dermkat's Reviews (2.11k)

I started listening to this audio book back in June. I've read and loved the book before and am looking forward to my trip to the island in September, so I decided to listen to it instead of re-reading. However, I didn't love the narrator so I kept listening to small chunks and then committing to a different audio book. Finally, this month, with the trip getting closer, I got excited to finish listening to it! Same old Anne with an E! I still love the story, I just found the narrator's performance of Anne particularly a bit spacey and child like. I'm just so partial to Megan Follow's performance in the tv movies--her Anne was still overcome by imagination but also came across independent and strong.

I studied this book and wrote the final Capstone paper for my English degree about the inclusion of the character Benji, using a disability theory lens. I hadn't read it again since then (over two years ago) and was wanting to, but I found the audiobook through my library and decided to listen instead. The story was as I remembered it, but listening was actually a lot harder than reading it. Here's what I mean by more difficult: the book itself is challenging to read and comprehend due to its multiple narrators expressed in Modernist style; however, the audiobook was easier to follow but emotionally and morally draining. Certain characters of this book, set in the deep American south in 1928 are of their time in their opinions on black people, and one of the main characters is extremely racist and sexist. The frequent use of the n-word and other derogatory terms was something I must have been able to slip past and not absorb while reading the physical copy... I knew it was there, but having to listen to it was a whole other ball game. It physically hurt at times having to listen to the third section of the book narrated by Jason Compson, who is incredibly racist and sexist. Besides this aspect, the story was as I remember it and it made me want to re-read my 35(ish) page paper in which I asserted that Benji Compson was not empty-headed, but was actually very intuitive and essential to the telling of the story. If you want to know more about that, let me know.

This was great! Again, a tad unusual because one doesn't generally read a cookbook. However, as this was interjected with quotes from the books and insights from the author, who is the granddaughter of L.M. Montgomery, I actually flipped through every single page and read every recipe. I am hoping to get a copy of my own and try some of the recipes soon! This was published five years before I was born and I didn't know it existed until earlier this month. This version is apparently a newer, reformatted version and reviews say this one is much nicer because it actually says which recipes are from which books and it includes some of Lucy Maud's personal recipes. I haven't seen the original version, but I definitely appreciated those features. 

This is the first book I have wished I'd read instead of listened to. Because I listened to it at night and narrator Juliet Stevenson's voice is so lovely and lilty, my mind drifted and then I drifted off to sleep. I missed a lot of it and don't really feel like I got the whole story. This book is hard to read and understand. The first time I read it I still wasn't sure I knew what had happened. This is my third time experiencing it and I think, for me, because of its Modernist stream of consciousness style, it is better read than heard. It requires full brain engagement and focus, and I just don't do that while listening. It's still one of my favorite books so it wasn't a waste of time, I am just disappointed I didn't fully experience the story. However, I will say that when the book is read aloud the narrator puts her own punctuation and pauses where they don't exist in the book, which does make it easier to follow right from the get go. So, if this book has seemed intimidating in the past, you could try listening to it. Plus, the narrator is the mom who works in the bra shop in Bend it Like Beckham and, though she is hilarious and overdramatic in that, her voice is perfect for proper British narration!

I read this book for the first time two summers ago but had been a fan of Middle Earth stories since a kid whether in movie or book form. This time, I decided to listen to the audio book before bed. I really enjoyed Rob Inglis's narration and found his voice very interesting yet soothing to listen to. Sometimes too soothing though--I often set a 15 minute sleep timer and would miss things because he lulled me to sleep! I was okay with that though and only went back a few times to see what I'd missed since I'd read it before. Still a great book that I will likely re-read again at some point, but was glad to experience it in a different way.

This book satisfied the literary nerd in me, big time and was really the only 'adult fiction' book I managed to read this month. There are four doorways to reading, according to super librarian Nancy Pearl, and these are what draw people into reading and inform their preferences. Most people utilize a combination of these: Story, Character, Setting, and Language. I learned about them during my library degree and maybe I'll write a separate post about the topic, but what you need to know now is that I generally read for story and language. Let me tell you, this book gave me language!!! During my English Lit degree, I always read with a pen in hand to underline things that stood out to me as important or beautiful. This is not a habit that continued into my everyday reading life EXCEPT for when a book gives me language, and I wanted to bust a pen out multiple times during this one (and I did!). It is the story of an unnamed literature scholar giving guest lectures about lost books while at an unnamed university in an unnamed city. The novel is a mixture of his lectures, experiences, and recollections, and has a very modernist feel with its run-on sentences and air of mystery. Yet, the entire book somehow feels like it is also mocking that type of literature. As the reader, I noticed how meta some parts were and the resulting ironies. Also, it was so satisfyingly confusing--the narrator could be the author but nothing is ever clearly real. In fact, the 'about the author' section states that the author loves to work in pseudo-biography but mainly writes fiction. I got this as an advanced reader copy and it doesn't come out until April, but I think other lit nerds will enjoy it!

**Bonus: Here are a couple of the lines that warranted underlining, in my opinion, because of how concisely and beautifully they expressed my own feelings about the topics at hand:
During a discussion about 'good' literature: "I wanted to tell her how I believed that literary greatness wasn't an innate quality but something formed through machinations of culture and society and history. I wanted to talk about the subtle formation of canons and discriminations against particular kinds of taste and style, about race and gender and nation" (Rose, p. 81).
On searching for a book he recalls experiencing in childhood but none of the details of: "I was trying to find something I cannot ever be sure existed, something I myself may have imagined" (p. 84).
About the fallacy of memory (like I wrote about in my post about mis-remembering and mis-quoting!): "That, at least, was how it was in her memory, but memory makes up its own stories every time" (p. 86).

Here again, I was disappointed in the book because of my fondness for the Disney version starring Julie Andrews. As I was contemplating the stiff, harsh version of the titular character in the book, I recalled that a movie was released a handful of years ago about the making of the movie and the author's struggles with Walt Disney (Saving Mr. Banks (2013)).  I watched the movie and now feel like I better understand the book's intended purpose (so far as it was portrayed in the film).  My heart broke for what Mrs. Travers went through and it gave me more sympathy for her character, but I will likely always prefer what I knew first. I just love musicals and Julie Andrews too much, and the songs I sang in childhood have nestled too far down into my memories.

Having grown up watching the Disney movie version, I enjoyed reading the book and learning how it differed from the story I knew. That said, I was disappointed that a few of my favorite story elements were not from the book, including my favorite bit of ridiculousness: The Walrus and the Carpenter. Thankfully, I visited with a friend the morning I finished the book and she happened to be a big fan of the original story. She let me know that the movie's plot was a hybrid of the book I read and the sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. So, I immediately ordered that book from the library. More about that in a bit.

Time to finish what I started. So many things from the movie were taken from this book! My favorite, the aforementioned The Walrus and the Carpenter poem, mannerisms from the Red Queen which were combined for the movie version of the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the talking flowers, etc. In general, I wasn't as thrilled with this book's overall plot as the first one, but watching for the elements I knew from the movie was entertaining.

I’m not sure how, but I had never read this book before. I am a big fan of The Lord of the Rings movies and had read the books in elementary school, so after the first Hobbit movie was released I started reading this book. However, I was borrowing my Dad’s copy and had to give it back before I finished it. When we read The Fellowship of the Ring in our Tolkien and Lewis class I purchased a set of books that included The Hobbit, so I made sure to read it this summer and I now understand (but don’t agree with ALL) the issues that people had with the movie trilogy. As always, well done Tolkien.

The five short stories in this compilation feature musicians and all intertwine to some degree. I read this directly after finals when my brain was tired and I already forget details. I do recall enjoying the stories as I read them, though.