Dig out your dictionary for this chilling story of a word virus, performed flawlessly by Tavia Gilbert and Paul Michael Garcia. In 26 chapters, Gilbert and Garcia alternately narrate a journal that tells the story of technology gone awry. In emotion-laden tones Gilbert delivers Anana Johnson’s account of her search for her father, Douglas Samuel Johnson, editor of the North American Dictionary of the English Language, who has disappeared in the midst of a conspiracy to destroy language. Garcia delivers the entries of Bart, who is also on a mission to find Johnson. In a deep, steady voice, Garcia portrays Bart’s passion for Anana and life in general. Polysyllabic words, requiring dictionaries, are the norm until they’re garbled by the "word flu." This warning about dependence upon technology is performed without a hitch.
Pub Date: April 8, 2014
Duration: 16 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781482969023
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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