All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming read by Suzanne Toren

At St. Alban’s Church there is a stained glass window picturing a Roman soldier with a halo dressed as a Priest. The Roman soldier was Alban. When the Priest who converted him was sentenced to death, Alban switched clothes with him and died in his place.

A soldier disguised as a priest describes in some sense the Rector herself, an ex-army helicopter pilot, who turns up at crime scenes, and helps the Chief of Police solves crimes in a small snowy parish about 2 hours drive from Albany.

Jan Karon: The Mitford Series

Read this series by Jan Karon about a diabetic Episcopalian rector in a small town in North Carolina whose fat happy female parishioners cant stop baking him pies cakes and cookies. Very very funny scenes with neglected husbands eating unthawed church sale  cakes the minute their wives aren’t looking, a big dog who settles down only upon hearing Scripture,  a bossy secretary with a drawer full of Little Debbies, a perky wife-artist who likes to move the furniture around, and a parish full of souls in need of interference…

The Deal: A Novel of Hollywood by Peter Lefcourt read by William H. Macy

L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a  screenplay.  The screenplay is  fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter.  The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again)  in this town is one property.

The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio,  an agent, a casting director,  who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.

The characters are mimetic:

The  studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming.   (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions,  at which she arrives  hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.

The director is paid in  dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors.  The actors are not worth characterizing.

Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.

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.

Southern Living by Ad Hudler read by Cynthia Darlow

“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’…Have a nice day!”

Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.

Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:

“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’

Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.

A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.

Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”

The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women — a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife — track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.

The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:

Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.

Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.

Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith

It is the story of a happy Captain of a sinking ship. It is the story of Chernobyl, afterwards. It is the story of provisional investigators, provisional policemen, provisional scientists who are provisionally accepted as the mad inhabitants of a zone officially uninhabited, in which no crime officially occurs. The mood is of a cocktail party on an asteroid hurtling toward earth. There we find Arkady, sullen, stubborn, singular, biting at radioactive pickles (“Crisp, tasty, and with a touch of strontium”) and asking questions.

From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang

Read by Stephen Lang who is good doing liddle giwls and the monotones of the personal(it)y disordered but not wonderful
doing Barty who is (we guess) the hero. Unless the real hero is: the theory
of quantum mechanics as interpreted by Feynman and the possibility of understanding
that things are always all the ways things are and we only sense some of the ways things are … sometimes.

It is possible that this book was written for the Koontz children or by the Koontz children … because it is difficult
to conceive that this is all there is after the wicked genius of FALSE MEMORY and the Topcat cooldom of SEIZE THE NIGHT.

Or maybe we only read the book some of the ways it could have been read and not all of the ways for which we apologize. Not that we didnt grin or giggle or laugh, with fangs on, listening to Jacob and Edom small talk of big disasters, earthquakes, tycoons, hurricanes, canned
hams…. Listen:

…he bolted up from the sofa saying “Canned Hams” but at once he realized this made no sense. None. ZIP. So he searched desperately for something coherent to say. “Potatoes.” “Corn Chips.” Which was equally ridiculous. So Edam plunged across the living room as though he were falling off a ladder, struggling to explain himself as he went. “We’ve brought some. There are some. I’ll get some if you wouldn’t mind having some. We have boxes in the car…but I’ll bring them in. Boxes of …boxes. Well, not boxes of boxes. Of course not. Its boxes of stuff, you know… Stuff
we’ve brought in boxes.” Yanking open the front door, lurching aross the threshold onto the porch, he thought at last of the word he needed and he cried out over his shoulder “GROCERIES!!!” with triumph and relief…”

The Road to Ruin by Donald E. Westlake Read by William Dufris

‘…This grand vehicle was a color not seen in nature… metallic, shimmering kind of not-chartreuse, not-gold, not-silver, not-mauve with just a hint of not-maroon….’

Thinks Kelp, not-thinking, not-talking to himself in a kind of not-Bronx, not-Queens, not-Staten Island, in-your-front-lawn five-borough accent while looking for a car to steal in Long Term Parking at JFK. Specifically, a car with an MD plate, cause doctors know about cars you can survive.

This is a book for New Yorkers over 40 who remember Mayor Lindsay and the Bronx before Co-op city and Queens before Balkanization.

Be prepared to laugh unstoppably in the middle of supermarkets. While waiting in line for plywood, ready for the next hurricane. With a mouthful of anything beginning with the letter B.

WILLIAM DUFRIS doing 5 ex-cons planning the kidnapping-that would-go-wrong at bowling alley volume is gut-funny, rib-funny, crotch-funny. A book to be not-read, not-spoken but laughed out loud.

Remarkable.

Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon by Donna Andrews read by Bernadette Dunne

Geek gaming firm with mascots (wounded buzzard, psychopathic dog) sets up shop in small Western town but needs a Wendy to clean up and organize the Peter Pans. Enter Californian Meg Lanslow to clean up their books – and before she finds out whats going on everybody’s least favorite programmer is murdered…. Is it the shrink with a radio show who gives advice to lovesick husbands? Is it the nasty capitalist landlord? Is it one of the temps? Funny, witty and perfectly read by the singular voice of Bernadette Dunne.

Hope to Die by Lawrence Block

What a wonderful Upper West Side between Broadway and Central Park West in the 70s voice to listen to …. when you’re on a boat to Kabul or Talibaq. Close your eyes and you can see the doormen, the yellow taxis, the short, balding, murderous psychoanalysts, walking their dogs between appointments with depressive middle aged lawyers suffering from garden variety impotence.

It must be comforting for the patient, I said, to have a shrink who
can pull a gun on you if you start acting out…You’re on the verge of
this major breakthrough, really getting in touch with your anger, or remembering
what really happened when your uncle came into your bedroom that night,
and you look up from the couch, and there’s Dr. Nadler, and he’s pointing
a gun at you….

Nope. Theres nothing as insidious as a bald jewish shrink on the Upper West Side — except a bald Jewish shrink with an aphorism: What do you get? You get what you get.