Audio Books in Review

City Of Thieves

// January 9th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // Reviews

written by David Benioff
read by Ron Perlman

I love nice suprises. And this book was a very nice surprise. First of all, a bit about the author. He’s a screenwriter, and did the screenplays for movies like Troy, Stay, The Kite Runner and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s also married to actress Amanda Peet (The Whole Nine Yards, Syriana).

Now to the story. It’s the tale of two young Russian men (boys, really) and their adventure during the seige of Leningrad (1941-1944). Lev Beniov is a quiet, chess-playing Jewish boy (and the son of a poet) who stays behind in the city while his mother and sister escape to the relative safety of a country home owned by relatives. He meets Kolya, a handsome young deserter from the Red Army, in jail. Together, they are given the opportunity to escape severe punishment if they can go out and find a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake.

What follows is a haunting, delightful, fascinating journey which lasts the entire allotted time for their quest. There is the constant cold and hunger, plus adventure, love, lust, terror, violence…and above all, a developing friendship between the reckless young solider and his cautious younger accomplice. A word of warning: Because this story is written from the perspective of a 17-year-old boy, it’s filled with sexuality (albeit mostly in the forms of longings). So if you are put off by those things, you might want to avoid this one. But if you listen, you will be drawn to these two very different characters…and to the descriptions of the environment will have you feeling the weariness, hunger and bone-chilling cold.

The messenger for this tale is Ron Perlman (Beauty and The Beast, Hellboy). While he doesn’t do as many voice characterizations as some other readers do (ironic for an accomplished actor), he handled the Russian affect beautifully…and words just roll off his tongue. Not to mention he has a wonderful vocal timbre…so it’s a real pleasure to listen to, despite the 8.5 hour length. Perlman, who turns 60 this year (amazing that he can still pull off a physical character like Hellboy!), brings to the table a breadth of experience in voice work (I was unaware of this until I checked his Wikipedia page). I’d love to listen to him read again.

The quality of this Penguin Audio production is very good. It features a some classical music during a few breaks. I only caught one missed edit, fairly early in the book. So it didn’t detract much.

Two thumbs up for this one!

Breathless: A Novel

// November 29th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Reviews

Written by Dean Koontz
Voiced by Jeffrey Cummings

I’ve always enjoyed Dean Koontz. I haven’t read a whole lot of his books…but probably a good half-dozen of them over the years, and none have ever been disappointments. However, he’s managed to leave me disappointed this time. Not because this book didn’t have all the elements of a really great book. It did. But simply because it never fully realizes its potential.

Koontz gives a great setup. Lots of characters with rich histories…many of them rooted in deep pain. The gentle furniture maker who used to be a military assassin, the dedicated veterinarian who was the victim of mental and physical abuse for 10 years as a child, the serial killer who’s only once come close to being caught and is on the hunt again…as a work for hire, and the twin who is on a gruesome mission to “become” his brother. All strong stuff. And then we’ve got the overriding mystery…two nearly-indescribable creatures who appear out of thin air and display nobler-than-human behavior. Why are they here? Where did they come from? And will they become guinea pigs in the labs of big, bad Homeland Security?

This really is a compelling set of questions…and it takes about 7 hours and 45 minutes of the 8-hour audio book to get to this place. But then…Koontz seems to weary of the story, or run out of ideas, or something. Whatever the cause, he neatly wraps up many (but not all) of the questions he’s raised so quickly that it belies the (at times plodding) pace of the earlier parts of the book. Personally, I was left wanting. There’s a gentle-enough sensibility about the book…I’d even describe it as beautiful at points…that I can’t believe this was a cynical attempt on the author’s part to provide a setup and then not finish the job…but it comes up so short of his usual work that I still had to consider the possibility.

As to the narration, that was a disappointment as well…although I suppose if you’re going to have a book with little payoff, it’s probably best to deliver it via a narrator who provides the same. Jeffrey Cummings’s performance here is, at best, serviceable. His enunciation is overly-labored, some of his pronunications of words are odd, his characterizations are weak-to-mediocre, and the straight read simply lacks heft. Let’s face it: Not everyone can excel at this kind of work, and he simply doesn’t. I don’t know if he’s new and will get better…or if this is as good as he gets…but I found myself having to go back and listen to passages again and again and again…because he simply didn’t deliver them in an engaging manner, and my attention was constantly drifting.

So…I’m afraid I’m going to have this one about a 2-star rating out of 5. Intriguing, but a disappointment in the end.

Shibumi

// November 18th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Reviews

Written by Trevanian
Read by Joe Barrett

I had previously listened (and enjoyed) another of Trevanian’s works: The Eiger Sanction (which I knew mainly because Clint Eastwood had made it into a movie, though I’d never seen it). And I like thrillers, so I thought I’d give this one a spin (since the word was that it was his best-received work). Having heard it now, I can understand why. This was a heck of a good read….interesting on many levels, despite the fact that it was published 30 years ago.

Nikolai Hel is one of the world’s foremost assassins…or, should I say, he was one of the world’s foremost assassins? He’s been retired now for two years, and has devoted all his energy to pursuit of a lifestyle of “shibumi” (a Japanese word meaning something akin to “a formidable contentedness”). However, the niece of an old friend shows up one day on his doorstep asking him to avenge the murder of some of her friends. Will he, or won’t he? I suppose this question is somewhat of a foregone conclusion…and, frankly, it’s one of the least interesting parts of the story. Instead, we’re treated to a detailed background of both Hel’s life since childhood and the murky world of espionage…and how much its driven by money, rather than ideology (in this case, oil money). And both parts of this background are really interesting….especially Hel’s history…of Russian lineage, raised in China, by an occupying Japanese general.

Because the book is 30 years old, and deals with a number of issues (such as computers) which have been transformed by technology in the interim, there is a certain datedness to it. And there is a somewhat cynical view of Americanism which was popular in the Seventies, in the wake of Watergate…which, while it still exists today, has found a somewhat different mode of expression. That being said, I didn’t really feel that either of those detracted much from the story. Trevanian, a history professor who died in the past few years, used this canvas to do a bit of showing off…of his vast knowledge of various cultures (Chinese, Japanese and Basque…among others)…but his sense of humor (especially as expressed in Hel’s Basque caving partner) is pretty delightful and irrepressible. And there’s a sense here of it being a sendup of spy mysteries…and yet, it’s hefty enough that it can’t be dismissed as some sort of joke.

As to the narration…it’s interesting that I pointed out Joe Barrett’s Eiger Sanction narration, in part, because of his excellent handling of German and French. This time, his limits were really tested. I found his straight read very solid, and his Japanese and French accents still quite admirable…but some of them were just really distractably bad (the word “laughably” sounds harsh…but it did make me laugh a few times). Still, it’s not like I could have done better…and I’m not sure who could have. This book was so involved and deep…and the palette so broad, that, even at only 16 hours…I felt like it went on forever (in the best sense of the word…I tend to enjoy long, involved stories)…and despite some of the flawed voice characterizations, I still really enjoyed it.

Shibumi. Two thumbs up!