Do you like your favorite books read to you? If so, I have a few suggestions this month that will satisfy your thirst for more literature.
I was a teenager when I ventured into the realm of audiobooks and MP3s, straying but not too far from my usual bound paperback and hardcover books, which were usually stacked close to my bedside for nighttime reading.
Now, well into my adulthood, I am still craving the occasional flavor of audiobooks. I have made it a habit of listening to a book on audio—preferably an MP3—weekly.
There has been some debate about whether or not listening to audiobooks is considered the same as reading physical books. Not all narratives translate well into audio form. I think if the narration works, the “reading” experience is worthwhile. I have had a few misses and miserable experiences with audio narrations, where the performer only reads the text with a dry, dull voice instead of the usual color, texture, and animation associated to a live performance.
Reading and listening to a book is both mentally stimulating and engaging. An advantage of audiobooks is the intellectual stimulation they provide, clearing the mind of negative thinking. Also, while many readers prefer holding and flipping through a bound book, the opposite can be said for audiobooks. People who listen to them may find themselves deviating because of short attention spans.
Four books I am recommending this month will undoubtedly keep you planted in your seat for a few solid hours of riveting storytelling.
If you are familiar with Jonathan Letham’s long backlist of titles, you should add his latest intricately faceted crime story, “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” to your summer listening list. With crime in the title, it has its fair share of criminal highlights—the novel deals with social commentary and gentrification involving a Brooklyn community neighborhood spanning fifty years. Narrator Geoffrey Cantor breathes new life into the story and delivers a breathtaking performance.
Fans of “Murder She Wrote” will enjoy Terrie Farley Moran’s newest murder mystery, “Murder Backstage,” set in the beautiful city of Edmonton.
America’s favorite mystery writer/amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher and her close circle of friends from Cabot Cove, Maine, travel to Alberta, Canada, for some R&R. Jessica receives a phone call from her British cousin, Emma MacGill, to reunite after all these years. Emma is rehearsing for an upcoming musical theater revue and wants Jessica in attendance.
However, the main reason for their trip is to see famous stage, screen, and television actor Derek Braverman playing his last musical theater performance.
A stagehand winds up dead backstage at the Jubilee Auditorium, and it is up to Jessica to unravel the mystery. Laural Merlington does an excellent job juggling all the cast of characters, especially Emma MacGill, whose British accent shines in this lively excursion, a highlight of Moran’s half-dozen “Murder She Wrote” books.
Patricia Cornwell’s 27th thriller, “Unnatural Death,” finds her tenacious medical examiner Kay Scarpetta chasing Bigfoot in another memorable, chilling case.
Scarpetta’s latest complex investigation summons her to a wilderness where two campers have been brutally murdered in a gold mine sixty miles south of her office in Northern Virginia.
The bodies are maimed and unrecognizable, and Scarpetta wonders who could have committed this horrible crime. On closer examination, she starts to believe that something else murdered these two individuals. Scarpetta has always been realistic, using science and the most recent forensic technology to help solve crimes. But this new situation suggests something otherworldly, maybe supernatural, is involved.
Over the years, Scarpetta has seen a great horror perpetrated by humans. But now, while working this case, surrounded by woods and an over-worked imagination, Kay struggles with retrieving and examining the dead bodies and admitting that the perpetrator might very well be the famous subject of legend himself—Bigfoot.
January Lavoy carries the large cast of characters with aplomb and delivers a tension-filled episode with a few hair-raising moments. Her controlled tone—not overly exaggerated—validates her professionalism as an audiobook narrator. She does a wonderful job with the male characters, primarily Pete Marino, a former homicide cop for the Richmond Police Department turned captain.
Joyce Carol Oate’s “Babysitter” is a sleek, compelling, and elliptical narrative set amid an affluent suburb of Detroit.
Murder. Love. Lust. Redemption. And—the unreliable protagonist.
Hannah is the wife of a prominent businessman. She has also been having a secret affair with a charismatic man whose identity remains elusive.
Child killings rock the landscape of Detroit, as does the unexpected ways in which the Babysitter, aptly named by authorities, leaves a trail of dead bodies in his wake.
As the Babysitter continues his rampage, painting the town red, the heightened anxieties of its denizens intersect in startling, unexpected ways that only Oates can write in her hypnotizing stream of consciousness.
The novel is a tour de force on many levels, as it takes three narrators to add dimension and a gritty polish to the authentic storytelling. Cassandra Campbell, Kirby Heyborne, and Max Meyers deserve a standing ovation.
This summer, take a break from the usual physical book and choose your next novel on audio. Enjoy my recommendations, or select your own. Add an audio performance to your list of good reads.
— Thomas Grant Bruso is a Plattsburgh resident who writes fiction and has been an avid reader of genre fiction since he was a kid. Readers and writers are invited to connect and discuss books and writing at www.facebook.com/thomasgrantbruso