Kaipo Schwab brings quiet elegance and nuance to this character-driven meditation on creativity, beauty, and ambition in a Japanese architectural firm. His narration captures the calm precision of young Toru Sakanishi as he navigates his first professional position during a bidding war for a high-stakes government project. Schwab's gentle pacing and warm tone mirror Toru's inner monologue. Schwab also uses emotional shifts to reflect the tension between tradition and innovation, desire and restraint. Schwab excels at conveying the humor of Toru's awkward handling of several crushes. Moments in the lush countryside are vividly described. Taking advantage of the rich translation, Schwab creates an atmospheric narration that invites listeners to linger in this carefully built world of artistic rivalry and natural splendor.
Pub Date: June 10, 2025
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798331930080
Publisher: Tantor Media
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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