Monday, Monday.

A few crumbs from the start of the work week.

1. Oh please, people, send me your best and least disgusting cabbage recipes. My CSA is overloading me with the stuff and I never want to eat coleslaw again. I just made the most insane soup involving lentils and cabbage and lemon and pain. This is what cabbage does to me! It makes me hate soup, which is horrifying.

2. I spent a lot of the weekend reading Anna Quindlen's new book, Every Last One. I concluded that it is the beautiful, rich, character-driven equivalent of being punched in the gut several times in succession. She breaks my heart in the most wonderful, captivating way.

3. I spent the rest of the weekend hiding from the rain and driving all over hell's half acre, listening to Judith Light reading the audiobook version of Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner. I love Jennifer Weiner, I really do, and it was an audio CD of her short story collection, The Guy Not Taken, that really sold me on her. I like her subtle quirkiness and self-deprecation and soft but still sarcastic humour. And Angela Bower just sucks the fun right out of her, reading the story like a Southern melodrama. This might be one where you need the hard copy, but I'm giving it my thinking woman's chick lit stamp of approval nevertheless.

4. Now that Oprah's show is in its twilight season, I finally feel comfortable with admitting that I think she is absolutely awesome. I may hardly ever watch her show, and I will probably renege on this with her next book club pick, but today, I wholeheartedly endorse her. Whatever, all you haters! She is getting John Travolta to fly 300 people to Australia! She gets 'er done!



If you are not entertained and touched by that, you have no heart! NO HEART AT ALL!



Yep.

From the random files.

Perhaps the most eagerly awaited audio book of all time in the SERIOUSLY?? department: Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton, read for you by Bronson Pinchot. Yes,
THAT Bronson Pinchot.




Don't you miss the old ABC TGIF lineup? Growing up we were only allowed one hour of TV a day (which would be forfeited if we didn't do our housework, or if we had some kind of public temper tantrum--the latter was embarrassingly common for yours truly) which was usually taken up by reruns of Get Smart after school. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to tune in to the adventures of Agent 99 (Such style. Such grace.) and that idiot Max on Fridays so I could save up my time and cash in for that week's Very Special Episode of Full House. It was a noble sacrifice.

Anyway, I'll look forward to the pairing of Angelina Jolie's absurd life with Balki Bartokamous' absurd narration. I'm not ashamed to admit I teared up a little while listening to the Perfect Strangers theme song. They say you become more emotional in the autumn years.

Old man, take a look at my life.

Recently I've developed a bit of a thing for crochety old men. On paper, I mean. It started with a complete obsession with Studs Terkel, compounded by my discovery that Harvey Pekar had edited a really wicked comic book version based on the original transcripts. From there I moved on to listen to a bunch of Terkel's interviews, collected on Voices of our Time and owned by my library (and probably yours). A friend of mine described Studs Terkel as "the man Ira Glass wishes he could be." For any non-NPR-listeners, you can probably replace Ira Glass's name with Peter Gzowski for an apt analogy (although then you would probably argue that Gzowski truly IS Terkel's Canadian counterpart, AND HOW!, and then you could up and die of embarrassment at what a huge radio nerd you are.). He's a man generally interested in the human condition and the human story, and he seems to draw the most amazing truths out of his subjects. I've written before about a couple of my favourite passages from Working, and here is another gem.

“Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.”

Insight! Horrifying, panic-inducing insight!

Anyway, my Terkel-philia waned a little this weekend, when the audio version of his book Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who Lived It got me so drowsy I almost drove into a ditch alongside Highway 38. I hate to undercut the importance of oral history and undercutting everything I've already said, but listening to this book was a little like being trapped on an elevator with Abe Simpson. So I cut my losses and moved on.

My second old man turned out to be Kurt Vonnegut, a man who has wandered in and out of my reading life for nearly as long as I've been holding books. Again, I've written before about my complicated relationship with him, but I'm happy to report that, if only for today, Kurt and I are back on. Maybe it's just the magic of Rip Torn's dulcet voice reading Vonnegut's words to me. I think that's exactly what it is, in fact. Rip Torn is finally giving a pitch-perfect voice to the words in my memory, and he is pulling it off. I'd go so far as to say this recording is the cure for the drive-home-Monday blues. Vonnegut's cranky words in this compilation of miscellaneous non-fiction from his later years should make you cry with abject grief about the state of humanity, but out of Torn's mouth, the words will make you laugh harder than you've laughed in a long time. Get thee to the library, and check out Armageddon in Retrospect, read for you by Don Geiss. You won't regret it.

And now, a tangential video-finale.

Give a hoot, read a book.

Oh hey, are you interested in an audiobook you can listen to in your car without developing a paralyzing fear that a cult member and/or murderer is on your tail all the way home at night?

Then Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk, is probably the worst possible choice for you.

Someone whose tastes I occasionally appreciate, and who begrudgingly uses the library even though he is convinced we are tracking him everytime he checks anything out, returned this book on CD awhile ago and told me he'd listened to the whole thing in one sitting. The other night, as I was searching for something to bring home with me, slim pickin's on the shelf meant it was basically a choice between Norah Roberts and Palahniuk, and when in doubt, I always try the darker, hipper option. I haven't slept much since.

Seriously, this book is terrifying. It opens with the narrator inexplicably telling his life story into the flight recorder of a plane he's hijacked, and if you can believe it, the story plummets downhill (downwind?) from there. He's one of the lone survivors of a Waco-esque cult. He's obsessed with death. He's routinely abused by the people he works for. He advertises his phone number as a crisis help hotline and advises the people who call to kill themselves. He quotes highschool home ec minutiae ad nauseam to the point where you will pick up seventeen different home remedies for blood in your carpet.

Wow, you're probably thinking, what a feel-good story.

And yet, I cannot stop listening. This book on CD is the audio equivalent of rubbernecking at a car crash (which, frankly, is not the best jumping off point for something you're going to be listening to while at the wheel of your car). Like all Palahniuk, there's something strangely hilarious about the morbid, morose, hopelessness of it all. This book isn't for the faint of heart, but if you feel like something wildly different and wildly disturbing, check it out. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll maybe feel queasy. It'll be better than Phantom of the Opera. (Not really, though.)

I don't recommend listening to it all at once, though. You will probably need frequent music breaks between tracks of insane confessional. I recommend this song as your first pause.



Cute as a bug's ear, that one.

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.