Jim Meskimen presents this tribute to reading, books, and librarians. Listeners meet retired librarian Bob Comet, whose seemingly uneventful life is rich with kindness, challenges, and triumphs. Meskimen's lonely, compassionate Bob, who's lived in the same place since childhood, rescues a lost woman, returns her to her care home, and surprises himself by volunteering there. Meskimen's unhurried pace is appropriate as Bob reveals his life from age 11, when he ran away, to the recent past, when he was betrayed by his wife and best friend. Meskimen flawlessly portrays him with heartbreak and humor. Every character is relatable and endearing, particularly huge, outspoken Linus from the care home, who is easily Meskimen's best creation. A deeply moving conclusion adds to this future classic.
Pub Date: July 4, 2023
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780063085152
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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