Holes by Louis Sachar

A literary phenomenon

Published in 2006
Read by Kerry Beyer
Duration: 4.5 hours
Unabridged

I teach high school Spanish and history but even if you don't have much interaction with young people, you'd have to live in a cave not to have noted the literary phenomenon that is the novel Holes. Although my students don't read Holes in my class, they have mentioned it so I decided to listen to it as an audiobook during my drive to and from school.

The plot itself is fairly unique in that there are literally no loose ends. Nothing is introduced that does not have a consequence later on, be it the prison guard quitting smoking and chewing sunflower seeds instead or the references to peach preserves, it all ties together. All of that makes the story less believable, more like a dark fairy tale but all of the more enjoyable.

Louis Sachar

The story itself is pretty solid. There's a mystery, a sense of camaraderie and an awful tale of injustice in the flashbacks. It is dark, but not overwhelmingly so.

The audiobook lasts about 4.5 hours. It was read by Kerry Beyer. A little research shows that this may be Beyer's only foray into audiobook narration. That would be justified. It's not that he did a bad job (he was easily understood), it's just that, as a frequent listener of audiobooks, I know that there are much better readers out there. Beyer had a tendency to make every sentence sound as though he were exclaiming over the most marvelous of things. It was all supposed to sound very exciting but it grated after a while. I suppose it's not the fault of the reader but the fault of the producers who didn't re-direct his efforts.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Holes by Louis Sachar.

Listening Woman (Joe Leaphorn) by Tony Hillerman

Third in the Leaphorn series and one of the best

Originally published in 1978.

Like most fans of Hillerman, I've read them all. I'm sporadically going back through them and re-reading ones that I read more than a decade ago.

I've grown used to the older Leaphorn, the one that uses his head and thinks through problems and mostly avoids the physical stuff. This one is a younger Leaphorn that uses his head but gets involved in a lot of physical action. This one would make a great movie, but since I've not been happy with the few adaptations that I have seen I guess that I would prefer that no one make the attempt.

Tony Hillerman
(1925-2008)

Lots of Navajo culture is introduced in Listening Woman. This one lays the groundwork for a lot of the future books, including introducing multiple characters and does a lot of exploration into Leaphorn's quirky sense of interested agnosticism in regards to Navajo religious beliefs. The plot centers around a couple of murders and lots of discussion of Navajo witches and a dark family secret.

This one would be a good one for a book discussion group.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Listening Woman by Tony Hillerman.

Reviewed on May 2, 2009.

All Clear (audiobook) by Connie Willis

A sci-fi book for lovers of history

Published in 2010 by Audible Studios.

23 hours, 56 minutes.
Read by Katherine Kellgren.
Unabridged.

43 hours of audio listening later (read wonderfully by Katherine Kellgren who handled a wide variety of accents and aging characters with real skill), I am finally done with the Blackout/All Clear saga. These books are intended to be one giant book, not a series, although you would never. ever know that from the audiobook's cover. To her credit, the author, Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Connie Willis introduces the second half of this audiobook with a warning that you had better listen to the first half first. Indeed you should and you should listen to the second installment as soon as you can after hearing the first one because there is no review, no scenes where the characters re-hash everything for the benefit of the listener. This is literally the second half of a very large book and she starts out exactly where she left off.

See my review of Blackout here.

All Clear continues the premise of Blackout (of course) and follows the adventures of late 21st century historians who learn about the past by time travelling. They observe and learn by blending in and becoming part of the past. They operate under the belief that they are unable to actually alter history (and apparently they have never read Jack Finney's Time and Again!) but they should not really do anything to test that theory.

Blackout/All Clear is both science fiction and historical fiction. Its real strength lies in its historical research and the way that it makes the reader experience London during World War II. The bombings, the inconveniences, the rationing, the danger, the weariness, the randomness of death from a bomb dropped from the sky - those aspects of the war come through crystal clear. Some reviewers have complained about the length of the books (and they are a big chunk, believe me, I know).  Certainly, a Reader's Digest type of editing job could easily cut out hours and hours of listening time without much affecting the plot of the story. Scenes could be cut, conversations could be shortened. There are certainly aspects of mind-blowingly stupid behavior on the part of the characters that had me wondering of Willis had gone daft.

Connie Willis

But, Willis has created an experience here. This is not so much a story but an homage to the regular, everyday people that endured the cruel attacks of a dictator, the privations of war, made communities in subway tunnels, survived when they were literally alone in the world. It is a bit of their experience and as such it is priceless. I teach history so nothing about this book really surprised me. I knew the bare facts but Willis has created a chance for the listener to get a taste of what it was like to live the facts, not just know them. For that, I have to thank her.

Throw in a bit of drama, a touch of sci-fi, the lovable completely awful Hodbins and I have to recommend Blackout/All Clear to anyone interested in World War II. Sci-fi fans are bound to be disappointed but I like both and I certainly enjoyed this.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found here: All Clear.

Reviewed on March 12, 2011.

Curiosities of the Civil War: Strange Stories, Infamous Characters, and Bizarre Events by Webb Garrison

Too scattered for this student of the Civil War.

Published in 2011 by Thomas Nelson

Webb Garrison's Curiosities of the Civil War: Strange Stories, Infamous Characters, and Bizarre Events is a well-researched , hefty book that does deliver what it promises - a collection of odd things about the Civil War.

I read a lot of history and it seems to me that there are two main ways to organize a book about history. You can go with the more traditional timeline approach - tell the story in the order that it happened (narrative history). Or, you can go with themes - study the themes of the history as the writer sees them. For example, a Civil War historian can look into the evolution of military technology and techniques or focus on civil rights in the North and the South. Most historians try for a combination of the two and pick several themes and follow them as they tell a narrative history.

Curiosities of the Civil War goes with the less popular "bathroom reader" style. It is literally a collection of facts, interesting as most of them are, with only the barest of themes to hold them all together (for example, the theme "Supporting Members of the Cast" consists of several chapters about non-famous Civil War personalities such as John Wilkes Booth's one-eyed horse (and nearly everyone else's horse), soldiers, wives and various weird animals that became regimental pets.

For me, the randomness was too much. I like a story to be told as I am learning my odd and interesting facts. This style just could not hold my interest for more than two or three pages at a time.

This is not a book for the Civil War novice - this book will teach you nothing but a series of facts with no analysis, no interconnecting themes, no narrative (It does, however, have a very nice index). If you are looking for a book to pick up, read a couple of pages and then put back down, this is it. Otherwise, well, find something else.

I reviewed this book in conjunction with Thomas Nelson's BookSneeze program. I was not compensated for this review. The opinions expressed are mine.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Curiosities of the Civil War. 

This book was reviewed on March 9, 2011.

The Corruptible: A Ray Quinn Mystery by Mark Mynheir

Interesting Characters. So-so mystery.

Published in 2011 by Multnomah.

The Corruptible is the second in the Ray Quinn mystery series. It is written by now-retired police officer Mark Mynheir who adds a touch of authenticity to his work (although he misses the most obvious clue at the beginning of this mystery).

Ray Quinn is a former Orlando police officer turned Private Investigator who was forced to retire due to disability as a result of being shot through the hip. His replacement hip is painful and he needs to walk with a cane and he often deals with the pain (physical and emotional) with a few stout shots of Jim Beam. He has a support team of sorts: a partner named Crevis who is trying to pass the entrance exam to be a police officer and a business manager who works during the daytime hours as a parochial school teacher.

In this story, Quinn is hired by an investment company to recover stolen client information by downloading it onto a portable hard drive. The number one suspect is a an acquaintance of Quinn, an employee of the company who was former Orlando narcotics undercover officer who had been forced off the police force.

Quinn delves into some of his own difficulties with alcohol and unresolved issues of his own forced retirement and his new physical limitations as he follows the trail to the missing data.

Mark Mynheir

As I noted in the title of this review, the strength of this book, and of the series so far, is the characters. The mysteries are so-so, but the real-life struggles of the three principal characters and the fact that Ray Quinn is not a superman that can punch out all of the bad guys makes the story more interesting.

There is a second story involving those annoying e-mail scammers who claim they are trying to "smuggle" money out of Africa into America while in reality they are trying to scam the elderly out of their hard-earned cash. Also, there is an undercurrent of Christian themes written into the story.

Follow this link for my review of the first book in the Ray Quinn series.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The Corruptible: A Ray Quinn Mystery.

Reviewed on March 7, 2011.

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

The controversial winner of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Here we are, decades years later and The Confessions of Nat Turner is still in the news. Recently, Henry Louis Gates, Jr made comments (positive ones, now. Originally negative impressions, years ago) about the book. The primary controversy is quite simple - how can a white man, a southerner, and the descendant of slave owners write a novel about one of the few slaves who actually stood up and demanded his freedom by leading a rebellion? Some have even asserted that he did not even have the right to write the book in the first place - after all, it is not HIS history.

But, is Nat Turner to be forever held apart? Is African-American history to be held apart? Can an African-American write about the Japanese Shogunate? Can an Asian-American write about the Alamo? Of course and of course. Gates makes this point in his comments (correctly). History is human history.

Nat Turner (1800-1831)

Styron's fictionalized Turner is based on research and a book written by Nat Turner's defense attorney, Thomas Ruffin Gray entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia.

The controversy over Styron's portrayal of Nat Turner and his failed slave rebellion in 1831 Virginia would not be nearly as furious if not for the sheer power of Styron's writing. He drags you into Turner's tortured mind and you can feel Turner's rage, religious fervor and lust. In my case, it pulled me in so tightly during some scenes that the rest of the world was lost to me. All was a breathless rush until that little piece of this tragedy was over and I was able to breathe again.

William Styron (1925-2006)

 I am not entirely pleased with some of the liberties that were taken with Nat Turner. As a general rule, I am more a fan of historical fiction that makes characters out of people who are witnessing the history rather than making it. I am especially doubtful about books that take known historical figures and purport to get into their minds and figure out what drove them.

However, the writing displayed in this book is really quite exceptional and it merits 5 stars. It takes the information we have about Turner, throws in a healthy bit of supposition and mixes in a plausible way to come up with one of the more profound books about American history, religion and race to have been written in the last 50 years.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Originally reviewed on October 27, 2005. Updated on March 6, 2011.

Update February of 2022: The Confessions of Nat Turner was listed on a 2021 list of 850 books that a MAGA Texas state legislator wants to ban from schools in Texas: see article here. It is now included in my tagged list of books that MAGA members of the GOP want to ban from schools.

School Days by Robert B. Parker

A throwback to the early days of 'Spenser'

Published by Putnam Adult in 2005

This edition of Spenser reminded me of the early days of the series - the days before Spenser would assemble a gigantic posse of bad guys and policemen (ie, Potshot) in order to get the job done. Thankfully, this one is also basically Susan Silverman-free (not that I mind Susan, it's all of the repeated conversations about their relationship - it just gets old!)

Unfortunately, School Days is also Hawk-free, so the experienced reader of Spenser books will definitely miss the witty banter the two often share. However, Spenser manages to get in a few good lines without the extra help and he does get a bit of outside help from some unusual sources from the past.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon here: School Days (Spenser)

Reviewed October 9, 2005.