The reason for all the audiobooks was that I spent the first week of this month traveling, including a 12 hour car ride to the place I was going and a 12 hour car ride back. So, I downloaded audiobooks for the drive. We listened to two of them during the drives and I finished the others once I got home. All the audiobooks I finished were memoirs read by their authors. I generally like memoirs read by their authors because is sounds as if the author is telling you, the reader, the story of their life directly.
These are the books I finished in February.
Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker
This is the audiobook I listened to on my way down to the Gulf Coast. It was not what I expected, which is on me and not on the book. A memoir by the actress Mary-Louise Parker told as a series of letters to men (some real, some fictional), it was, interestingly, not much about her career as an actress. She might mention that she was in NY to do a play but that was about it. It was almost completely about her personal life including her kids, her health and her love life. She has a very dry sense of humor and we chuckled along with some of her stories. On the whole, not the best memoir I've ever read but entertaining enough.
What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci
This was the audiobook I listened to on the way home. This is essentially a diary that Stanley Tucci kept over a year journaling the food he made for himself and/or his family and what he ate (whether made at home or in a restaurant). He includes recipes (you need to like pasta). Along the way he talks about certain projects he was working on beginning with the filming of Conclave. He also talks about the death of his first wife, which is sad. He also talks about the celebrities he had dinner with throughout the year. It took me a long while to figure out that his second wife, Felicity, is the sister of actress Emily Blunt (maybe he said that early on and I just missed it). He can be very funny and I enjoyed listening although I did get a bit tired of hearing about pasta. And I don't recommend you listen to it if you are hungry. But I think listening to this book made me appreciate the little spots he did for NBC during the Olympics about Italian food in the Milan area.
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
The third audiobook memoir that I checked out of the library for my trip turned out to be something I didn't want to listen to in the car. Read by the author, it was a very quiet book and I needed something that would keep me awake. But I did listen when I arrived home. Geraldine Brooks (the author of Horse, among other novels) was married for 35 years to Tony Horowitz, a Pulitzer prize-winning author. In 2019, while he was on a book tour, he dropped dead suddenly while he was walking down a street in Washington DC. This memoir is the story of Brooks' grief journey. A few years after his death she retreated to Flinders Island in Australia (she is Australian) to consider what happened and work through her grief. The memoir is partly a memoir of her time on the island and partly a memoir of the time immediately following his death. It is not a long book but I found myself very affected at points. (I'm glad I didn't listen to it while driving.) There were also parts where I found myself as angry as the author - for instance when she discovered that the family's health insurance had been canceled the day after Tony's death without any notice to her. Or when she had to apply for all new credit cards because she had never thought to establish credit under her own name prior to his death. And especially when she received the call from the hospital unexpectedly telling her that her husband had died but the doctor was finishing her shift and couldn't take the time to answer questions. I hope the administration at GW Hospital read this and made some changes.
The Book of I by David Grieg
If you have ever wanted to read a comic novel about slaughter by Vikings then this is the book for you. The island of Iona was often a target of Vikings and the novel begins in the year 825 A.D. with the landing of a Viking hoard and the slaughter of all but two of the residents - a monk who hid in a latrine and the wife of the smith who made such good mead from local honey that she is spared. The Vikings also leave behind one of their own, believing him to be dead. This is the story of the following year in the life of the three on the island. Although this is a very short novel, each of the characters has an arc. It examines issues of faith, love, and loyalty, all the while in language that is humorous. I have no idea if the end of the novel is historically accurate but it was satisfying.
The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee
The next installment of the Wyndham and Banerjee series set in Calcutta in the 1920's, this novel is set a few years after the end of the last novel. Banerjee has returned from a stint in Europe but does not want to go back into the police force, he is working for Indian independence. Wyndham is still clean from his drug addiction but he drinks too much. And he has lost the faith of the police force so he hasn't been assigned any good murders to investigate in a long time. The two come together again when Banerjee's cousin disappears at the same time that a rich local man is murdered. I always enjoy this series and you could read this without reading the previous novels, but of course it would be better if you started at the beginning.
Helm by Sarah Hall
This is an historical novel about the only wind in the British Isles that has a name: Held. Held is a character in the novel. There are also many other characters who observe Held through the ages. In my Quick Take I said that if you like short stories you may like this, as this novel is more like a collection of related short stories but not told linearly. For me, that slowed down the narrative arc of the whole novel. Despite that, I did like this novel and was very impressed by what Hall accomplished in anthropomorphizing Held.
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
The last of the audiobook memoirs I got from the library. Levy is a staff writer for The New Yorker and she writes with The New Yorker style. You know. Start the essay with something really personal that will grab the reader, then go into whatever it is you are intending to write about and at the end go back to the personal story. I don't have a problem with this form of essay - I am a subscriber to The New Yorker. But in my opinion this style works better for essays than for books. And probably works better when read on the page rather than heard in audiobook form. This memoir starts with the description of a horrible moment in Levy's life without any explanation about how she got there and then goes back to the beginning of her life. This memoir did not grab me. It's not that Levy didn't have an interesting life; it was as interesting as any other woman who wants a career and a marital life and a baby. Her's might even be slightly more interesting because she was in a same sex marriage that had issues with fidelity and heavy drinking. I usually like audiobook memoirs read by the author because it usually sounds as if the author is telling YOU the story personally. I think the problem with this audiobook is that Levy wasn't great at doing the reading and it often sounded like she was angry when I think it would have worked better if she had sounded ironic. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had read a hard copy of the book.
The Hideaway by Nikki Allen
Full disclosure, Nikki Allen is married to a distant cousin of mine and I met her one time a number of years ago.
This thriller is part of the oevre of "country house murders" where a group of strangers are stranded together in a house where they can't escape and someone is a murderer. But in this novel, the "country house' is a house in Costa Rica and the group of five strangers end up lost in the rain forest. The action of the novel is related in third person omniscient, with the chapters alternating between the points of view of the different characters. (Regular readers will know this is not my favorite structure for a novel, but it didn't bother me too much here.) Each character has come to the retreat in Costa Rica because they are dealing with personal issues (traumas?) and they want to get their life together and come back changed. In real life Nikki has worked as a therapist and she is very good at representing the various issues that each character is dealing with. In fact, the strength of this novel is the development of the characters. As far as plot, this is of course a thriller/mystery and it's pretty good but I thought it lost a little bit of momentum in the later chapters where there was a lot of narrative and less action (the opposite of what you would expect - although in the old murder mysteries the detective DID do a lot of narrative at the end explaining what happened). I thought it was an enjoyable book, the kind to take on vacation. As a first novel it was promising and I do look forward to her future books.
