Audible Changed My Life.
Audible Changed My Life.
Reviews, Conversations and Insights. And You are Invited.
Subsequent to holiday highs we enter the winter weeks seeking good reads. This series of audiobook reviews is based on my reading over the past seven years during my one-hundred-mile daily commute. Audible changed my life.
My audio recommendations are fiction, a result of reclaiming and separating my personal life from my professional reading about a decade or so ago. Audiobooks are not only for travel but are great for all sorts of multitasking. I listen when chopping vegetables, housekeeping, and occasionally on my walks.
The statistics presented with each review are provided by Audible. More about various audiobook resources later…
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
By: Michael Chabon
Narrated by: David Colacci
Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
Published 2001
Release date: 06-12-12
4.5 out of 5 stars with 3,606 ratings
Some readers believe Michael Chabon to be a literary genius, a master of prose. Others cannot get through the initial quarter of this book, left with feelings of disappointment and befuddlement. After a slow start I just thoroughly adored this book. The early pages describing the inception of the characters' entry into the golden age of the comic book industry in 1939 were slow. But the story matures as the author artfully tells of two cousins, Kavalier and Clay, intertwining the comics into their lives with irony, humor and sensitivity. A combination of fable and magical realism this book will make you laugh and make you cry. Key elements of an outstanding novel are all present. The characters come into themselves over the course of time. The setting is principally New York City which allowed the reader a glimpse into the mindset of its occupants in these months preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor. To be young and Jewish, have escaped the horror in Prague, and see one's life prospering, while leaving family behind trapped and persecuted is a source of deepest sadness and guilt. Joe and Sammy create the Escapist yet can they escape their inner demons?
The pages of this book turn with emotion. And the exceptional writing style attracted and kept my interest. The Audible version read by David Colacci was incredible; the narrator had the inflection and accents down perfectly. A deserving winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a lengthy but worthy audiobook choice.
A Taste of Michael Chabon’s Writing
“Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge - not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there - he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart.”
Audible Changed My Life is a continuing series. More book reviews, and more about audiobooks and “me,” to follow. Feel free to jump into the conversation!
