My current read for the NLS is Bruno Latour’s devastingly eye-opening Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Even from the first post-acknowledgements page, you get the idea:
The Books That Choose You
A LitHub-recommended long read reminds me that one of the intrinsic pleasures of making audiobooks is that I don’t choose what I’m reading next. Instead, the book chooses you.
Strictly speaking, what really happens is that the studio director chooses you to read the book. But the effect is the same: I don’t pick the books I’ll spend hours reading aloud, word for word, cover to cover. Unlike my home library, these projects don’t say anything about my intentions to be or know or feel something—or do they?
Thanks to working at a studio with a blessedly quirky contract to record material for the Library of Congress, the books that “choose me” are a potpourri of fiction and nonfiction, books I’ve seen elsewhere and plenty I haven’t, things I might otherwise choose to read and, yes, sometimes, things I wouldn’t.
Like the rest of life’s happenstances, sometimes this works out quite nicely. Recently I narrated these three works of nonfiction over a few weeks: a book about sea otters, one about a man who spent his days and nights living as a wild turkey, then an encyclopedic account of connections between sci-fi and pop music in the 1970s.
The result: I know more than I did before (with no interest in running with the turkeys), and I’m a grateful omnivore.
Out of Context
Here’s part of an illustration from a current narration project. Want to guess the title?
Expiating at Length
…is a good way to describe the narrative effort of my current project: the recollections (fictional) of an escaped slave in Henry David Thoreau’s company. There are some wonderfully uncommon words here—words I know I’ve never spoken out loud like phenakistoscope and phalanstery— as well as the characters of Emerson, Hawthorne and a sprinkling of other Transcendentalists. As an erstwhile English major, I say 👍🏼.
Pfffffft
That was the word in the text, described also as “a raspberry.” A conundrum: how to pronounce it?
From the Margins of American History
A good book tells many tales, some of them so small you don’t immediately notice the weight they carry. To wit, this incidental scene from Curtis Wilkie’s Dixie, in which Robert Kennedy stops unannounced in the all-black township of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and makes a human connection.
🐥
We don’t know his name, but in an age of penny loafers, he wore Keds at the office park. He stepped boldly onto the wet cement, becoming forever an #inspiration. pic.twitter.com/TQYPqtYKa0
— jpin (@jpinnow) April 29, 2018
Ad Astra per Aspera
Read more comix
If you’re looking for something that speaks deeply with utmost simplicity, I happily recommend From Lone Mountain, the latest collection of the work of John Porcellino. Full disclosure: once upon a time, he & I took a little road trip to Kansas. Read about that here.
Mrs. Fletcher
Her kid’s off to college and …
One of the good reads I read last year was Tom Perrotta’s coming-of-age(s) tale Mrs. Fletcher. If you’re an NLS patron, you’ll find it here.
In brief: a single mother takes her son off to college. He flexes his teenage masculinity (ewww …). She explores the freedoms in her newly empty nest (hmmm …). One year later, they’re not quite the same characters they were before.
Astronomical!
This hat could write a book
I can’t wear it in public, for fear that folks would wrongly salute these epaulets. But I do admire bold marketing, and this ugly thing has certainly got that going for it.
