This book is monumentally improved as an audiobook production because of the energy of narrator George Newbern. He grabs listeners by the lapels as he voices Professor George Entmen, a nice guy with a respectable but lackluster life except that he has developed the ability to fly. But even his flying--not soaring, but subtle low and slow floating--seems as underwhelming as the rest of his existence. Newbern's delivery elevates mundane descriptions of the self-deprecating protagonist, his dreary co-workers, and his ordinary family. Newbern's performance succeeds in eliciting such a surplus of empathy that one roots for Entmen to vanquish scam artists, fellow academics, and myriad other emerging lowlifes who seek to expose his miracle as either a fraud or a cheap trick.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781662022531
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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