0.cached.png
By Katrine Ames
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
If you log endless hours behind the wheel of a car or on a stationary bicycle, you've probably heard a lot of good books lately. The audio-book business is thriving, with annual sales approaching $1 billion. Before the mid-'80s, when publishers woke up to the boom in portable cassette players and automobile tape decks, it scarcely existed. Since then, business has grown so quickly that there has been almost no market research. "What we find," says Leslie Nadell, director of publicity, promotion and advertising at Random House Audio Publishing, "is that once people have listened to one they become instant converts." (Best customers: public libraries.) Some bibliophiles are uncomfortable with the genre, since most books are recorded in condensed form. But professional audio abridgers often do a remarkably good job, and authors get to vet the manuscripts. Increasingly, new books and tapes are appearing simultaneously. Herewith, some recent examples, now playing at your local bookstore, library, supermarket and truck stop.
Great writers can make great readers. John le Carre and Eudora Welty, for instance, are peerless deliverers of their own work; Norman Mailer, however, is not. The best thing that can be said of his Harlot's Ghost (Random House. $16) is that it's a manageable length, about two hours of excerpts from the novel's 1,310 pages. Still, it's weirdly fascinating to hear the author's gravelly, bumbling, stilted intonation of CIA skulduggery. Salman Rushdie isn't quite up to le Carre-Welty standards, but he reads his Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin HighBridge. $15.95) with elegance, humor and a delight in wordplay. Unlike Mailer, he's neither smug nor selfconscious. And at appropriate moments, he slips charmingly into the lilting English spoken by many people in India.
Actors can help draw a larger audience. In a particularly inspired bit of casting, John Lithgow takes on Anne Tyler's Baltimore novel of family forgiveness, Saint Maybe (Random House. $16). With his sweet, poignant, bemused delivery, Lithgow finds the balance between control and hysteria and illuminates the novel's moral center. John Glover, possessor of one of the most insidious, insinuating voices of our time, reads Don DeLillo's tale of arcane academia and environmental pollution, White Noise (Penguin HighBridge. $15.95). From the moment Glover nasally announces, "I invented Hitler studies. . ." the darkly funny, minatory novel jangles in the ear.
Read More on News
Taped mysteries and thrillers sell very well. Judy Kaye does Sue Grafton's "H" Is for Homicide (Random House. $16): as detective Kinsey Millhone, she has just the right ring of self-effacing cynicism and she's hilariously on target playing a bunch of macho thugs. Thrillers, of course, can also be nonfiction. Despite the byzantine insidertrading scandals it lays out, James B. Stewart's Don of Thieves (Simon & Schuster. $16) makes a remarkably smooth transition to tape. It's due to the compelling narrative and the tangy, measured delivery by National Public Radio's John Hockenberry, who reads "Thieves" like a great radio drama of the '30s.
More and more literary classics are turning up on cassette. This Yuletide, put Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (Simon & Schuster. $15) on your listening list. You may know Patrick Stewart from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but in 20 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company he played, among others, King John and Shylock. Here, he's everyone, exercising a range of timbres and accents from his own faint burr to cockneyand upper-crust clips. Reciting the litany of Scrooge's scroogeness, Stewart relishes the emotional gamut of meanness: "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous." Humbug seldom sounds so good.
KATRINE AMES
MARC PEYSER
At home, they're babysitters in cassette form. During tedious car trips, they're ideal for keeping your kids quiet. But the best children's books can be savored by everyone. Among the gladdest tidings of the season: the re-appearance of two classics by E. B. White, recorded unabridged, decades ago.
Julie Harris's sonorous reading of Stuart Little is like Mom telling your favorite bedtime story again, only better (Bantam. $15.99). Lasting almost two hours, it may be a bit long for very young children, but each chapter has its own track, so you can conveniently parcel out nuggets of two-inch-tall Stuart's indomitable spirit. Like the little mouse himself, this recording is full of the joy of life, and the fear of dogs.
Here's something that, on its own, justifies the invention of the audio book: the timeless spider-and-pig tale Charlotte's Web (Bantam. $18.99), read by its author. Speaking without artifice and with a mellow charm, White also has a plangency that will make you weep, so don't listen (at least, not to the sad parts) while driving. One word describes this aural treat, the same three syllables Charlotte spun in her web for Wilbur: TERRIFIC.
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines