Category Archives: books

A good narrator lets me get lost.

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Earlier this year I was prompted to think about who were my favorite audiobook narrators. It was soon revealed how very many I have! I was glad the request was for the narrators who I find truly add to the reading experience, and not the ones to avoid, because that would not be as pleasant an activity as I was engaged in, perusing through the titles I have listened to.

I’m thankful that the “bad” narrators are much fewer than the good. A good narrator lets me get lost in the story, and the bad ones are distracting in the various ways they draw one’s attention to their reading instead. I will list the narrators along with one or more books that made me love them:

Ralph Cosham (Geoffrey Howard) in How Green Was My Valley and many C.S. Lewis books, e.g. the Ransom Trilogy.

Peter Bishop in The Witness of Poetry.

Mike Fraser in The Timeless Way of Building.

Ellie Heydon in Mary Stewart novels.

 Arthur Morey in The Technological Society.

Andrew Sachs in Silas Marner.

Tom Stechschulte in Up and Down California.

Julie Harris in Out of Africa (unfortunately abridged).

Derek Perkins in G.K. Chesterton books.

Flo Gibson

Flo Gibson, in books about adventurous women, such as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Letters of a Woman Homesteader.

Eleanor Bron in Elizabeth von Arnim books.

Neil Hunt and David Rintoul in Nevil Shute novels.

Stefan Rudnicki I first heard reading The Aviator, and I thought he was perfect for that story told in the first person. I began searching on Audible to see what other books he had narrated, and that is how I came to read Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich.

I started listening to a Joseph Conrad novel done by him, and was amazed at how differently, but also smoothly, he narrated that character’s voice — and not just the accent.  Seeing that he was the narrator of the Ursula LeGuin novel City of Illusions made me willing to try it, and his narration of The Captive Mind was just right for conveying Czeslaw Milosz’s writing voice.

Stefan Rudnicki

The protagonist of The Aviator is Russian, and I wondered if the narrator was Russian — how did he get that accent so well, but not overdo it? That’s why I researched Stefan Rudnicki more than any other narrator, and I learned that he was born in Poland. I also found this video in which he, along with other skilled veteran readers, leads a Round Table Discussion with several relatively new narrators, on the topic of improving their narration.

The whole narration “industry” is fascinating. It seems that participating in it is a satisfying way for older actors to keep working, at a pace that fits their slower stage of life. From reading reviews, I can tell that we listeners don’t all appreciate the same narration style. Are any of these your favorite narrators, too?

Man was also a culture-bearer.

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The trees and bushes in my garden get bigger year by year, requiring more attention from me; and several other aspects of my present life prevent me from having the leisure I once had, to write reviews of the books I read. For example, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I only finished this month. It is the first post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read, published in 1959.

It made a big impression on me, which I probably wouldn’t be able to analyze or articulate to my satisfaction, so I didn’t even begin to try, but immediately moved on to a different book. (It’s my experience that reading books doesn’t require the same quality of leisure as writing reviews.) But O happy day! Jeff Bilbro mentioned the book, with a quote, in the newsletter of The Front Porch Republic, so I will just pass that on, with thanks to him. I also commend the other articles on that site, or their print journal, as worthy of your consideration. Here’s Jeff:

“I recently read Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and I found it a moving narrative exploring the proper cultural and religious conditions for rightly valuing knowledge. The novel follows a monastic order that forms in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, and they carefully preserve remnants of the former industrial civilization through generations of warfare until human civilization is ready to rediscover natural science and its applications. Can such knowledge ever be used wisely, or does increased technical know-how inevitably lead cultures to abandon religious and moral wisdom? Miller offers no easy answers. In this passage, an abbot of this monastic order reflects on the significance of the rising interest in their archives:

‘Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they become valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.’

“Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro”

Apocalypse by Albert Goodwin

I feast on the garden and my cold dinner.

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Today I spent most of the afternoon and evening working in my garden, happy to act out the quote from Elisabeth in the last post. Often on Mondays I end up trimming and weeding, because it’s tonight that I put out the garbage cans to be picked up in the morning, including the big green bin that is for all green waste.

The lettuces that had bolted I chopped up and gave to my worms. Out there I set up a board by way of a chopping block just for this purpose. I probably have four times as many worms as I started with last fall, because the man who gave me my starter batch moved far away and couldn’t take his worm farm; he gave them all to me! He consolidated all three or four of his bins into one new one, before bringing it to my house, so I fear that they are overcrowded, and I plan to modify my set-up so that they have more room. But they seem to be doing well on the diet I provide.

I tied the new tomato stems to the long tree prunings I am using for stakes; I removed a lot of spindly new nigella sprouts that are still coming up everywhere even though the weather is not conducive to their health. And I picked lots of kale and Swiss chard.

Last Saturday my patio got scrubbed and power-washed. I’d noticed only this spring how black it had turned over the winter; it hadn’t been cleaned since it was installed twenty years ago. While that was happening I picked a few of the sweet peas from the vines that are crisping up, as I pulled out the plants. The patio was left to dry and won’t be sealed until later this week, so in the meantime all my potted plants are waiting on the paths. I was watering them this morning when I noticed the manzanita’s bark curling as it does at this time of year. Here are new pictures of that artistry.

At six o’clock I was still going strong, and I didn’t want to stop and cook dinner, so I came in and just found cold things in the fridge to eat quickly — a lamb chop and a few roasted Brussels sprouts. There was cold tea as well, pretty fancy stuff that had just arrived today.

Last year I gave my grandson Scout a subscription to a few orders of Tea Runners blends of tea, and when I visited him recently he made tea for me from a flavor of my choice, from his collected packets. I was so impressed with the various flavors I decided to order a few for myself, and today I made Burgundy Blast as iced tea. Its color and flavor reminded me of the Kool-Aid that my siblings and I used to drink in the summers of my youth; I say that, quite glad not to have drunk Kool-Aid for many decades. But this was just barely sweet (I see from the ingredients list that the mangoes included were sweetened), and so fruity and yummy. And beautiful. This is what it looked like before the boiling water was poured over:

For several years I used to pick lavender flowers from my many plants, hoping to put them into sachets. I stored them in the freezer against the day I would have time for that project. But it never happened, and I stopped trying. This year I got the idea to make lavender simple syrup, but I didn’t pick the buds in time, and now they are fading. Oh, well, I gathered a cupful of blooms anyway, and maybe I will make lemon & lavender shortbread… maybe.

A lovely thing happened on this gardening day: I received in the mail this book The Fragrance of God, by Vigen Guroian (2006). I noticed it online when I was buying the new edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. The Fragrance book seems to be on the same theme as the author’s previous book, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening. I couldn’t help leafing through it right away, though I was too busy to give it proper attention. Just now I did take time to glean one quote with which to end my mostly garden post. I am reveling in my own heart’s portion of Paradise tonight.

“When Adam left it, he took a portion of Paradise with him. That piece of Paradise is more deeply etched in the human soul than all the memories of this impoverished world. Scratch beneath the skin of a genuine gardener, and you will find this memory of Paradise. When he looks into his backyard, Paradise is what he envisions. But Paradise is not just inside of every man and woman. In these regions of ‘sin and woe,’ William Cowper remarks, ‘Traces of Eden’  may still be seen, ‘where mountain, river, forest, field, and grove’
remind us of our ‘Maker’s power and love.'”

Fairytales and Fireflies

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Today the boys rode their coaster bikes in the alley behind the house. No cars came while they cruised up and down. Kate brought out a plate of apple slices, and I showed her the rhododendrons that are starting to bloom and peek through the thick jungle of other flowers. It was getting hot, and soon we were back indoors.

Raj and I got to the end of Stuart Little, and the same day both boys cozied up to me after their baths while I read the last of the seven stories in Fairy Tales for Brave Children. That book contains works from the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, and other folk tale collections. Tonight we read “Vasillisa,” from Russia, which is a Cinderella sort of story, but with a doll who helps the disdained sister to do mountains of work.

I like the illustrations by Scott Plumbe. The one below is of The Selfish Giant, after he repents of his unkindness to children, and is lying in the snow covered in honor with out of season flowers. That tale is by Oscar Wilde.

It’s time for me to leave my dear family and return to California. I was really happy that a thunderstorm descended  this evening about dinnertime. Within a few minutes of the loud thunder and lightning flashes, the street out front was a river. A few of us stood on the porch to take in the show; I was amazed at how warm the air was.

But then the rain starting blowing sideways at us, and we went in again. It wasn’t long before the clouds had cleared and the “river” ran into the drains, taking the heat of the earth with it. By 9:00 we were sitting on the porch in 20-degree cooler air, and watching fireflies. What a lovely ending to my East Coast sojourn.