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Don't Spoil the Ending - Tinkers by Paul Harding

I'm about half way through listening to the Brilliance Audio/Audible.com production of Tinkers, so I'm as interested as the next listener in not having the ending spoiled for me.

The risk seems minimal, however, because author Paul Harding's first sentence informs his readers that the story begins 8 days before the death of its central character, retired high school guidance counselor and clock-repairer, George Washington Crosby.

From there the story moves backward and forward in time, much in the manner of George's deathbed hallucinations. "George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control."

In fact, the entire book is a stream of consciousness recollection of George's life and that of his oddball father, Howard, a "tinker" who drove a horse-drawn wagon down country roads and lanes, pedaling soap, needles, tobacco, and other household necessities. Periodically, Howard is beset by epileptic seizure's that tear his world apart and  prompt him to ponder life's mysteries.

The narrative shifts in time, changes perspective, omits quotation marks entirely, and returns again and again to George on his deathbed, as his last eight days of life run down like one of the many antique clocks he lovingly restored. Life itself, the author seems to suggest, is a complex clockwork of inter-related gears and springs, in which small motions are magnified and transfered across time. Sometimes the whole machine "whirs with brass logic," and other times faulty alignments may cause it to "squeak and gibber."

For George's father Howard, the clockwork mechanism of the universe periodically flew to pieces when his grand mal seizures transported him from his day-to-day world into an alternate existence in which he communed with nature, wrote poetry, and speculated on the meaning of life. While his family sat at the dinner table, their food untouched, waiting for his return.

Howard thinks of his epileptic seizures as bolts of lightning that, in striking him, cause the mysterious curtain of existence to be briefly lifted, allowing him tantalizing glimpses of what lies on the other side. Deep questions for an uneducated tinker to ponder, and not at all the sort of stuff that interests his bitter and long-suffering wife. The lightning metaphor is repeated throughout the book, and son George is even struck by a literal bolt of it as he builds the house in which we find him on his deathbed at the book's beginning.

This book barely saw the light of day, by the way, let alone winning a Pulitzer Prize eariler this year to the surprise of almost everyone. Tinkers is Harding's first published novel, and it was rejected by agent after agent and publisher after publisher. In the end, it was picked up by the tiny Indy publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, and sold all of 7,000 copies before winning the prize.

Though hardly a blockbuster, Harding's book became a favorite of independent booksellers, and through one of them was brought to the attention of Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, chair of this year's Pulitzer fiction committee.

I'm only half way through, but I'm loving it.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

From Denmark to Ireland by Way of Brooklyn

"The sky was swept of clouds when I noticed a figure bent over his broke-down 1950 Vincent Comet dream machine and cursing under his breath. I slowed on my bicycle, not thinking he'd notice. But he turned to face me on the narrow street. And with one look, he cracked me open like a safe and stole everything inside."

So begins Darling Jim, Christian Moerk's impressive debut novel, the Tantor Audio edition of which won the Audio Publishers Association's "Audie" award last May in the category of "Thriller-Suspense". It was up against some pretty stiff competition, including recent works from Greg Iles and Elmore Leonard.

Moerk is a 40-year-old writer, born and raised in Denmark who came to the U.S. for college, received a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, worked in Hollywood for Warner Brothers, wrote for the New York Times, and now resides in Brooklyn. He spent considerable time in Dublin during his days in the film industry, and he does quite a good job evoking the accents, slang expressions, and locales of modern-day, small-town Ireland.

Dual narrators, Stephen Hoye and Justine Eyre, worked hard for that Audie, and, like the author's, their evocations of Ireland are convincing. Raised in New England, Hoye studied and worked in London theater for 20 years. Eyre is a Nova Scotian Canadian by birth, spent much of her childhood in the Phillipines where she was educated at British schools, then trained in theater at McGill University in Toronto.

(Fans of vampire lit -- and who is not? -- may be interested to note that Eyre was involved in another male-female co-narration: the Books on Tape library edition of Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 best-seller The Historian, co-narrated with Paul Michael. She can also be heard reading the forthcoming vamp mash-up, Dracula My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker -- due in August from Tantor Audio and available on Playaway this Fall.)

Moerk's inspiration for Darling Jim was an Irish newspaper story about an aunt and three nieces found dead in the house in which they'd lived for months as shut-ins. From this gruesome starting point, Moerk imagines an irresistable vintage-motorcycle-riding, silver-tongued, blue-eyed shanachie or story-teller who leaves a convoluted trail of mayhem that must be pieced together by the novel's characters and readers alike. The book was first published in Denmark in 2007. The first U.S. edition was published by Henry Holt in 2009 and received very favorable notices -- a starred review in Publishers Weekly and raves from Booklist and The Washington Post.

The story is told in three parts that interweave an after-the-fact third-person narrative (read by Hoye) with two separate diaries written by two of the three sisters and read by Eyre. Each narrator does an impressive number of distinct voices and accents. Hoye's section is focussed primarily on a hapless but determined young artist and postal clerk named Niall. Eyre is especially convincing in her strikingly different renditions of the three sisters.

Typically for this genre, a goodly amount of the willing suspension of disbelief is required of the reader, but those willing to go along for the ride will be rewarded with an entertaining yarn, rendered skillfully for audio and justly deserving of its recent Audie award.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Life is Not a Drip - Life is a Flame! Sir Salman Rushdie Dazzles ALA Audience

This past Saturday afternoon in Washington, DC, Sir Salman Rushdie drew a large audience to his lively and engaging talk, part of the ALA Auditorium Speaker Series.

He spent most of his time discussing his forthcoming book Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to 1990's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun was Rushdie's first book since a fatwa was issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 as punishment for his novel The Satanic Verses, which the cleric deemed to have been a work of blasphemy.

Haroun was the story of a boy's quest to, as Rushdie put it, "rescue his father's storytelling skills in a world in which stories were being poisoned." He wrote it for his elder son, Zafar, then nine years old, at a time, said Rushdie, when he had become "uncharacteristically interested in happy endings."

It was only after the book had been published, Rushdie said, that he came to think of it as a work that was "written to please a certain child" -- placing it in a tradition that includes Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, and Peter Pan.

Nearly 20 years later, Rushdie's second son, Milan, came to him and asked "'where's my book?'" Guided by the example of Lewis Carroll writing Through the Looking-Glass as a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Rushdie decided he owed his younger son a book of his own.

By the time Carroll wrote Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 6 years had passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll was estranged from the Liddell family, Alice Liddell, his inspiration, was no longer a child but a young woman of 19, and the first Alice book was famous. "How scary it must have been to write a sequel," said Rushdie, who confessed that, for the first time in his career, he found himself dealing with the same pressure.

"Through the Looking-Glass is not 'Return to Wonderland,' " said Rushdie. Like Carroll, he wanted to employ the same central characters but create another imaginative world, wholly different from the original. "I didn't want to do 'Return to the Sea of Stories,' " said Rushdie.

“Through the Looking-Glass is NOT

'Return to Wonderland'.  I didn't want to

do 'Return to the Sea of Stories'...”

And so, whereas the central metaphor of Haroun was water, Rushdie decided to make Luka about fire. Rushdie read aloud a short passage from the book in which a character compares the relative merits of fire and water and exclaims, "Life is not a drip. Life is a flame!" and "Life is not wet, young man -- life burns!"

Rushdie described the new novel as an exploration of "the love and the problems between fathers and sons" and as a book in which the author, now 20 years older than when he wrote Haroun, contemplates the hard facts of mortality. This time, story teller Rashid Khalifa is himself at risk -- not just his story-telling abilities. Death appears as a character in the novel, and Rushdie said that, at first, he was concerned he might have made him too disturbing a figure for children. He tried it out on young Milan (then age 12) and found it was actually the boy's favorite character in the entire book.

"I give all the credit to Darth Vader," said Rushdie. "Thanks to George Lucas, everyone now understands it's the bad guy who's the most interesting." In comparison, he said, Luke Skywalker is "a pathetic little drip."

Rushdie said he was interested in the relationship "between the world of the imaginary and the real world." "We live in an imaginary world in the real world," he said. "Mythology is the name we give to what was originally religion. Something good happens when people stop believing -- it becomes literature." However, "it's not so good for the gods -- now they're just a story," as Luka, the hero of the new book, discovers when he stumbles into a junkyard of deposed gods.

"Young readers don't need to dwell on these matters," said Rushdie, but he expressed the hope that -- as with the works of Lewis Carroll -- older readers will find layers of meaning worthy of grown-up attention.

"If I do it properly," said Rushdie, "it could demolish the boundary between adult and children's literature" -- like a movie that's not exclusively for kids or adults but "just for whoever shows up." His wish, he said, is that, "the same child can read the book again as a grown-up and get some slightly different satisfactions."

If Luka and the Fire of Life is up to Rushdie's previous standards, the satisfactions will no doubt be numerous and considerable.

During a question and answer period, Rushdie revealed himself to be a fan of audiobooks and said he was "really happy" that his second novel, Midnight's Children is finally available as an audiobook. (The book won the 1981 Man Booker Prize and was awarded "Best of the Bookers" in 1993 and 2008, celebrating it as the best novel to receive the prize in the first 25 and 40 years of Booker history).

For me, a delightful surprise came when an audience member asked Rushdie to comment on the similarities between The Satanic Verses and Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, which readers of this blog may have seen me extol on more than one occasion (see my posts from 18 December 2009 and 19 May 2010).

Rushdie answered that Bulgakov's book was "the most helpful" thing he read in preparation for writing The Satanic Verses and that he was inspired by it's inter-woven narrative strands. He noted that one of Bulgakov's story lines is a retelling of the life of Jesus, just as one of Rushdie's was "a variant retelling of a different prophet." He concluded by observing that the two books had initially met similar fates -- involving banning of the text and persecution of the author.

The event was recorded in full by ALA, although it's not clear at present if the audio will be posted online for download. I'll pass that information along when it becomes available.

In the meantime, listeners interested in Rushdie's work can find three of his titles -- Midnight's Children (1981), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008) -- available on Playaway from Recorded Books.

Luka and the Fire of Life promises to be full of the same sort of wildly imaginative characters and fanciful wordplay that made Haroun and the Sea of Stories a joy to read. Rushdie tantalized his audience with sketches of the dictatorial, deference-demanding rats who constitute an autocratic government body known as "The Respectorate" and the disrespectful princess (the "Insultana") who defies them.

The new book will be published in print by Random House on 16 November 2010, along with an audiobook edition from Recorded Books. That should give everyone plenty of time to read (or re-read) the escapades of Haroun in preparation for encountering the new adventures of his younger brother.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

A Rolling Stone Angers The Boss

The news media have been abuzz all week with stories about Gen. Stanley McChrystal's trip "to the woodshed." He meets today with President Obama to be rebuked for remarks critical of the administration and its Afghanistan strategy, as reported in Rolling Stone.

In retrospect, Gen. McChrystal might have done better to just let Annie Leibovitz photograph him with his shirt off and limit his comments to the Taylor Swift-Kanye West affair while steering clear of more political controversies. The article, "Runaway General," will be in the issue of RS for July 8-22, which hits newsstands this Friday. You can read it online here.

The growing consensus seems to be that McChrystal's comments may very well lose him his job as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

A segment on today's Morning Edition from NPR featured Tom Ricks, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and Senior Fellow with the Center for a New American Security. Ricks expressed his opinion that the president, having attributed poor judgment to McChrystal, is now obliged to relieve him of command. You can hear the NPR segment here.

Ricks is author of two titles dealing with U.S. military policy abroad -- Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (2009). Both are produced by Penguin Audiobooks and are available on Playaway.

In 2000, Ricks received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting as part of a team of writers at the Wall Street Journal responsible for a series on ways in which the U.S. military might have to change to meet 21st-century demands. He was also part of a Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer in 2002 for reporting on the start of the ongoing war on terror. Fiasco was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2007.

As Americans look for answers to our ongoing dilemmas in the Middle East and Central Asia, books by Ricks and others offer important context and thoughtful analysis. Other recent titles of similar significance are Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008, Brilliance Audio) and, most recently, Sebastian Junger's much-anticipated War, a first-person account of being intermittently embedded over the course of 14 months with the Army's 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. 

War is not a policy book per se, but it presents an unflinching look at what American forces are up against on a daily basis in Afghanistan. The audio edition (from Hachette Audio) is narrated by the author and also features a bonus interview with Junger.

An interesting companion to Junger's book is Greg Mortenson's Stones into Schools from Blackstone Audio. Mortenson picks up where his first book, the mega-best-selling Three Cups of Tea (also available on Playaway from Tantor Audio), left off -- with his foray into Waziristan, the remote mountainous region of northwest Pakistan. Bordering on some of the most troubled areas of Afghanistan, the truth is that this area is not closely associated with either country and is probably best understood on its own terms.  Mortenson knows the region and the people well.

Whether Gen. McChrystal keeps his job or not, these areas of the world are likely to be trouble spots for a long time to come. Audiobook listeners looking for a deeper understanding of these parts of the world and their issues would do well to explore these titles.

Post Script:  In the time it took to write this post, Gen. McChrystal lost his job and has been replaced by Gen. David Petraeus -- all the more reason to study up with some of these books.

I'll be at ALA Annual in Washington, D.C. with the rest of the Playaway team this weekend. If you'll be attending, come visit us at Booth #1337.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Digging Deeper: A Look at 5-Year Audiobook Sales Trends

This past February, Baker and Taylor published a five-year "category trend report" for sales of adult audiobooks. B&T publishes these trend reports periodically, but it only began doing this for the audiobook category in 2010.

The numbers in the report are interesting, but they also leave several key areas unexplored. A few facts that jumped out at me:

• Total audiobook unit sales for the period January 2008 through June 2009 were down 20% compared to the preceding 18 months.

• From January 2004 to June 2009, retail sales as a percentage of total sales declined from 64% to 49%.

What was left out of course were any details about sales of audiobooks in libraries and how they fit in to the five-year trend.

So, using Baker and Taylor's Publisher Alley service, I dug a little deeper. Here's a summary of what I came up with when I looked at the separate numbers for retail sales and sales to public libraries:

A few noteworthy facts:

• From 2005 to 2009, total audiobook sales (through Baker and Taylor) shrank from about $41 million down to about $27 million - more than a 30% decrease.

• Within those totals, the retail share shrank from nearly $28 million to about $12.5 million.

• But during the same period, audiobook sales to public libraries actually experienced a modest increase from about $13 million to almost $15 million. (Actually, sales to libraries peaked at about $16 million in 2007.)

You can see the varying trends of retail vs. public library sales in the following chart (the vertical axis shows unit sales):

Keep in mind these qualifiers:

• These numbers reflect sales of physical formats - principally CD, MP3 CD, and of course Playaway. Not accounted for here is what's happening in the world of audiobook downloads -- both retail (e.g., Audible.com) and in the library world (e.g., OverDrive, NetLibrary, and MyiLibrary).

• The figures are for sales by Baker and Taylor only -- a fraction of the total market. Just how big a fraction is not entirely clear, but most likely B&T has more than 10% and less than 25% of the whole market.

So what do the numbers tell us? Clearly, the audiobook marketplace is changing. It's beyond dispute that retail sales of physical audiobooks have been in a steady decline, although the success of Audible.com suggests that direct-to-consumer downloads may have been picking up much of that slack.

In fact, if we could accurately account for these downloads, it might very well be that overall retail unit sales of audiobooks haven't really declined at all. They may even have grown.

Meanwhile, it seems that audiobook listeners may be turning in increasing numbers to their public libraries in order to get what they want -- that shouldn't come as much of a surprise in challenging economic times. And it's clear that libraries have continued to expand their acquisition of audiobooks in multiple formats, with Playaway and downloadables appearing to grow at the fastest rate.

What's your take on these numbers?  Where do you think the audiobook dollars are going?  Leave a comment.

Off to ALA in Washington, D.C. next week. If you'll be attending, come visit Playaway at Booth #1337.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Lit of the Living Dead Are Zombies the New Vampires?

There's no doubt about it -- zombies are in. Maybe not as in as vampires, but very definitely in.

Readers of this blog may have seen my recent thoughts on "vamp lit" (very much on my mind again these days now that Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga has come to Playaway).

Zombies are a different sort of undead, and, as a genre, "Zomb lit" doesn't have literary roots quite as deep as vampire literature. Nor does it seem to have much if any pretension about being "serious" writing.  As a rule, it appears to be mostly concerned with campy genre-bending, metaphors stretched to the breaking point, and generally going for laughs.

If you want to gauge the full extent of Zombieland for yourself, try some basic Googling. In WorldCat, I found 669 results for "Subject Descriptor = Zombies -- Fiction". Here's a selection of recent zomboidal titles now available on Playaway:

What could be more all-American than high-school football? How about high-school football with zombies? That's exactly what's on offer in Ryan Brown's Play Dead from Brilliance Audio, in which a team of newly undead varsity atheletes must fight to win the championship -- and save themselves from eternal damnation.

Following on the heels of Seth Graham-Smith's very successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Ben Winters' Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, mash-up books like Jane Slayre by Sherri Browning Erwin (and Charlotte Bronte) simultaneously make fun of the popular preoccupation with the living dead and skewer the mannerisms of sacred authors like Bronte and Jane Austen.

And the latest form of mash-up is historical rather than literary. Graham-Smith's most recent offering, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, imagines Honest Abe the rail splitter splitting open the heads of vampires to avenge the death of his mother.

Also in the pseudo-history category is the cleverly titled Paul is Undead by Alan Goldsher, which imagines a zombie Fab Four that try to take over the world in a slightly different way from the actual lads from Liverpool. The subtitle is The British Zombie Invasion, and the audio version from Blackstone Audio is read by the very talented British narrator (fresh from reading Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy).

It's hard to know how long the trend may last. The possibilities seem endless -- limited only by the reading and listening public's interest in paranormal literary pranksterism. What's next? Maybe Moby Dick with a zombie whale? Or Huck Finn and the Mississippi Werewolf? How about a vampire Great Gatsby? (Actually, I'd kind of like to see that last one.) Almost as fast as I can make the jokes, these stranger-than-the-original-fiction titles keep rolling out. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright -- Ernie Harwell, Detroit's Legendary Sportscaster

The name William Earnest "Ernie" Harwell may not be universally known, but for anyone who had anything to do with the city of Detroit over the past 50 years, he was a household name, broadcasting the play-by-play as "the voice of the Detroit Tigers".

Prior to his 4-decade-long career in Detroit, Harwell broadcast for the Brooklyn Dodgers (standing in for Red Barber) from 1948-1949. From '50 to '53, he was the announcer for the New York (baseball) Giants, and from '54 to '59, he worked for the Baltimore Orioles. In 1960, Harwell moved to Detroit and began announcing for the Tigers. Except for a one-year stint with the California Angels (he was brought back to Detroit by popular demand), he stayed with them until 2002.

Harwell's death on May 4th at the age of 92 made national news and unleashed a wave of nostalgia on the part of the legion of listeners he reached over the years with his trademark expressions such as "That one is LONG gone"; "He stood there like the house by the side of the road, and watched it go by" (after a strikeout); and "It's two for the price of one!" (after a double play).

On July 1, 2010, Playaway releases Ernie Harwell's Audio Scrapbook, a one-of-kind, four-hour audio documentary of the legendary sportscaster, featuring hours of reminiscences by Ernie himself; archival interviews with baseball legends Connie Mack, Ted Williams, and Joe Dimaggio; and classic calls from Ernie's earliest days with the Atlanta Crackers to his 42-year career as the "Voice of the Tigers".

For a taste of the Ernie Harwell story, view the online trailer for the Audio Scrapbook.

Ernie Harwell earned a place in the Sportscasters Hall of Fame and lives on in the memories of the many Michigan sports fans he touched over the decades.  Ernie Harwell's Audio Scrapbook is an enduring contribution to sports history and deserves a place in any library's sports collection.

** Visit Playaway at Booth #4077 @ BEA. **

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Philip Pullman: Good Man or Scoundrel?

Philip Pullman's retelling of the Gospels will not be everyone's cup of theological tea (as evidenced by its underwhelming first print run of only 50,000 -- the "His Dark Materials" series has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide -- and its publication in the U.S. by independent press Canongate rather than by Random House). But for inquisitive students of Christianity, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a thought-provoking exploration of myth-making and morality.

The book was published in print in the U.S. on April 1 (by Canongate U.S., now a division of independent publisher Grove-Atlantic). The Playaway version launches May 20, simultaneously with other audio formats.

Pullman is not the first fiction writer to imagine an alternate version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov presented the disciple Matthew as a not-so-reliable reporter of Jesus' time in Jerusalem. And Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, imagined a Jesus who returned to earth and found himself at odds with the Church.

Pullman's story also fits within a very well-developed body of scholarship on the historical and literary process of Biblical canonization. In Pullman's tale, Jesus' twin brother, Christ, is an ardent admirer of the preacher of Galilee but also a skillful author and editor in his own right.

All of this might be more than a little confusing to a Sunday school class who's only exposure to the Bible has been in the context of religious instruction. But for those students -- young and old, both believers and non-believers -- who are interested in a scholarly approach to religion, Pullman's work has much to offer.

Beyond whatever philosophical points Pullman may be trying to make with his book (a self-described atheist, he has spoken publicly about his desires to de-mystify and undermine Christian beliefs -- statements that have made him an enemy to many practicing Christians), The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is also a carefully crafted and captivating story.

And the audiobook version is magnificently narrated by the author himself. If you've heard the Random House Audio productions of the "His Dark Materials" books, featuring Pullman and a full cast, you'll know what a talented reader he is. If you haven't heard him before, this engaging three-and-a-half-hour work is a good way to introduce yourself to his skills as a voice actor.

For more of the man himself, take a listen to NPR's recent story about Pullman and his latest work. Among other things, he recounts his discussion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and says he hopes his book will send readers back to the Bible for their own re-examination of the Gospels.

And, if you're interested in critical Bible studies, here are a few Playaway titles to consider as companion listening:

Bart Ehrman: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2008), and, available on Playaway from Recorded Books: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005).

Garry Wills: What Jesus Meant (2007); What Paul Meant (2007)

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (particularly the section known as "The Grand Inquisitor").

Off to Book Expo America next week. If you'll be attending, come visit Playaway at Booth #4077.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

A "Pleasant" Experience

On May 1, Playaway launched two popular kid's titles from Harper Children's Audio: Skulduggery Pleasant (2007) and, the first of several sequels, Skulduggery Pleasant - Playing with Fire (2008). 

The third and fourth books, Skulduggery Pleasant - The Faceless Ones (2009) and Skulduggery Pleasant - Dark Days (published earlier this year), are coming soon.   A fifth book, Skulduggery Pleasant - Mortal Coil is due in the Fall. 

I don't want to get too deep into the literary merits of author Derek Landy's creation. Aspects of the story are really quite clever.  The title character is a skeleton detective -- not a Sam Spade type who searches for missing bones, but himself a walking, talking, fire-hurling skeleton in a sharp suit who fights the bad guys and stands up for the innocent.  

He also happens to be an ancient death-defying "mage" or wizard with a centuries-long grudge against the evil-doer who robbed him of his family and reduced him to his skeletal state.    

So far, so good.  Some of the other plot elements, however, may sound a little familiar to readers of contemporary young people's fantasy literature:  an evil wizard bent on world domination, a race to find the ancient magical object that will enable him to carry out his nefarious deeds (his name, by the way, is Nefarian Serpine), and a teenage girl named Stephanie, who's mistakenly under the impression that she's an ordinary misfit but discovers that -- get this! -- she's actually part of an exciting magical world she never new existed.  Can Stephanie and Skulduggery thwart the evil Serpine and save the world?  I wouldn't want to spoil it for you.

So perhaps it's not exactly the kind of book that will be regarded as a classic a hundred years from now, but for audiobook fans young and old, none of that really matters.  What does matter is the incredibly entertaining narration performed by the super-talented Rupert Degas. 

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and it takes quite a bit to get me truly excited about a narrator's performance.  Degas makes the cut.  Take a listen to this short clip, and keep in mind that it's one guy doing all the voices. 

I actually couldn't believe it the first time I listened, but it's all Degas.  His vocal range is incredible -- from 12-year-old Stephanie to sub-baritone Skulduggery and everyone in between.   Say what you will about the umpteenth Harry Potter-esque plot line -- it's well enough written to be highly entertaining, and the Degas' rendition makes it an audiobook experience that should not be missed.  (I also really like the spooky-jazzy incidental music at the end of each chapter -- a nice touch for fun material of this sort.)

For a more grown-up -- and far less light-hearted -- listening experience, give a listen to Degas' rendition of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, produced by Naxos Audiobooks.  Degas is an Englishman by birth, but he has no trouble shifting from the Scottish locale of Skulduggery Pleasant to a completely credible American accent for McCarthy's heart-rending, suspenseful story of a man and a boy struggling to live on in a post-apocalyptic America in which everything has died, save for a few sad and dangerous people. 

McCarthy's book is a meditation on love, loss, the will to live, obligation, ecology, and the essentials of morality and survival.  Degas reads it with a great deal of heart, bringing to life the scared boy and his loving but increasingly desperate father.  His reading might even make you cry.  Not every narrator can do that.

The Naxos version is slightly abridged (about an hour shorter than the full-length version), but Degas' narration is so skillful that it's really worth a listen -- even for folks like me, for whom a post-apocalyptic "downer" isn't ordinarily the first choice in reading material. 

In all, Playaway currently offers eight titles narrated by the talented Mr. Degas.  I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of them.

And you can also hear him as part of the full-cast reading of The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.  More on Pullman in an upcoming post.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

When I first heard about Going Bovine, I was immediately intrigued, in no small part due to the cover design: a cow standing upright, holding a garden gnome.  It started popping up on recommended and best-of lists for young adults.  Not long after, it won the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award for literary excellence in young adult literature.  The cherry on top is the video on Amazon of author Libba Bray talking about the book while dressed in a cow suit.  Pretty compelling!

The story starts out with a traumatic yet exhilarating catastrophe at Disneyworld’s It’s-A-Small-World ride, which sets the tone and the pace for Cameron’s story.  Now a sharp albeit unmotivated 16-year-old, Cameron is diagnosed with mad cow disease.  Sounds like a downer, but even in the midst of the serious subject matter, Bray is fiercely witty and draws some interesting though unsubtle parallels to Don Quixote.  Narrator Erik Davies does an excellent job with the sardonic tone often used to portray the intelligent disenchanted teen.  Though written for a young audience, the story and the writing make Going Bovine captivating for an adult audience as well.

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Posted by Caroline Duke, Playaway Collection Development Manager