'Tis the season, for audio books as well as any of the other presents or stocking stuffers we so desperately seek at this time of the year. The small size and portability of an audio book makes it an ideal gift for those traveling for the holiday season -- a present you can actually listen to on the way home!
But judging by a survey of this year's Christmas books, Norman Rockwell's idealized family holiday seems further away than ever. Take Augusten Burroughs' You Better Not Cry (Macmillan Audio, $29.95) -- the picture on the audio-book cover shows the back of Santa with his coat spread wide and nothing on underneath, except a pair of fur-topped boots. It's a fair warning for what lies inside.
Burroughs, who has made a small fortune off his childhood of misery via memoirs such as Running With Scissors, has a distinctive literary voice that is alternately whiny and nasty. Matters aren't helped by the author choosing to read in his own adenoidal voice nostalgic tales of eating most of a wax Santa, his excessive demands for a Christmas pony, and the capper, waking up in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City next to a degenerate and naked French Santa. Where's Jimmy Stewart and It's a Wonderful Life when you really need them?
Apparently, on the next shelf over. You can never go broke underestimating America's appetite for heartwarming Christmas stories. Donna VanLiere is banking on the Christmas trifecta, with the third of her novels, The Christmas Secret (Macmillan Audio, $29.99), following The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Hope. Christine Eisley is a divorced waitress with two small children, struggling to make ends meet and rapidly going downhill. The owner of the local department store is teaching his own quiet moral lessons about kindness and responsibility to his self-involved grandson, Jason, who is working at the store over Christmas while he waits for any big accounting job offer. How Christine and Jason intersect, working toward their obvious destiny, and how the minor characters ebb and flow together, with revelations worthy of soap operas, makes for good, if highly sentimental storytelling. It was a little distracting to listen to the reading of The Christmas Secret by its author, who was annoyingly perky, but you end up emotionally involved in spite of yourself with a love story whose loose ends (and the obligatory unexplained miracle) have been wrapped up, decorated, beribboned, sprinkled with glitter and placed under your listening tree.
The biggest turkey on the holiday table this year has to be Nancy Tillman's The Spirit of Christmas (Macmillan Audio, $14.99), which offers very little spirit and not much more Christmas. The fabulous Harry Potter narrator, Jim Dale, reads a poem or two, there are a bunch of Christmas carols, and nothing else. This book feels as if it were put together by a bored elf.
Boredom can't exist for long around Stephanie Plum, and Janet Evanovich makes the most out of the holiday setting in Visions of Sugar Plums, part of a three-book set by Macmillan Audio, Between the Plums ($39.99). This is the book that introduces bounty hunter Plum to her unusual and other-worldly friend, Diesel, the action all bracketed by Stephanie's inability to get her Christmas act together. It's funny, harebrained and nonstop, three reasons why Evanovich remains a best-selling author.
The loveliest story I listened to this holiday season was "An Ex-mas Feast," one of three stories by Uwem Akpan in Say You're One of Them (Hachette Audio, $18.98). Akpan is a Nigerian writer who carries the Oprah's Book Club seal of approval, and his writing is superb, carrying emotion and narrative effortlessly forward. Read by Dion Graham, "An Ex-Mas Feast" takes place in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, and reminds us that this is a time of peace and goodwill to men, even for the lowliest among us.
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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