Twelve Rooms With A View by Theresa Rebeck read by Marguerite Gavin

What begins as a story about a girly James Dean with two wicked sisters and a  drunk mother becomes a story about a CPW apartment building and its history, its doorman, its neighbors.

Tina Finn is outrageous and outraged, at everyone with a bank account  or a stable identity, at her sister with the crackberry, at her other sister with the perfect husband, at grown ups. But in a Jacuzzi surrounded by gay men she becomes another Doris Day …. relaxed, bubbly, verbal.    The twelve room apartment gathers around itself a seraglio of children, thieves and lovers, and delivers an ending both righteous and happy.

Promises To Keep by Jane Green read by Cassandra Campbell

There is something beautiful and more than beautiful about these women who enjoy their kitchens, who love  all the rooms of domesticity.   Jane gives us wives, book club ladies and hostesses, in Manhattan or Westchester, well groomed and well mannered and well off, obedient to husbands or mothers in law or schedules. Some are jolly and educated New Englanders, old and odd, wealthy and artsy and irrepressible.  The plot? It is as comforting as warm bread,  about women organizing people and things; themselves and each other. One woman most of all: Callie Perry, who has always been the happy center of many friendships.

Jane Green, The Beach House read by Cassandra Campbell

Nan localizes Nantucket. Charmed, beautiful, slightly eccentric, she is at that age  where she can get away with mostly anything:   trespassing or swimming naked or wearing scarlet lipstick everywhere.

Nan lives in a huge old house where she has decided to run a bed and breakfast for summer guests. It is this  house which  brings together a handful of curious, complicated personalities: Michael, Nan’s son, Bea and Daniel (a soon to be divorced couple), Daphne (a divorced real estate agent) and her hormonal and horrible daughter.

Nan eases and re-invents the lives which assemble around her; she couples, amuses, and converts her guests, into friends, into family.

Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilting Series narrated by Christina Moore

It is not unusual for women’s books to lay out women in groups, like a plate of madeleines, a silver tray of cream cakes. But this circle of quilters is not a dainty or delicate array.

Chiaverini quilts stories about a dozen or so women who quilt, whose separate lives come together accidentally and on purpose at Elm Creek quilting camp, where women welcome women into an American tradition. Chiaverini’s women are full-bodied, irregular, problematic. Each one has stories full of children or mothers; Diane, for example, who shows up at the police station to bail out her son:

Well. it certainly does my heart good to know that the citizens of Waterford are being protected so heroically from skateboarders. Now if only you could do something about all those thieves and murderers and terrorists running loose, now I would be really impressed.

Diane is smart and sarcastic and argumentative, Sylvia is a grand old dame and a master quilter, Summer is a sleek hippy daughter of a single feminist academic, Judy is a practical, organized, rational type, Bonnie   industrious and busy shopowner-housewife, Sarah, the bitchy domestic manager   and co founder of the quilting camp. After eight quilting books, these characters are solid evidentiary structures and Elm Creek is a well elaborated structure of the imagination: safe, supportive, creative, cozy. It is problematic and fun. As fun as a summer camp for big girls who love little pieces of cloth.

It is of course the problems of everyday life that are shared among the quilters, not just the piecing and sewing and binding and basting.Perhaps  there is a kinship between these ladies and the medieval craftswomen or ‘spinsters’ who (like the wife of Bath) were good at ‘deceit, weeping and spinning’. Somehow, this medieval picture of women and textiles and discourse is comforting to female readers in 2010.

Elvi Rhodes A House By the Sea read by Anne Dover

How fun to be a stubborn, sensible English widow who takes up decorating or hotelkeeping or moves to Brighton. The kind of fun that takes time: not like those television garden shows that demonstrate

“how to transform an entire garden in a matter of five hours while the lady of the house [goes to] visit her mother in the next town. …A team would move in. They would spend an inordinate amount of money on mature plants, containers, garden furniture, trellising and ceramic slabs… Towards the end there would be moments of panic because the wife was due to walk in the door in precisely seven minutes time…”

No, Caroline has fun slowly. She sells her old house at Bath slowly, she moves to Brighton slowly, she fixes her old house slowly, and then converts a new house into flats, slowly. Meanwhile she discovers that she’s “…got a wonderful eye for fabrics, window treatments, lighting, decorating, color schemes and so on … even furniture.” Then, very slowly, she turns her builder into her friend and her friend into her partner, slowly, sensibly, with a happy division of labour:

I’m asking you to design while I carry out the practical part.

How fun.

The Anglo Saxon World by M.C.D. Drout

In between rolling translations of Anglo-Saxon chronicles, poems, histories, M.C.D. Drout hawks 566 years of kings, pirates, popes, monks, wars, buildings and battles. But most and first of all, he hooks us with language, giving us bits of Anglo-Saxon poems, lists of Old English words (some, siton, foton), Old English websites, including kingalfred.com, where he has written a free Anglo Saxon grammar called “King Alfred’s Grammar” named after his (and soon to be yours) best and biggest hero : King Alfred; and anglosaxon.com where he serves up his recordings of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Whew!
Then he gives us, cut up into nice round 100 year sizes, the history of a “people who lived in a place full of Celtic place-names, surrounded by Roman ruins, bringing with them Germanic legends, and building Christian Churches”. Organized by the MaCGyVr principle, it is a history of 6 ages: Migration, Conversion, Golden, Viking, Reform and Fall.
Throughout, he tells us marvelous stories of the marvelous, noting what historians know, what they fight about, what they hate each other for, and how to read historical interpretations as interpretations, how to consider what makes sense, what doesn’t, and how to fall in love with the material of Anglo-Saxon history, its indeterminacy, its scarcity, its ongoing reconstruction.
In between he does stand-up:

Jefferson came up with the idea that the front of the [great] seal should have a picture of Hengist and Horsa …. and that the backside of the seal … would picture Pharoah, sitting in a chariot, as he road through the parted red sea … with the Israelites on the other side, following the pillar of fire that led them to the promised land. You know, I have to say, the eagle was probably the safe way to go here….

A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

There are very few perfect beginnings to a story. Beginnings which move through images at the same rate as they move through text, rolling into a plot detectibly, sensibly, unhurriedly. A boy, for example, making the rounds on his bicycle, delivering the daily papers:

…At Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook’s, he delivered The Times and the Daily Graphic. At Mrs Sweatenham’s he left The Times and The Daily Worker. At Miss Hingecliff’s and Miss Murgatroyd’s he left The Daily Telegraph and The News Chronicle. At Miss Blacklocke’s, he left The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail. At all these houses, and indeed in practically every house in Chipping Cleghorn, he delivered every Friday, a copy of the North Benom News and The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette, known simply as The Gazette. Thus on Friday mornings, after a hurried glance at the headlines in the daily paper…. most of the inhabitants of Chipping Cleghorn eagerly opened the Gazette and plunged into the local news. After a cursory glance at correspondence, in which the passionate hates and feuds of rural life found full play, most of the subscribers then turned to the local column.

We can easily sketch in our mind a series of houses, in front of which stand assorted sizes of mailbox, and in which kitchens sit the inhabitants of this happy English village, eating their singular English breakfasts, reading the headlines, the correspondence, the local news, and then, more likely than not, the Classifieds, in which are published up to the minute or almost up to the minute ads, as relevant and localizable as Tweets.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larson read by Simon Vance

Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of  Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops.   None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes   signaled  by cigarettes. Sometimes by a  walk.   Much goes unsaid, and unshared.

All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke.  The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor  an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is  skinny,  occasionally violent,  abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys:  mathematics, sex, hacking.  She has  lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea,   for a total of 97,000 kroner.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

Gamash celebrates his marriage at a bed and breakfast with beds so high you need a little step stool to climb into them and bumps into a family murder.

Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker read by Robert Ian MacKenzie

An intimate look at the arrangements, organization and order of small town French village life, through the eyes of the jovial, wise and well fed chief of police, for “…not  a single pig made it to market without some part of it being offered as part tribute part toll to Bruno…”.

He put the grill close to the coals, arranged the steaks, and then under his breath sang the Marsellaise, which he knew from long practice took him exactly 45 seconds. He turned the steaks, dribbled some of the marinade on top of the charred side, and sang it again. Then he turned the steaks for 10 seconds, pouring on more of the marinade, and then another ten seconds. Now he took them off the coals and put them on the plates he’d left to warm on the bricks he’d left to warm on the side of the grill.

The strolling investigator offers up an amiable mix of local types, of those who “evidently conformed to the English stereotype of bizarre affection for animals dressed in gleaming black boots, cream jodhpurs,” of the prissy European officers of hygiene who threatened the taste of the local cheese, of old men who had not spoken to each other since the war.

The reader sometimes sounds as if he’s sucking on bubbles, a kind of terrible English mumbling.