P&PS

I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks lately.  Between all the knitting I've been doing, and the fact that work has left me feeling a bit under the weather, I've had a lot of time to sit and listen. I've always been a bit picky about audiobooks.  I'm very particular about what I like in terms of narration: the accent of the narrator, the rate of speech, and the amount of inflection and added emphasis all play a role in my enjoyment of the book.  Over the last couple of years I have gotten less picky. I've learned to listen to anything questionable before bed when I'm half asleep and disinclined to complain, leaving everything else for when I'm traveling or otherwise looking to be entertained. More specifically, I like audiobooks with narrators who speak a bit more quickly or at a rate at which I can speed the audio up a bit and still not lose anything.  I dislike added dramatics or emphasis in either places where I don't think it's n...

While I still have to finish a post on my favorite audiobook narrators, I thought I would share a couple of my favorite audiobooks from last year. I’ve listed these in the order that I listened to them in to avoid the agony of having to rank them. Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje narrated by Alan Cumming The combination of Ondaatje’s writing and Cumming’s narration is some sort of cosmic fate. Ok, I know that sounds a little bit dramatic, but I love this audiobook so much. It’s the second audiobook in my life that’s solidified by faith in the medium. I’m picky, I know, but when you stumble upon something as awesome as this, the hours of slogging through audio samples is totally worth it. Aside from my possibly overenthusiastic love there’s also the fact that this is the first audiobook that made me realize I might be on to something in terms of translated or foreign books. While the novel wasn’t translated, the story is almost entirely contained in Sri Lanka. Unfamiliar nam...