This audiobook starts out with a bang: Los Angeles's morning rush hour comes to a halt because a naked man is seen running along the 101 against traffic. From here, the story, which alternates between past and present, slowly reveals how the lives of a handful of people converged in a dusty desert town four years earlier and now come together again. Initially, narrator Will Damron's rhythmic cadence sounds forced, but listeners will quickly come to appreciate how well his delivery stresses the author's poetic language, even as the action turns violent. Damron's measured performance avoids foreshadowing, allowing listeners to discover the interconnections among the characters and to form their own opinions of the way each person handles the far-reaching consequences of his or her impulsive choices.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062695727
Publisher: Harper 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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