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Audio Books: 'Sinful' summer pleasures include listening to a good book or three
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Published: July 6, 2008
Ah, the joys of summer reading! Whether you're on the beach, sunning amidst the sand and surf, or up in the mountains, gazing out at the hazy Blue Ridge, nothing beats having a good book to read.
Or just listen to. Few of us have actually sampled the pleasures of our summer novels or nonfiction in audio form, and there are decided advantages, aside from occupying the long drive time to and from your vacation idyll.
No sunblock smudges on the cover, no sand to shake out of the binding, no glare on white pages, no mountain cherry juice (or other liquids) to spill on the book. Just download an MP3 book, or burn a CD audio book to your iPod or some similar storage device, plug in your earphones, lie back and relax.
Summer is a time to be sinful in your reading, going for the purely recreational. If the police beat appeals to you, then Hachette Audio offers a classic who's making a strong comeback: Joseph Wambaugh. A former LAPD detective sergeant (from the classic era, pre-corruption scandals and federal consent decree), Wambaugh hit his peak in the 1970s, with cop best-sellers such as The Choirboys, The Black Marble and a fine novel, The Onion Field.
Just as the Los Angeles police department went into decline, so did Wambaugh, but now he's back, all feisty and contemporary. Hachette Audio is releasing both Wambaugh's brand new novel, Hollywood Crows ($39.95) and its direct predecessor and inspiration, Hollywood Station ($19.98) from 2006. Cop stories are cop stories, but in this competition, the original clearly wins out.
Adam Grupper does a superb job vocally interpreting a stationhouse full of characters, from rookie female officers to paunchy cynical veterans. His accomplishment is all the more impressive when contrasted with that of Christian Rummel, who reads the sequel. When you compare their different renditions of the surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam, Rummel is a total wipeout.
Not only are the characters more engaging and original in Hollywood Station, but the plot that finally brings together the multiple stories Wambaugh carefully sets up is much stronger than the flimsier narrative skein in Hollywood Crows. This sequel just doesn't fly — save half the price and stay close to Hollywood Station.
For a different sort of summer literary excursion, try Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage (Macmillan Audio, $29.95) for a compelling and unexpected story of a highly unusual marital dilemma in early 1950s San Francisco. Read with enormous emotional depth and dignity by S. Epatha Merkerson, this story of a black couple suddenly confronted with the reality of bisexuality and life on the "down low" surprises at every turn.
It is Merkerson's deep and rich voice that gives true voice to Pearlie Cook and the agonizing choice she must face about giving up or fighting for her husband. Greer's writing is sensitive without ever descending to sentiment, and literary without any condescension to his characters or his storytelling.
I can't really recommend Boots on the Ground by Dusk (Tantor Media, $34.99), Mary Tillman's agonizing account of her famous son Pat's death in Afghanistan, for summer reading, or any other comfortable time of the year. The story of Tillman's tragic demise by friendly fire, deliberately mis-portrayed by the Defense Department and Pentagon as a hero's death while charging the enemy, is sad enough.
But in Tillman's monotone delivery, the deadened sound of a mother who has lost one of the lights of her life, the book becomes almost unbearable. There certainly seems to have been a conspiracy to cover up the truth of her son's unnecessary death, but Tillman seems unable to move on, going over the same material again and again in the book and sounding no more relieved by its end than she was at the beginning.
Two other books round out the summer listening list: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (Hachette Audio, $19.98), a first novel about office politics that is alternately hilarious and disturbing, and The Black Dove by Steve Hockensmith (Tantor Media, $34.99), a sequel to the author's earlier effort, On the Wrong Track, which introduced his late 19th century detective brothers, Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer. William Dufris seems to have great fun vocally creating Big Red in particular, but the Chinatown-set mystery has few surprises and many Chinese clichés are trotted out. The brothers draw their inspiration from Sherlock Holmes, but Hockensmith is no Arthur Conan Doyle. The Black Dove, like Hollywood Crows, just never gets airborne.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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