Getting Started in Audiobooks
Not sure what to download this month? Below you’ll find a selection of audiobooks that eMusic’s expert editorial staff considers the essentials. So whether you’re looking for thrills, chills, laughs, true stories, or literary classics, this collection of eMusic’s favorite books is the perfect place to get started.
FUNNY STUFF
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David Sedaris's fourth collection contains some of his sharpest and most bittersweet writing. "Go Carolina" recounts his childhood battles with a speech therapist, dispatched to cure his sibilant s, and "Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities" recalls his brushes with a midget guitar teacher, who encourages young David to think of his instrument as a beautiful women. This being North Carolina in the 1960s, young David isn't about to explain that the beautiful woman... angle doesn't do it for him, although he does suggest "Oliver" might be a fitting name for his instrument. Sedaris is at his best when out of his element, as in the string of essays devoted to his back-breaking attempts to learn the French language. In "See You Again Yesterday," he bluffs his way through summers in Normandy with a growing vocabulary of disconnected and poorly chosen nouns, rapidly exhausting the semantic possibilities of "bottleneck" and "ashtray." In the title story, a tyrannical Parisian teacher does her best to crush the spirits of a class of foreign students. The author's breakthrough comes when he can comprehend every word of the abuse she hurls his way. Like any good humorist, Sedaris writes to be read. His performances here lend the stories a touch of authenticity and the occasional uncanny edge. It's one thing to read Sedaris describe his childhood obsession with singing commercial jingles in the voice of Billie Holliday, and another entirely to hear him actually do it (and surprisingly well, at that). The lightly abridged version contains 23 of the book's stories, including a handful performed in front of a vocally appreciative audience.Sam Adams
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CHILLS & THRILLS
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In this gripping debut the first installment of a trilogy swiftly becoming a publishing sensation disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist accepts a confusing but lucrative freelance assignment: move from Stockholm to a rural town in northern Sweden to help the elderly Henrik Vanger, head of a once-dominant industrial family, and find out what happened to his grand-niece Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago. The case is a commanding twist on the famed... locked-room mystery due to unusual circumstances, the suspect list is limited only to members of the Vangar family, a deeply twisted clan with a harrowing set of secrets. Eventually, Blomkvist teams up with the titular heroine of the book, a savvy but anti-social technological savant 25 years his junior. The unlikely pair tackles not only Harriet's case, which turns out far grislier than expected, but also the corrupt corporation that caused Blomkvist's professional downfall. Stieg Larsson, who died suddenly shortly after finishing his trilogy, was, like Blomkvist, a journalist and political activist, and his treatment of corruption both large and small is intelligent and piercing. The translation is imperfect, but stiff prose is easily overlooked thanks to masterful plotting, an evocative setting and a set of complex heroes whose deep flaws make them all the more appealing.Rebecca Shapiro
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BOOKS THAT ROCK
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It might be impossible to find a man who's done as many bad things in his life who is as darn likable as Keith Richards. Much of the Rolling Stones guitarist's biography has already been detailed in other reviews and articles (the snipes at Mick Jagger, the drug binges, the death of his infant son Tara), yet there is still much to discover and enjoy in the audiobook, read by Johnny Depp,... growled by Joe Hurley and intoned by the man himself. What may be so surprising is that one of the modern world's most famous scamps can summon so much self-deprecation as well as pleasure from the little things (shepherd's pie, pet dogs) as well as the big things (speeding over the Mediterranean from the French coast to Italy for breakfast). Life is a fun listen even for those who aren't Stones aficionados or even tremendous rock fans, although some perfunctory knowledge of the Stones' hits will enhance appreciation for Richards' musical digressions, of which there are many: even one of the Glimmer Twins still practices hero worship when it comes to his musical influences. Listening to Life is like sitting next to the most interesting man at the bar for several hours and living vicariously through him only without the hangover.Claire Zulkey
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SCI FI & FANTASY
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Nearly thirty years ago, Douglas Adams' fellow radio-comedy writers couldn't resist spoofing the continuous repackaging of his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "And there'll be another edition of the television version of the book of the play of the radio series of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of the License to Print Money at the same script next week," went one particularly thorny barb. That list has only grown there followed... a computer game, a comic book adaptation, three more radio series, an execrable film and now a new audiobook. There's good reason for this continuous renewal: The Hitchhiker's Guide is a dazzling comic masterpiece, as fresh, original and giddily captivating today as it was in the 1970s. Though some purists might argue that the original radio scripts comprise the true Hitchhiker's canon, the novels are what give full range to Adams' prodigious gifts as a writer. Like the radio plays, the books are best when read aloud. A description like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" which knocked my legs out from under me twenty-five years ago and has lost none of its power to make me grin like an idiot deserves to be listened to and savored. Adams's friend, the writer, actor, comedian and sometime poet Stephen Fry, was the natural choice to record this version of The Guide. A superb and indefatigable narrator of audiobooks, Fry can make a listener's toes curl with pleasure with his resonant, versatile voice whether he's delivering a learned treatise on iambic hendecasyllabic meter, a classic Oscar Wilde tale or an excerpt from the London telephone book (this last is as yet unrecorded but presumably soon to be available). So it's surprising and a bit disappointing that Fry reads The Hitchhiker's Guide with the same stately cadence and hyperprecise diction that made his Harry Potter audiobooks suitable for small children and students of English as a second language. Whether it's reverence for the material that holds him back, or someone's direction to slow it down for the stupid Americans, this lentissimo delivery somewhat undercuts the mad energy and exuberant humor of The Guide and leaves one wishing Fry would loosen up and have a bit more fun. Despite the drawbacks, Fry's recording is a worthy point of entry into a galaxy almost but not quite entirely unlike our own weirder, more wonderful and infinitely funnier.Jo Miller
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CLASSICS
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Pride and Prejudice is quite possibly the most beloved novel ever written. Not only did it spawn everything from Bridget Jones' Diary to the BBC television version to recent Bollywood and Hollywood adaptations, but the book itself, unlike so many classics, is actually read voraciously, and time and time again, by everybody from literature professors to teenage girls who swoon over the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. This is... the text that inspired it all, the arch, playful romantic comedy sprinkled with satire and wisdom. There's the delightfully dull-witted Mrs. Bennet ("a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news"); the buffoonish Mr. Collins ("not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society"); and the imposing Mr. Darcy (his first words about Elizabeth are, "[s]he is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me"). It's nearly impossible for a book this good to be anything but brilliant. Still, I wish reader Nadia May were a little less fussy, less schoolmarmish in her interpretation. Though Austen's language is proper and restrained, she, like Elizabeth Bennet, is of "a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous," and it would be nice if Ms. May sounded as if she were having a little more fun. Small matter, though. No matter who reads it, Pride and Prejudice is beloved for good reason. Adelle Waldman
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MODERN CLASSICS
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Published in 1961, three years after Hemingway's death, this collection of short, sharp-edged pieces looks back on the writer's years as a struggling writer in Paris. As perhaps no other author, Hemingway has the gift of making writing seem like manual labor, a hardscrabble existence lived in cold flats and cheap cafes, enlivened by the occasional plate of mussels or bout of marital relations. As the author's own account of his birth... as a writer, the pieces in A Moveable Feast collected by his fourth wife, Mary, and controversially re-edited by his grandson, San in 2009 are naturally prone to self-mythologizing, but the book is also loaded with pungent details, not to mention plenty of literary gossip. He recalls visiting Gertrude Stein and her female lover with a frankness that surprises even today, and describes the English novelist Ford Madox Ford as an obsequious foul-smelling boor who provokes an almost insurmountable urge to punch him in the face. Of course, prose style is why most readers come to Hemingway, and A Moveable Feast reads like a dream, with an ease belying its precision. He describes the process of pruning each paragraph down to its essence: "If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written." Even experienced writers would do well to frame that notion and hang it over their desks.Sam Adams
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NONFICTION FAVES
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What boggles the mind more: a question like, Why does the universe exist?, or the fact that we might have an answer? Impossible as it may seem, that's precisely what Stephen Hawking tells us in The Grand Design within a generation we may know why the universe exists and exactly how it works. Knowing the answer would close the 4,000-year history of physics, so it's appropriate that Hawking and his co-author, Caltech... scientist and writer Leonard Mlodinow, begin their book with humanity's first attempts to explain the universe. From the discovery that the sun is bigger than the Earth to Newton's law of gravity to today's string theory and multi-verses, the authors helpfully provide some continuity by pointing out that even as our theories of the cosmos have gotten far richer and more complex, they're all essentially stories that best fit what we observe. And what incredible stories they are. Reflecting the latest understanding of quantum physics, Hawking and Mlodinow insist that light takes not only the path we observe it to take but also all possible other paths. Weirder yet, our universe might have 10 or more dimensions, with the extras being curled up too tiny to see, and every particle that exists might in fact be nothing more than a vibrating string. Physics and metaphysics may have never seemed closer, but Hawking and Mlodinow's lucid, engaging explanations make it all crystal-clear and utterly compelling. One ends up hoping that we're not too close to a final explanation, if only so that future physicists can continue to spin out dazzling theories like those in The Grand Design.Scott Esposito
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FANTASTIC FICTION
DOWN TO BUSINESS
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This is the book where Malcolm Gladwell tells me I'll never be a professional hockey player, and then explains how it's not my fault. See, I was born in May; and an absurd percentage of successful hockey players were born in January, February and March. So astrology is real?! Nah. It simply has to do with kids being grouped by age via arbitrary cut-off dates, and coaches mistaking maturity for excellence. And... away we go with Outliers, a frequently astounding (and occasionally discouraging) thinkmaze on the subject of being special. As Gladwell puts it: "There is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success." Computer pioneers, classical composers, the Beatles and everybody else who ever accomplished anything gets taken to task. Maybe they weren't geniuses, just people who lucked into exactly the right set of circumstances (born here, taught this, exposed to that) and were willing to log the 10,000 hours of practice needed to put them over the top. Desire and dedication are factors, of course, but by the end of Outliers you'll be wondering whether innate talent is even real. As per the Gladwell brand, there are a thousand anecdotes for parties and dates in this book, but don't ignore the precious bonus content: excuses.
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