Audiobooks!

Listened to:
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart

Read in old fashioned print media, barely moving my lips at all:
Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
The Hermit of Eyton Forest, Ellis Peters

Read out loud:
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling

...and here's the sad thing: likely many more that I have already forgotten having read. But! we don't believe in dwelling on past failures (especially not when there are so many present and future failures to be obsessed over) so, onward.

I spend squoodles of time commuting, sadly along a route which is peculiarly unamenable to public transportation (I once calculated it would take me five hours to get to work if I went via public transport, and I would have to arrive either two hours early or 45 minutes late). And while there's some enjoyment to be extracted from pushing/twiddling all the various knobs and buttons in my zippy new little Honda Fit (functional air conditioning! so exciting!) the radio reception isn't great for large stretches of the 101 and NPR is annoying anyway now that they have embarked on endless pre-pre-pre-election campaign speculation, so audiobooks are my new best friend.

Everyone everywhere no matter what should read David Mitchell's completely brilliant amazing fantastic book The Bone Clocks, including those friends and members of my immediate family who disapprove violently of fiction in all forms. I am willing to consider a possible exemption for under-twelves and non-English speakers, but only if the former commit to reading it as soon as they are old enough and the latter commit to learning English in order to be able to read it and/or read it translated into a language they do understand. Like his also brilliant Cloud Atlas, there a zillion little moving pieces and interlocking stories and you spend probably 90% of the book thinking, hunh? this is weird? I have no idea what's going on, but his prose sure is great! and then the last 10% of the book is like that Welsh Youtube video of the sheep with LED lights on their back getting shepherded around a dark soggy field when the camera zooms out and holy shit, they have recreated the Mona Lisa in wet sheep and it all makes sense. While probably the underlying theme of most of the books of this month (possibly all fiction everywhere?) is that the writer is going to die and that's terrifying and there is nothing heshe can do about it, David Mitchell clearly is writing with the more generous meta-point that we are _all_ going to die and he is afraid for humanity in general as well as just for himself, and he is going to use his fiction to try and point out the stupid things we are doing to hasten that end in the almost certainly vain hope that someone somewhere might do something about it. So bravo to you, David Mitchell, wherever you are (London, I think).

Beowulf I read when it first came out, and remembered nothing but the delicious alliteration in the description of one of Hrothgar's daughters (sisters?) who married a Swedish king, and that the "queen... was a balm in bed for the battle-scarred Swede," which years later listening to it in the car produced a little grunt of joy at (a) remembering the phrase and (b) how evocative it is. It's an odd story, in that it leaves _out_ a lot that you want to know: why exactly did Beowulf take off across the sea to fight a seriously dangerous demon that was terrorizing a nation he had no allegiance to, why was he undervalued at home, what did Grendel look like, why did Grendel want to terrorize the Danes in the first place. Etc. I also, once we figure out how to solve the mortality problem (see above) and I have centuries worth of time to kill, want to sit down with the original and Heaney's translation side by side and try and get a sense for how literal vs poetic his translation is. (A sexist quote I like that I always thought came from Flaubert, but which I just looked up and is actually (apparently) from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who from his Wikipedia article is no stranger to either translation or romantic difficulties, given his transatlantic career and multiple marriages, "A translation is like a mistress: if it is beautiful, it is not faithful, and if it is faithful, it is not beautiful.")

Salt Sugar Fat and The Rosie Project are pretty much polar opposites in terms of audiobook experiences: SSF was read by a guy with a really, really, really annoying voice and a breathy overdramatization, but had some good data in it w/r/t the specific ways (again see above) we are killing ourselves with food-substitute. Short version: don't eat processed food, because it has a LOT of salt, sugar, and fat in it, and those things are bad for you. As The Rosie Project's main character, Don Tillman, could/would tell you: this book had an ending you saw coming a mile away, and the ultimate tying up of romantic loose ends was irritatingly facile but the actor who read it  had a flawlessly deadpan delivery, plus entertaining antipodean accent, and I was giggling helplessly over all the Aspergersy resemblances of the main character to previously mentioned members-of-immediate-family-who-do-not-approve-of-fiction. (ha! I just remembered something else I read this month: Bella DePaolo's Singled Out: How Singles are Stigmatized, Stereotyped and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After, which does a very reassuring analysis re: how the studies "proving" that marriage makes people happier are a load of codswallop. If you include data on people who get married and then divorced/widowed along with the currently-married data, staying single starts to look pretty bloody good. So hooray for us.)

BFG: Ostensibly for the four-year-old. She thought it was too scary and fell asleep. I thought it was great. It would be great to be the Queen and to read it to William, Harry, etc. when they were little, although maybe Diana wouldn't have let her or maybe they only let the nannies do bedtime stories. Funny to be a real person yet there be so many books in which you play a fictional part.

I am on kind of a Gary Shteyngart roll recently - the Russian Debutante's Handbook is so deeply mired in the sludge of my memory (reference words: kooky - immigrant - clever) that I wasn't sure what to expect with the autobiography/peri-apocalyptic novels, but they are both very funny and perceptive. Especially interesting to see how much of his autobiography made its way into the periapocalypse. He wrote both books when he was younger than I am now. arghghh. Would I be able to write that well if I had done nothing but write fiction from the age of 6 onwards and attended a whole slew of creative writing workshops? Hm. Seriously doubt it. I think I would be very afraid of that kind of extremely personal writing - I wouldn't want zillions of readers to know that much about me, although look, here I am, blathering to my eight? nine? followers about exactly what's been on my bedside table the last few weeks. :p