Stop, look, listen.

I drove from Hamilton to Ottawa yesterday, hopefully for the last time. Trust me when I tell you that this is the longest, stupidest, boringest stretch of driving on God's green earth, and the frequency with which I'm forced to make this trek is a mean cosmic joke. The only bit of excitement I ever get is when I pass by the inexplicably-named KABOOM.com store just east of Toronto on the 401 and I yell out "KABOOM...dot com" and giggle and then look over to my empty passenger seat to see if my non-existent road buddy thought it was funny too.

Anyway, usually I make a point of throwing together a very meaningful mix CD for my road trips, but this time I forgot. On the way down to the Hammer I listened to my husband's new triple album over and over again, to the point where I fell in love with it so hard I wasn't really sure if I could ever listen to anything else. So yesterday I decided to forgo music all together and I threw in a book on CD. I used to listen to audiobooks all the time when I had to drive to work every day, and I'm looking forward to doing it again when I start my new job, even though I nearly always endanger myself and my fellow drivers by listening to hard. Seriously, I had so many almost-accidents when I listened to this essay by David Sedaris.

I am a total snob when it comes to the narration on audiobooks. A good reader can make or break the story. My old boss had a real thing for British narrators, and I totally jumped on that bandwagon. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell remains one of the best audiobooks I've ever listened to and while the story of a young boy growing up in 1980s Britain is indeed heartbreaking and lovely all on its own, what made it for me was the handsome-sounding BBC-style narrator. Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot is pretty much the greatest book ever written about becoming a woman, and the version I listened to, with Bank herself as the dry, slightly-Brooklyn-accented narrator, made me fall in love with it even more.

On the flip side, a crappy reader can completely ruin a wonderful story, like the American narrator reading Tracey Chevalier's decidedly British Falling Angels (cockney slang delivered in a CBS newsanchor dialect = death). Sometimes a voice is just wrong for the character it's trying to embody, which is the problem I encountered with Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson, which I listened to yesterday. The protagonist is a frustrated, introverted teen guy, someone who probably would have joined the trench coat mafia if he'd had the opportunity. After a summer spent working alongside his school's janitorial staff as part of his community service for a crime that's revealed bit by bit, Tyler returns to the minefield of highschool a muscled, misunderstood legend. He's not really sure who he is, and neither is anyone else. Anderson's one of my favourite teen writers, and this book is every bit as moving as her other instant classic of teen crises, Speak. But when the tribulations of the reluctant antihero are told by a too-old male voice with all the subtlety and shyness of a Bud Light announcer, something just doesn't compute.

I'd conclude this in a more thoughtful way but I'm still on holiday, and there's a half-finished batch of sangria in my kitchen that really needs some attention. Happy Friday, my ducklings. Here's ten minutes of Liz Lemon to ease you into your weekend.