Category: Original narration

Lisa Scottoline read by Kate Burton:: Mary goes to Missoula

Bennie’s office of girls has moved uptown, and become a good hair office. The Good Italian Catholic girl and the Giant California Blonde combine glib girly gall with smart search skills to reconstruct, redress and prosecute a 60 year old wrong.

Mary (GIC-girl) is obsessed with an old case about an old immigrant and sets off for Wyoming because someone doesn’t want her to.

Judy who climbs mountains for fun (Mary once saw a photo of Judy’s family and thought they worked for Comcast Cable….) encourages her:

“Do you even know where Wyoming is?
“Sure, somewhere on the left.”
“Do you know what an antelope looks like?
“Sure, a dog with horns.”

South Philly accent well done by Kate Burton, who makes Mary sound smart and gullible, smart and nutty, smart and frilly. Lovable combinations. Law and fiction, fiction and law.

Martha Grimes read by Tim Curry: The Old Silent

Short cuts to well told endings of British crime novels don’t usually work. They leave out the localized, linguistic pulp of English thought. And it is thought not plot that makes a novel so very relentlessly English.

Tim Curry’s reading resonates with localized, idiomatic, parochial, inherited sense, regionality, territoriality.

Listen up. Tim Curry turns this abridgement into an exception.

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Pattern recognition is the theme of this second millenium. Knowledge is pattern recognition. Love is pattern recognition. Beauty is pattern recognition. Those who can recognize patterns get to recognize more patterns. Hi, ho. Class struggle.

Now, lets get flush. A few small and weary ancestors hammered away at a short list of ideas. They are museum quality, priceless, with some entertainment value.

But you don’t want to get behind an idea. Not in heavy traffic. It is all over the road. It is in your face. In the right lane. In the left lane. In the right lane. Then, suddenly, without warning, it stops. In the middle of the road. Miles in front of the light. Sitting pretty on some double line, any double line.

For ideas, substitute patterns. Pro cogito ordo est.

Lou the autistic works for a company that makes weapons systems and other good stuff. He spends thousands of hours in front of a computer screen recognizing mathematically gross patterns within data fields. Patterns take the place of knowing how to think.

Lou sees patterns, Lou makes patterns, Lou is patterns.

28% of Lou’s patterns span Margot: a very pretty normal he talks to when he goes fencing at Tom’s house every Wednesday. 5% span shopping for groceries (Tuesday), 5% span driving to work (8:02 -8:25), 1% span cleaning his car (Saturday), 7% span going to Church (Sunday morning).

This is a monstrous book. A brilliant book. A good book.

It shows us inter alia that normality depends on the undaunted recognition of patterns: social signals, facial expressions, vocal tones, and on the order and organization of appropriate reactions to such patterns….

Maybe.

I just looked up “undaunted” to see whether it means the same as dauntless. The OED reads: undaunted: not daunted. No! You think? We autistics protest. Why don’t normals say what they mean? Why don’t words mean exactly? Why should mathematically coherent, numerically aligned, literal, pattern-recognizing beings kowtow to semantic ninniness. Aarrrrgh.

But we do.

This Far No Further by John Wessel read by Richard Ferrone

A nice little vignette of malicious 1990’s life with its Coke, its Sexual
Saturation & its top of the mornin’ Fuck You Very Much Sadism. P.I.
ex-con Harding is hired to track and video rich respected Plastic Surgeon
& wife-beater in the course of perverse sexual scenes.
Erotic, staccato descriptions of girls tied up, girls forced into double
penetration, girls sucking huge, rich, respected, well-educated dick. Then
things get ugly.

The job begins to smell like a set up. The dipsy Goth
girlfriend gets beaten up. The beautiful victimized almost wife begins
to look more beautiful….

Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz read by

A book for a long inside day waiting for a hurricane or a war…. about a
man wired by a dream not necessarily of being a cop but of being the good
guy in the uniform, a hacker-ette, and a dog….. and about dainty compassionate
dinner hour executions by Roy, your average, everyday, pre-hysterical,
mild mannered, FBI psychopath, who may, at any moment, shriek or squeal
or giggle or break into some shower scene, and kill his mother, his kindergarden
teacher, the nice little old lady next door…
Far from being a horrorist, K is a very very smart and funny New Englander
or the prototype of what a New Englander would be if he could write his
own language and grin. At the same time. Heald sounds like every crazy
on every highway on every rainy night. The reading is relentlessly funny,
deadpan, narcotic. The real question is: why, and how, Koontz turns suspense
into hope, and human faults into mating calls.

CHORUS:”Never lie to the dog”

Best Scene: Chinese Restaurant

Message: Hope comes from the difference between a government and a people.

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.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre read by FRANK MULLER. An Original.

How did Muller know that the text could sound like this? How could he make words talk like this? And yet he does. Muller turns them up and over and around so that each one cries out: Me, look! Listen to me! Hear me. And having been read in such a way, by such a voice, a word, a text, remains unspeakable by any other voice.
One listens half-crouched, head tilted, just a little, toward the machine, the voice, because it is inconceivable or almost inconceivable that this is English. For how can one even open one’s mouth when there is someone who makes English like this, makes English sound like this….

Call For the Dead by John Le Carre Narrated by Frank Muller(!)

Smiley receives a letter from his ex, reads (“I want to make you an offer which no gentleman could accept. I want to come back to you. I’m staying at the Baur au Lac in Zurich till the end of the month. Let me know.”) and thinks:

“That was Ann. Let me know. Redeem your life. See whether it can be lived again and let me know. I have wearied my lover, my lover has wearied me. Let me shatter your world again, my own bores me. I want to come back to you…..” Let me know.

Posted By:  ()  Date: 02/11/2005 1:05 pm   Status: Open

False Memory by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang

If you’re going to murder somebody, ten to one there’s an old Cheez Doodle underneath the front seat of your car. Which is why Cheez Doodles have become some of the very best indicators of feloniousness among otherwise reasonable novelists like Dean Koonz, Jim Hall and Harlan Coben.

Think of the genetic misfit in Mr. Murder; the ex-mafia garrotist in Mean High Tide or the usurist’s thugs in Chinaman’s Chance. It’s not enough to be a psychopath, youve got to be a psychopath with a neurosis, a psychopath with a sweet-tooth, or a psychopath with a hard on for Frito-Lay.
Too often, the eating habits of terminally guided goons have taken a back seat to other seemingly more exciting personality traits…Narcissism, for example.
Consider the thoughts of the once beautiful assassin with the dreadful
new face in The Marching Season as the girls in the street, the waitresses, the laundrette,
stop looking at him, stop flirting with him, stop liking him. Tragic? No;
ugliness is just points to a misguided gene pool, a fucked up son, a joke
against a father.