Salon.com > Audio Books

David Sedaris has a pleasingly strange voice

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

David Sedaris first rose to prominence on public radio, with his 1992 performance of “Santaland Diaries,” in which he told the story of his career as Crumpet the Elf at the New York Macy’s. The most astonishing thing about this and other early performances, in retrospect, is how all the elements that conspired to make Sedaris a writer-celebrity — the embellishment from his own life, the transparent hyperbole, the play with repetition, the sharp and occasionally dark edge of his observational humor, and most of all his own pleasingly strange voice — were already present and operating so strongly that they seemed to belong to their own special genre (the Sedaris, let’s say) long before Sedaris had written and performed enough pieces that the group of them could reasonably qualify as a genre.

“The Listener”: The David Foster Wallace of bodily functions

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:59:00 +0000

Mary Roach writes bestsellers, and a reviewer might be tempted to attribute her success to her choice of subjects, which traffic mostly in taboos about the human body, and which are often succinctly described in a subtitle which follows a high-octane, memorably single-word title. To name three: “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.” “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.” “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.”

These titles make big promises. Implicit in them is the notion that the reader is not only going to get the science and the prurience, but also (Stiff, Spook, Bonk) a fair acquaintance with good humor, wordplay and the music language can make. When these promises pay off – and in Roach’s books, they always do – it’s more pleasure than learning, which is an extraordinary thing to say about books so packed with previously esoteric information hard won by research.

“Back of the House”: Restaurant secrets get spilled

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:21:00 +0000

We live in an age of celebrity chefs and food television, and, if you’re like me, the pleasure is in the peek behind the curtain at the expert hands that make the food. It's in the authoritative ways they talk about the making, and the special language of the kitchen, and the feeling that somehow, briefly, you get to belong to that world -- even though you know there’s no true belonging, because you’re not there, and if you were there, it wouldn’t be a kitchen you’d mostly be seeing. It would be a television set, with cameras on dollies and an audience on risers and a real chef who is playing the part of a real chef, but who isn’t being a real chef at all, because a real chef is working in a real kitchen under the special and unpredictable pressures and time constraints of a real restaurant in real time.

This problem – the desire to get closer, down in the trenches of the daily life of a person who belongs to a world not one’s own – can never find its solution in television, because the medium is too distorting, and there is too much money at stake to offer the kind of screen time that a closer look would require, and, anyway, the presence of the documentary cameras would change the behavior of everyone involved so much that any hope for closeness would be dashed.

Is the priesthood a failed tradition?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

It takes a long time to write and publish a book, so Garry Wills certainly could not have predicted that his newest, “Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition,” would arrive at precisely the moment in history in which many thoughtful Catholics must be asking the same question.

If you’re expecting a polemic, you might get a quiet one, but you won’t get much in the way of bombast or grandstanding. Wills is a scholar, and his opposition is rooted in a position firmly inside the church. The book is dedicated to the memory of a priest, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and it begins with a long appreciation of the priests Wills has known and loved in a professional lifetime of reading and writing about religion, which itself began in a Jesuit seminary, where Wills studied for five years in hopes of becoming a priest.

This brief memoiristic opening quickly gives way to a historical account of the rise to prominence and power of the priestly class in the Roman Catholic tradition, which begins with the first generation of a priestless movement that hadn’t yet begun to call itself Christianity, and it is here that the reviewer of the audiobook edition begins to experience a special pleasure. So often the better audiobooks get their traction and build their momentum through their narrative qualities — the urgency of scene-making, the building tension of information that the listener is gaining alongside the speaker, the carefully modulated rising and falling of carefully shaped juxtapositions of events.

John Hodgman’s guide to the apocalypse

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:22:00 +0000

As you have almost certainly heard by now, Dec. 21, 2012, marks the end of an age on a 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar, a fact that has prompted certain persons to herald it as the finale of various things, including the world. John Hodgman, humorist and minor television personality (appearing as an excessively authoritative guest on "The Daily Show" and as the PC in a now-retired series of advertisements for Apple computers), has been all over this story from the start. The final volume in his three-book series of "fake trivia," "That Is All," offers a handy guide to the apocalypse, or to use the term Hodgman prefers, Ragnarok.

Hodgman's very funny compendiums of bogus facts and advice would seem to present a particular challenge for audiobook adapters; the books are full of charts, tables and sidebars, along with amusing uses of typography and illustrations. A daily countdown of events culminating in the Dec. 21 climax of Ragnarok appears inside a little box on each printed page of "That Is All." The solution: Create a distinct recorded version, using the book as a rough guide. This, perhaps, explains why the audiobook was released this fall, a full year after the print edition. Without a doubt, the true Hodgmaniac will want to own both.

Getting extremely loud, incredibly close with Hunter Thompson

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

It is an oft-repeated maxim that the best literary books don’t always make for pleasurable listening when they become audiobooks, and that books that sometimes seemed thin in print can be redeemed by the ear. Perhaps this is because the audiobook, as a form, is better suited to entertainment than to weightiness, to brevity than to length, to raucous event than to expansive reflection.

So it is with Hunter S. Thompson’s “Screwjack,” a brief, loud, sometimes incoherent miscellany in print, which becomes, in the audio edition, a pleasurable way to fritter away an hour.

The audiobook benefits from a strong performance by Scott Sowers, a prolific narrator notable for his ability to change his delivery, and even the quality of his voice, from book to book. In mainstream novels of sensation, such as John Grisham’s “The Confession” or Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Sowers modulates his cadences up and down to fit the rises and falls of the action, veering from restraint to urgency. In Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” his delivery turns stately, to match Wolfe’s elegiac tone.

Why “don’t ask, don’t tell” matters

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Bronson Lemer’s “The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq,” is a dispatch from the years of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Bill Clinton’s stopgap measure, which was meant to allow gays, lesbians and bisexuals to serve in the military, but not openly.

The audiobook is ably narrated by Kevin Pierce, whose delivery is clear and true, and whose voice, like Lemer’s, steadily avoids special pleading and melodrama.

“The Last Deployment” begins at the end of the story, after Lemer’s unexpected year-long deployment to Iraq has disrupted his plans to leave the North Dakota National Guard, which he had joined so he could pay for college. Now he is meeting “the only man I’ve ever loved” in a restaurant outside Boston, hoping to rekindle what the war took from them.

But too much has changed, or, rather, Lemer has changed, and his ex-lover hasn’t. In the intervening years, Lemer has lived “the hot summer of 2003, the begging children who swarmed my platoon’s trucks in Baghdad, the scorpions the other soldiers and I caught and released on the Kuwaiti sand, the silly mustaches ...”

“The Adventures of Cancer Bitch”: Memoir of a sassy survivor

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:22:00 +0000

“I love pink M&M’s,” S.L. Wisenberg writes, near the beginning of her diaristic memoir “The Adventures of Cancer Bitch.” “I eat them every day. That’s all I eat. If I eat enough of them my cancer will go away. Won’t it? Isn’t that what they promise?”

It’s a virtuosic half-paragraph, a feat of tonal control that is amplified by the pleasingly plainspoken Texan almost-drawl of audiobook narrator Jennifer Teague, whose delivery radiates the complicated stew of virtues Wisenberg’s prose offers all at once: Sassy intelligence, social conscience, humor, feminist willfulness and indignation at the stream of reductive corporate can-do logic and self-help wall-poster language that patients must endure daily alongside their cancer.

The audiobook begins not with an author note, but with a section titled “About the Bitch,” a name chosen not for the author’s bitchy qualities, but rather because the blog that preceded it “should be called Cancer Something, and Babe was too young and Vixen was already taken.” Then, this news: “No animals were harmed in the production of this book except a few mice, and they were home invaders.”

Joan Didion, Diane Keaton bring ’60s alive

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Forty-four years ago, in the preface to her first book, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion wrote: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

It was an appropriate opening salvo for a writer who would become — and who remains — the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language. At the beginning of her career, Didion announced herself as the owner of two voices: the voice of the throat and the body, which stumbles in service of the other voice, the writer’s voice, the register of the interior life, which has asserted itself ever since with a great and intelligent ferocity.

The writer’s voice, which has been heard for so many years only in the intimate space created by the reader’s imaginative engagement with the words on the page, has now found a richly appropriate vessel in the narration of Diane Keaton. Keaton's delivery is fluid enough to accommodate not only the stately elegance of the sentences belonging to Didion, but also the many emotional colors of the other voices Didion embeds throughout her stories.

Behind the David Foster Wallace myth

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:58:00 +0000

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and in the four years that have passed since his death, his life and work have been a subject of constant discussion in American magazines, on Internet discussion groups and literary gossip sites, and among readers who gather wherever readers gather to talk about books.

He rose to prominence as a writer of formally daring novels, stories and essays that did their best to interrogate American culture, including the culture of entertainment, while also — in a pleasurably idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult manner — succeeding on their own merits as entertainments.

In his best work — showcased in his hyperbolic literary reportage for Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine, in stories such as “Good Old Neon” and “Adult World,” and in the novel “Infinite Jest,” his masterpiece — he seemed not only to crack open and display the candy-coated sophistication of his own brain, but also to do it in a way that invited a certain kind of reader to imagine that Wallace’s hyper-kinetic, hyper-associative and hyper-insightful page persona was something the reader could share in, because Wallace’s voice was somehow an analogue for the reader’s own interior life. In addition to everything else Wallace’s writing was, it was also, at its core, a virtuoso performance of seduction.

Dave Eggers still the “King”

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Dave Eggers’ “A Hologram for the King” is one of those books that is particularly well-suited for an audiobook adaptation. Eggers writes in short, punchy sections. He has long since put aside the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sentences of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in favor of a stripped-down and accessible lyricism that is one part Michael Chabon, one part Stephen Elliott, and which feels not unlike a conversation with an intelligent friend. Most of all, the book owes something to the theatrical tradition. Its most immediately recognizable forebears aren’t novels so much as they are plays of American commerce such as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” And the book’s sly epigraph (“It is not every day that we are needed”) is taken from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”