murder trial that threatens to obliterate Andy’s family.
It is the ultimate test for any parent: How far would you go to protect your child? It is a test of devotion. A test of how well a parent can know a child. For Andy Barber, a man with an iron will and a dark secret, it is a test of guilt and innocence in the deepest sense.

From Chapter One:

"In April 2008, Neal Logiudice finally subpoenaed me to appear before the grand jury. By then it was too late. Too late for his case, certainly, but also too late for Logiudice. His reputation was already damaged beyond repair, and his career along with it. A prosecutor can limp along with a damaged reputation for a while, but his colleagues will watch him like wolves and eventually he will be forced out, for the good of the pack. I have seen it many times: an ADA is irreplaceable one day, forgotten the next.

"I have always had a soft spot for Neal Logiudice...With the best intentions, he smashed people's lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That is the Prosecutor's Fallacy-They are bad guys because I am prosecuting them-and Logiudice was not the first to be fooled by it, so I forgave him for being righteous. I even liked him. I rooted for him precisely because of his oddities, the unpronounceable name, the snaggled teeth-which any of his peers would have had straightened with expensive braces, paid for by Mummy and Daddy-even his naked ambition. I saw something in the guy. An air of sturdiness in the way he bore up under so much rejection, how he just took it and took it. He was obviously a working-class kid determined to get for himself what so many others had simply been handed. In that way, and only in that way, I suppose, he was just like me."

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(Audio)Book Talk: GOING CLEAR, by Lawrence Wright

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Lawrence Wright

Audiobook read by Morton Sellers
Vintage (November 2013), Paperback (ISBN 0385393040 / 9780385393041)
Nonfiction, 560 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio, January 2013, ISBN 9780385393058; Audible ASIN B00AYLFLCM)

I've spent about 40% of my life in places where the Church of Scientology's presence is hard to ignore: the obvious one is here in Los Angeles, and the other one is Tampa Bay. (The fact I haven't lived there for over 25 years is probably why I'd forgotten that the organization's "spiritual headquarters" is in Clearwater, Florida.) But I work just a few blocks away from several Scientology centers in Hollywood, which makes it a lot harder to forget their presence here, and it's such a significant presence it seems important to understand it. Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief was on a lot of best-nonfiction-of-2013 lists, so I decided I'd see what I could learn from it.

What I Learned, in bullet points:

• Scientology bears little resemblance to what most people think of as a "religion," despite an official (and controversial) determination from the IRS that it is one;
• The rigidity of Scientology's practices, its attitude toward dissenters, and the power of its dangerously charismatic leaders suggest that those who see it as more like a cult than a "church" may not be wrong;
• Scientology has a caste system of sorts which places entertainment-industry members at the top, catering to them with its "Celebrity Centers," and its own clergy somewhere near the bottom;
• The ongoing, long-term coursework required to progress "up the bridge" makes it quite costly to be a Scientologist;
• Some of the things Scientology teaches its members, particularly in the early stages, are surprisingly useful and sensible. The "surprise" comes because they resemble some of the ideas and practices of pyschology, which Scientology considers a thoroughly evil discipline. Scientology's origins in founder L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and its antipathy to the mental-health profession are, to put it charitably, difficult to reconcile.

Going Clear's subtitle defines the book's structure. The first section pretty well covers "Everything you ever wanted to know about Scientology (and quite a lot you'd never have thought to ask)," and that begins with the rather colorful biography of its founder, the exceedingly prolific writer L. Ron Hubbard. Everything in Scientology's belief system comes directly from Hubbard's texts, some of which seem to be strongly influenced by his earlier science-fiction writing. That said, Hubbard grasped the human need for explanations and answers, and he devised some that have made sense to a huge number of people for over six decades.

Another thing Hubbard grasped was that Scientology's teachings could be particularly appealing to "artistic" types, and from early on, they were pitched toward a specific type of artist above all others--those in the Hollywood-based entertainment industry. A list of entertainers associated with Scientology would contain a lot of familiar names; you can Google them yourself, but you'll find Tom Cruise at the top of the list. For over a decade, Cruise has probably been the most-recognized Scientologist in the world, let alone in Hollywood, and he's prominently featured in the latter sections of Wright's book (along with numerous footnotes citing denials and "no comments" from his attorneys).

It's Wright's revelations regarding Scientology's "prison of belief" that made news when the book was originally published, particularly those concerning the "billion-year contracts" signed by members of its clergy, the Sea Org (often at very young ages), and the extreme, sometimes abusive conditions under which those members work. Many of his primary sources were once high-ranking executives within the Sea Org or other Scientology divisions. In some cases, their departures were more like escapes, and much of the information they've given the author was closely guarded by--and within--the church. Most of this material is made public for the first time in Going Clear...and much of it is may still remain unknown by current, committed church members, who will likely be directed to ignore or denounce the book (if they have access to it at all).

While these revelations are one of the main reasons to read Going Clear, they're also the source of my primary issue with it; pardon another church analogy, but I feel that Wright's preaching to the choir. The book's most likely readers are those who are already suspicious or skeptical about Scientology (and yes, I'd count myself among them); there's not much here that will dispel that, and a good amount that will reinforce it. That said, I was impressed with this as a piece of journalism. Wright had unusual access to Scientology insiders--departed and/or disaffected insiders, granted--but is able to relate their stories with an outsider's sense of perspective and a reporter's mandate to check with other sources (as documented by more of the previously-mentioned footnotes, frequently citing attorneys).

I was less impressed with Going Clear as a piece of writing than as reporting, and I didn't feel that the audiobook's narrator, Morton Sellers, brought much to the material--then again, this isn't material that lends itself to audio-performance embellishment very easily.

The story of the Church of Scientology isn't over; what Wright does here takes it out of Scientology's hands, exposes it more widely and broadly than perhaps ever before, and may change its future direction. I was fascinated, sometimes frightened, and occasionally flabbergasted by what I learned from Going Clear--it wasn't entirely satisfying reading, but I do think it's important reading.

Rating: Book, 3.75 of 5; Audio, 3.25 of 5

From the publisher's website:

A clear-sighted revelation, a deep penetration into the world of Scientology by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, the now-classic study of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—both famous and less well known—and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative ability to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.

At the book’s center, two men whom Wright brings vividly to life, showing how they have made Scientology what it is today: The darkly brilliant science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, whose restless, expansive mind invented a new religion. And his successor, David Miscavige—tough and driven, with the unenviable task of preserving the church after the death of Hubbard.

We learn about Scientology’s complicated cosmology and special language. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how such stars are used to advance the church’s goals. And we meet the young idealists who have joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, signing up with a billion-year contract.

In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of this constitutional protection. Employing all his exceptional journalistic skills of observation, understanding, and shaping a story into a compelling narrative, Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that reveals the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.

From Chapter One:

"London, Ontario, is a middling manufacturing town halfway between Toronto and Detroit, once known for its cigars and breweries. In a tribute to its famous namesake, London has its own Covent Garden, Piccadilly Street, and even a Thames River that forks around the modest, economically stressed downtown. The city, which sits in a humid basin, is remarked upon for its unpleasant weather. Summers are unusually hot, winters brutally cold, the springs and falls fine but fleeting. The most notable native son was the bandleader Guy Lombardo, who was honored in a local museum, until it closed for lack of visitors. London was a difficult place for an artist looking to find himself.

"Paul Haggis was twenty-one years old in 1975. He was walking toward a record store in downtown London when he encountered a fast-talking, long-haired young man with piercing eyes standing on the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets. There was something keen and strangely adamant in his manner. His name was Jim Logan. He pressed a book into Haggis’s hands. 'You have a mind,' Logan said. 'This is the owner’s manual.' Then he demanded, 'Give me two dollars.'

"The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Logan pushed it on Haggis, the book had sold more than two million copies throughout the world. Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words 'Church of Scientology.'

“'Take me there,' he said to Logan."

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(Audio)Book Talk: FIN AND LADY, by Cathleen Schine

Fin and Lady
Cathleen Schine
Audiobook read by Anne Twomey
FSG/Sarah Crichton Books (2013), Hardcover (ISBN 1427231540 / 9780374154905)
Fiction, 288 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Macmillan Audio, 2013, ISBN 9781427231550; Audible ASIN B00CTNXS0A)

When I first encountered reviews of Cathleen Schine's Fin and Lady last year, the fact that there was a character in it actually named "Lady" reminded me an exchange from one of my all-time favorite movies, Almost Famous:

(William and Penny are walking in Central Park the morning after he has rescued her from an overdose) 
PENNY: So I guess what I'm trying to say is...I've done twice the things I said I've done.
WILLIAM: What about your mom?
PENNY: She always said, "Marry up. Marry someone grand." And that's why she named me Lady. Lady Goodman."

"Lady Goodman" made herself into the free-spirited charmer Penny Lane, and I often found myself transferring her image on to the free-spirited charmer Lady Hadley. Schine's "Lady" had her name inflicted on her by her father, rather than her mother--the same father who thought "Fin" was a good name for his last child after seeing it at the ending of a French film--because it seemed fitting for a girl. The half-siblings do not meet in person until Fin is five years old, when he accompanies his parents to Europe searching for Lady after she fails to come to her own wedding, and they won't see each other again until six years later, when they become all the family either has left. Not yet twenty-five, Lady becomes eleven-year-old Fin's legal guardian...and in other ways, he becomes her guardian as they navigate the 1960s in a Greenwich Village brownstone.

I have some of my own (very vague) memories of 1960s New York City--I arrived there in the spring of 1964, just like Fin, although he's more than a decade older than I am; the novel's setting is an absolute sweet spot for me, and was definitely part of its appeal. The Hadleys' New York wasn't mine, however; privileged by money, place, and youthful beauty, Lady and Fin have the sort of life that I rarely encounter outside of fiction. Still, their story and their relationship rarely felt less than real to me--I couldn't resist them, although I admit I didn't try very hard.

I have Schine's earlier novels The New Yorkers and The Three Weissmans of Westport on the shelves of TBR Purgatory, but I decided to read this most recent work of hers by ear. Anne Twomey's reading suited the book very well. I occasionally found the voice she used for pre-adolescent Fin a bit too high-pitched and grating, but her delivery often reminded me of a younger Betty White, and I appreciated what she brought to the story. This wasn't my official "first book of 2014"--as I write this, I still haven't finished reading that one--but it is the first book I finished in 2014, and it was a thoroughly pleasant experience.

Rating: Book and audio, 3.75 / 5

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Book description, from the publisher's website

It’s 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn’t seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging ’60s. He soon learns that Lady—giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free—is as much his responsibility as he is hers. 

So begins Fin & Lady, the lively, spirited new novel by Cathleen Schine, the author of the bestselling The Three Weissmanns of Westport. Fin and Lady lead their lives against the background of the ’60s, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War—Lady pursued by ardent, dogged suitors, Fin determined to protect his impulsive sister from them and from herself. 

Fin & Lady is a comic, romantic love story: the story of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.

Opening Lines:

"Fin’s funeral suit was a year old, worn three times, already too small.

"He knew his mother was sick. He knew she went to the hospital to get treatments. He saw the dark blue lines and dots on her chest.

“'My tattoos,' she said.

"She sang 'Popeye the Sailor Man' and raised her skinny arms as if to flex her Popeye muscles, to make him laugh.

"He knew she was sick. He knew people died. But he never thought she would die. Not his mother. Not really.

"Lady came to the funeral, an unmistakably foreign presence in the bare, white Congregational church: she wore large sunglasses and wept audibly.

"Fin’s neighbors, the Pounds, who raised big, thick Morgan horses, had been looking after Fin since his mother was taken to the hospital.

“'I’m sure your mother knew what she was doing,' Mr. Pound said doubtfully when he saw Lady Hadley approach, her arms open wide, a lighted cigarette dangling from her lips.

“'I don’t think she had much choice, dear,' Mrs. Pound whispered to him. 'There was no one else, was there?'”

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(Audio)Book Talk: ONE SUMMER, by Bill Bryson

One Summer: America, 1927
Bill Bryson (Facebook)
Audiobook read by the author
Doubleday (October 2013), hardcover (ISBN 0767919408 / 9780767919401)
Nonfiction: History, 528 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio, October 2013, ISBN 9780739315309; Audible ASIN B00EF9PJU8)

It's hard for those of us who came in late to grasp this fully, but the pace of change may never have been faster than it was in the 1900s in the United States. As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, I marveled that my parents had grown up without television; my youngest has a hard time grasping that his parents grew up without the Internet. At the same time, it can be surprising to realize that some things we consider recent, not exactly welcome developments in modern life--celebrity-obsessed popular culture, casual disregard of social conventions and morality, technological progress the complex mix of hope and fear that accompanies it--aren't as new as we think they are.

In One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson provides a snapshot of several months that captures a country on the verge of advancing to a level that would allow it to dominate the century. Bryson's approach to history is both focused and rambling, and won't be new to those who have read his work before. In a leisurely chronological progression from April to October of 1927, he views the era's most significant themes and developments via singular events. Some examples:

• Charles Lindbergh's successful solo flight from New York to Paris is the focal point for a discussion of the engineering innovations that led to it and the commercial aviation industry that grew as a result of it
• The temporary shutdown and retooling of Ford auto plants for the switch from the Model T to the Model A frames the rise of car culture
• The unstoppable 1927 Yankees, led by the home-run streaks of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, illustrate the rise of "America's pastime" and fascination with sport and celebrity
• Prohibition and capital punishment bookend the conversation about crime
• The rise of radio networks, the birth of television, and the struggles of the newspapers for dominance over both (as well as over each other) show that the only thing new about the 21st-century "media wars" are some of the forms (which have not yet completely killed off the ones that were around in 1927)

Bryson is his own audio narrator here, and the impression of him I got from listening to One Summer was that of an informative yet folksy raconteur--he has a lot of facts to convey, but he does it while mining them for entertainment value and without losing the thread of story. I've read him in print before, but this was my first experience with him in audio, and I doubt it will be my last. I find the scope of social and technological change from one end of the twentieth century to the other endlessly fascinating, and every time I listened to a One Summer, I was dropped right into a piece of it. Like all summers, it had to end, and I was sorry to see it go.

Book: 3.75 of 5, Audio: 4 of 5

Book description, from the publisher's website:

The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically-talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression. 

All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.

From Chapter One:

TEN DAYS BEFORE he became so famous that crowds would form around any building that contained him and waiters would fight over a corncob left on his dinner plate, no one had heard of Charles Lindbergh. The New York Times had mentioned him once, in the context of the coming Atlantic flights. It had misspelled his name. 

The news that transfixed the nation as spring gave way to summer in 1927 was of a gruesome murder in a modest family home on Long Island, coincidentally quite close to Roosevelt Field, where the Atlantic flyers were now gathering. The newspapers, much excited, called it the Sash Weight Murder Case. The story was this:

Late on the night of March 20, 1927, as Mr. and Mrs. Albert Snyder slept side by side in twin beds in their house on 222nd Street in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Queens Village, Mrs. Snyder heard noises in the upstairs hallway. Going to investigate, she found a large man – a ‘giant’, she told police – just outside her bedroom door. He was speaking in a foreign accent to another man, whom she could not see. Before Mrs. Snyder could react, the giant seized her and beat her so roughly that she was left unconscious for six hours. Then he and his confederate went to Mr, Snyder’s bed, strangled the poor man with picture wire and stove in his head with a sash weight from a window. It was the sash weight that fired the public’s imagination and gave the case its name. The two villains then turned out drawers all over the house and fled with Mrs. Snyder’s jewels, but they left a clue to their identity in the form of an Italian-language newspaper on a table downstairs.

The New York Times the next day was fascinated but confused.

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(Audio)Book Talk: ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, by Piper Kerman

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

Piper Kerman (Twitter) (Facebook)

Audiobook read by Cassandra Campbell

Speigel & Grau (2011), trade paper (ISBN 1452657661 / 9780385523394)

Nonfiction: memoir, 352 pages

Source: Purchased audiobook (Tantor Audio, 2012) ISBN 9781452657660 / Audible ASIN B008AF2JDS)

Reason for reading: Personal

Orange Is the New Black is a book that’s been on my radar for a while, but I really hadn’t found a compelling reason to read it until it became the basis of the Netflix original TV series that people couldn’t stop talking about last summer. I still haven’t watched it, but all the conversation made me curious about exactly how this memoir of a privileged white woman’s imprisonment on a drug charge could be translated into episodic television, so I downloaded the audiobook--it seemed like a fitting way to compromise on formats.

Piper Kerman’s story is that of the one youthful mistake that comes back to haunt someone. Looking for a little life on the wild side after graduating from Smith College, she drifted into a relationship with a drug smuggler, and--just once--delivered a suitcase full of drug money for her. The thrill wore off quickly after that, and Kerman got on with her life...until five years later, when the drug ring was busted and hers was one of the names named to Federal prosecutors. Kerman was in a better position than many to challenge the charges of conspiracy and money-laundering and spent another five years doing just that, but her eventual plea bargain sent her to a Federal women’s prison camp in Danbury, Connecticut for fifteen months (she served thirteen). Although she wryly notes that living at a women’s college was surprisingly good preparation for living in a women’s prison, Kerman’s also very aware that while her background is quite different from that of many fellow residents at Danbury, most of them have ended up there thanks to one thing: Federal mandatory-minimum sentences for drug-related charges.

Kerman has a strong support system on “the outs”--parents, good friends, and her faithful fiance Larry--and a good job and home waiting for her, but for the most part, her experience in Danbury isn’t significantly different from any other inmate’s. Her own story, by default, intertwines with those of many of her fellow prisoners, and as she tells it, it becomes evident that she’s in a unique position to evaluate and articulate the failings of the system which makes them all unhappily equal. One reason I hadn’t been previously inclined to read Orange Is the New Black before this was that I had an impression of it as a “debutante goes to prison” story. That premise annoyed me, and I was happy to discover it was incorrect--the episodes of diva behavior depicted in this memoir rarely originate with its author.

It seems to me that the personalities she depicts are what most likely inspired the development of the TV series--and there are some pretty memorable characters here, without question--but the insights that Kerman develops through her experiences with these people are what make the book worthwhile reading. Thanks to those, she has been an activist for justice reform since her release from prison, and being associated with a successful television show is likely to help her gain attention for that cause.

The audio version of Orange Is the New Black is read by Cassandra Campbell. Campbell’s efforts to distinguish Kerman’s fellow inmates via voices and accents aren’t uniformly effective, but she “becomes” Piper so well that I think I’d be jarred by the sound of Kerman telling her own story. It’s a story I’m glad I finally decided to hear.

Rating: Book and Audio: 3.75 / 5

Book description, from the publisher’s website: 

With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.

Opening lines:

"International baggage claim in the Brussels airport was large and airy, with multiple carousels circling endlessly. I scurried from one to another, desperately trying to find my black suitcase. Because it was stuffed with drug money, I was more concerned than one might normally be about lost luggage.

"I was twenty-three in 1993 and probably looked like just another anxious young professional woman. My Doc Martens had been jettisoned in favor of beautiful handmade black suede heels. I wore black silk pants and a beige jacket, a typical jeune fille, not a bit counterculture, unless you spotted the tattoo on my neck. I had done exactly as I had been instructed, checking my bag in Chicago through Paris, where I had to switch planes to take a short flight to Brussels.

:When I arrived in Belgium, I looked for my black rollie at the baggage claim. It was nowhere to be seen. Fighting a rushing tide of panic, I asked in my mangled high school French what had become of my suitcase. 'Bags don’t make it onto the right flight sometimes,' said the big lug working in baggage handling. 'Wait for the next shuttle from Paris—it’s probably on that plane.'

"Had my bag been detected? I knew that carrying more than $10,000 undeclared was illegal, let alone carrying it for a West African drug lord. Were the authorities closing in on me? Maybe I should try to get through customs and run? Or perhaps the bag really was just delayed, and I would be abandoning a large sum of money that belonged to someone who could probably have me killed with a simple phone call. I decided that the latter choice was slightly more terrifying. So I waited."

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