There is no frigate like a book

So, because of all the running I've been doing lately, I've been listening to lots of audiobooks. My first week I tried to listen to music, and I got slower and slower and more and more bored. So I tried Dickens. It changed everything. Each time I have a book I really like or really hate, I think--I must write a review of that. So here are my reviews, in some cases written long after the fact. Enjoy them or not--this is mostly for me. 

Non-fiction:

I have discovered that really good nonfiction is just as good at transporting me to new places as fiction is.

Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand. Stunning, compelling, inspiring. The best non-fiction book I have ever been a part of up until that point. I loved every minute of it. Louis Zamperini is my new hero. I cried at the end.

Cleopatra. This probably would have been better to be read than listened to--difficult to remember all the funny names. My copy didn't get all the way dowloaded and I was left in the mausoleum with Cleopatra over Marc Antony's dead body. I was pretty sure she killed herself (spoiler!), but I borrowed a copy at Barnes and Noble just to check. She did. I was pretty interested in the story as a whole, but

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, was much better to listen to. Less speculation, more letters and verifiable events. I'm still in the middle of this, but I've loved it. Right now, I'm upset with Catherine because she dumped her Polish boyfriend and put him on the throne of Warsaw to be a puppet, so she could keep her military boyfriend. I think she's making a mistake, but she isn't listening to me. Anyway, I'm living in imperial Russia right now--that's what I'm saying about nonfiction being transporting.

Teacher Man. I quite liked it at first--by the end I was a little bored. I liked the discovery of Frank McCourt's teaching voice in the classroom. It did make me miss teaching, but not as much as I was worried it would.

Is Everyone Hanging out Without Me? And other concerns. This was not as funny or inappropriate as Bossypants--should I be admitting that I read/listened to either of these? Bossypants made me laugh so hard I was lizzing. I didn't actually listen to it--I borrowed it from the library.

Fiction--This has not been as successful for me.

Our Mutual Friend: This is a librivox recording--read by volunteers, which makes for uneven listening. The books itself is lovely, one of my favorites of Dicken's. I come back to this book when I'm in between the other books.

A Christmas Visitor and Death Comes to Pemberley. These two mystery novels, both by people who ought to be good at their craft, were super duper disappointing. A Christmas Visitor was probably the worst book I have ever listened to. I knew the moment they met with the killer it was him, and spent the rest of the novel thinking all the characters were idiots and the author was an idiot for thinking her readers were as stupid as her characters for not figuring it out immediately.

I should have known better than to listen Death Comes to Pemberley. I have long since given up on Austen sequels--they are invariably ridiculous, and this one was no exception. Elizabeth has lost all her zip. And don't try to come up with your own timeline for a novel and connect it to a novel that actually has one--Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice don't take place at the same time and there is no sense saying they do.

Both these novels were "dithering novels." Basically, nothing ever happened on the stage of the novel--it was a like a Greek tragedy. All the events happened off stage and then everyone would spend chapters relating and rerelating what had happened to each other and wondering who could possibly have done the terrible thing that no one actually saw. Neither of the authors knew what was going on in their own novel, so they spent all their time ordering food and servants about, instead of organizing their own narrative. I was concerned that my eyes would actually stick in the permanently rolled position as my mother warned me they would.

The end.