I told your mama I'd get you home, but I didn't say I got no car

Audio books will save your life. Or at least keep you out of jail. Yes. Don't argue. Stop it. It's true! I'm serious! Do you want me to pull this car over? Because I swear I will leave your narrow butt right here by the side of the highway! We have at least 13 more hours in this car today and if you keep arguing with me you will not be going home with the rest of us! And stop making that "Eeeee" sound. I know it's you.

But a crappy narrator, or a stupid story, will NOT help. I listened to The DaVinci Code one summer in the car and I nearly drove off a bridge in desperation. Oh my god that book was terrible. So - the following titles have been selected as being engaging for adults and for kids, often with superlative narrators, classic appeal, and/or historical interest. Look in your local library for these - they're awfully expensive to buy.

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Fever 1793.



Avi. The true confessions of Charlotte Doyle.

Babbitt, Natalie. Tuck Everlasting.

Balliett, Blue. Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3, and The Calder Game. I admit that I'm not a giant fan of the nasal narrator, but don't let that stop you. Probably just me.



J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan. Narrated by Mister Jim Dale.

Bruchac, Joseph. But not for super-little kids - too scary!

Buckley, Michael. The Sisters Grimm (series). Awfully funny and even more clever, although I didn't like the way the sisters sniped at each other in the first book. The kids did though. I'm just too sensitive.

Collins, Suzanne. Underland Chronicles (series).



Cooper, Susan. The Dark is Rising (series). IF you can find them. Ably narrated by Simon Jones.

Dahl, Roald. British A-listers such as Alan Cumming, Eric Idle, Jeremy Irons, and Lynn Redgrave read Dahl’s subversive stuff. As does the author himself.

Dowd, Siobhan. The London Eye Mystery.

Fleming, Ian. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. SOOOO much better than the movie. Hard to find, but worth it. First of all, mom's not dead, she's along for the ride, and second of all, the ride is great!

Funke, Cornelia. The Inkheart series, the Ghosthunters books, Dragon Rider, and The Thief Lord. Brendan Fraser narrates some of these, and he has a nice voice for it. But they're no George of the Jungle. (And yes, any excuse will suffice for me to link to a picture of Brendan Fraser in that movie.)



Gaiman, Neil. The Neil Gaiman audio collection. Silly + weird = fun. Don't miss the author interviewed by his daughter at the end.

George, Jean Craighead. My Side of the Mountain. Dated, but still beautiful and exciting. Another one that's kind of hard to find.



Landy, Derek. Skulduggery Pleasant series, read by Rupert Degas. Rupert Degas is my new hero. His characterization of the Troll under Westminster Bridge alone is worth the price of admission. There's an interview with the suave, sarcastic, conceited Skulduggery himself at the end. You know, Rupert Degas also reads Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Brr - if I didn't have kids in the car, I would totally be listening to that.



Law, Ingrid. Savvy.

Lofting, Hugh. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. Don't let the interminable, strange, sappy movie spoil this crazy old story for you. There is no Anthony Newley and his fruity accent here.



Lowry, Lois. The Willoughbys. Vellly intelesting narration by Arte Johnson, who, apparently, is still alive.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter. Award-winning narration by Jim Dale, who I swear has won every award except knighthood and an Oscar for his work on this series.



Riordan, Rick. Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Ok, I don't like the reader's brutal Queens accent and extremely poor Greek pronunciation. But I suck it up, because the stories are terrific and the kids LOVE them. And so should you.

Sinden, David, Matthew Morgan, Guy Mac Donald (aka The Beastly Boys). An Awfully Beastly Business (series). The GRRRREAT Gerard Doyle reads these. Can't wait! Book trailer here.



Selden, George. The Cricket in Times Square. Friendly narration by the versatile Tony Shalhoub, lovely violin passages.

Snicket, Lemony. A Series of Unfortunate Events (series). Although this series is no longer the hot ticket in print, I feel like the audio versions will persist in popularity, because of Tim Curry's chuckling, mournful, spitty, insane readings. A depressing yet beautiful and hilarious song by The Gothic Archies is a bonus on each audio book.



Stanton, Andy. You’re a Bad Man, Mr. Gum. A truly distinguished audio book. Read by the author, he takes liberties with his own text, adapting certain 4th-wall-busting asides to the audio format. Plus, my god this book is funny! The red fairy in the bathtub who hits Mr. Gum with a frying pan whenever his garden starts looking messy... brilliant!

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Alfred Molina ("Throw me the idol, I'll throw you the whip") does for the sound of Treasure Island what N.C. Wyeth did for the look - now, whenever I think of that book, I will hear Mr. Molina's voice. Stevenson's very large and at times obsolete vocabulary (what is a mizzen, anyway?) is a lot easier for kids to digest in the audio context. And Molina is a genius with characterization, by turns silky, gruff, naive, you name it.

Stilton, Geronimo. Read by Edward Herrmann.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Little House books. Cherry Jones reads these, in a timeless voice that is both dry and warm. Even if you know these books well, her perfectly paced performance brings them to life in a new way.



White, E.B. Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Julie Harris reads Stuart Little, and White himself memorably reads Charlotte's Web. Beautiful and kind of heartbreaking there at the end.

Winkler, Henry. The Hank Zipzer series. The Fonz reads his own books, and when you hear him do it, you'll think, "Seriously? Somebody cast this funny little guy as a cool motorcycle dude?" The seventies really were a little weird.

Woodson, Jacqueline. Anything she reads herself is always going to be beautiful and affecting.

You're a bad man, Mr. Gum! by Andy Stanton, read by the author - review

You're a bad man, Mr. Gum! by Andy Stanton, read by the author

"'I am glad you asked me that,' said Friday, 'because the universe is my specialist subject and I am the winner of quizzes where that's concerned.'

This audio book had our whole family giggling all the way up Interstate 95 from Georgia when we came home from Spring Break. Really. Now, I don't want to take away from the print edition, which is certainly a funny book, with hip little illustrations and a chapter entitled "Mr. Gum Has a Cup of Tea" whose entire text is "Mr. Gum had a cup of tea," but on audio...

Let's put it this way. The other audio book that we really enjoyed on that trip, Neil Gaiman's The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection, included an interview with the author as a Special Bonus Feature. The interview is conducted by Gaiman's daughter Maddie, who asks good questions, including: "Why do you like audio books?" Neil answers this (and all the other) questions with his accustomed brevity, saying, (and I am paraphrasing here - that thing about Gaiman's brevity was me lying) that he likes audio books because he as an author can read the book as he first heard it in his head when he wrote it. Funny voices and all.

So, Andy Stanton apparently had choirs of lunatics speaking in his head when he was writing You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum!. Or maybe just Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and the entire Monty Python ensemble, including the dead guy who wanted to be a doctor. His characters are by turns terrible and silly, mystical and silly, adorable and silly, crabby and silly, and... silly. PLUS we get extremely Adams-y silly stuff like"

"She ran past a cat's ears that were lying on the pavement and a cat's nose and whiskers that were lying on the pavement and a cat's body and tail and legs and eyes and claws that were lying on the paveme -- in fact it was all just one cat, lying on the pavement."

And don't look for any Special Bonus Features on this CD, or in the book, because there AREN'T ANY.

Or... that's me lying again.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George - review

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
When was the last time you read this book? It might be time to do it again.

My Side of the Mountain was published in 1959, one of Jean Craighead George's first books. I must have first read it in maybe 1972. But last week, when I slotted it into the CD player in the minivan and we heard Sam Gribley describe his first attempts to catch a fish, start a fire, and spend the night outside, it was as if Sam was sitting right there with us. We hung on his every word. Cheered when he caught that fish. I checked the rearview mirror when he described shivering under his makeshift canopy of hemlock boughs, and all three boys (my camp carpool) were listening with their eyes wide, worried expressions on their faces.

The descriptions are so concise and yet so atmospheric. Sam's feelings are so unambiguously rendered. The whole book is as clear and bracing as the stream that runs down the mountain.

Are there some dated aspects? Well, certainly it is a little odd that Sam's dad is supportive of him running away from home to live in the Catskills. Then there's the hitchhiking. And I'm here to tell you that no librarian nowadays would allow some kid to leave the library if she knew that he was fixing to live on his own outside. Consequences are thin on the ground on Sam's side of the mountain. I think the author makes clear, however, that Sam's good experience is due to planning, research, and a hefty slab of luck as much as his native perseverance and resourcefulness.

On our daily drive to camp, we often see big birds over the highway. Usually they're carrion birds - black vultures or buzzards - but from time to time we see the distinctive silhouette of a raptor. The other morning, I noticed one of those, pointed it out to the kids and said, "Think that's Frightful?" And a clear, distinct memory came to me - of wondering that exact thing whenever I saw a hawk or falcon when I was a kid.

Every kid deserves the door to the imagination that is this book.

Vacation reading

Ah! We are back from two weeks in various cities and beaches in the American Southeast, and did we have time to read? We did!

I read:



So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld
Loved it! The whole "cool hunter" thing is a bit nineties, but you gotta love a good mystery, and a good mystery that is full of cool stuff is even better. Also, Westerfeld's examination of the co-opting of youth trends for mass consumption is straight out of Commodify Your Dissent, a compendium by the folks at The Baffler that every teenager should read before cracking that next can of Monster Mixxd Energy Juice.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
(reviewed while I was on vacation in New Orleans, thank you very much)

Farthing by Jo Walton
Technically a grown-up book, I would recommend Farthing to any young adult reader interested in speculative fiction, history, or mystery. It's an illuminating "what-if" novel set in an England that has accepted Hitler's "Peace with Honor" - disguised as an old-fashioned English country house mystery: Gosford Park meets Brazil. There are many discussions involving sexuality, i.e. who is homosexual and who is not, but no sex.

The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain
Essays by the author of Kitchen Confidential and The Bobby Gold Stories. I recommend the crap out of Tony Bourdain - but not, typically, for kids. There's the language, not to mention the extremely frank talk about sex and drugs. There are some teenagers, though, especially the ones considering restaurant careers... hey, they should know what they're getting into!


My rising 2nd grader read:



Black Lagoon adventures, books 1-7 by Mike Thaler ; illustrated by Jared Lee
The kid is giggling to himself as he goes through and then reading passages out loud to his younger brother. I'm taking that as a thumbs-up.


My husband read:



How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein
Recommended road trip reading. At every state border, as we hollered out "Good-bye, Georgia!" and "Hello, Alabama!" Bob would have some anecdotal treasure to relate about battles, topography, bureaucratic snafus, and the duplicitousness of Virginia. Luckily, he kept most of them to himself. (I kid! I kid!)

Also, he read The Economist. Also the newspaper. On the beach. I swear, one of these days I'm going to strap him to a chair and force Robert Ludlum down his throat. Or... eww.


On audio:
Our faithful minivan transported us a grand total of 2875 miles. And did we listen to books in the car? We did!



We spent most of our time in the car with Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan. We got through The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, and The Titan's Curse.

My boys, who are 5 and 6 years old, now know the traits and attributes of all the major Greek gods and a fair number of the minor ones. They cried out for "more Percy" every time we got into the car. Unfortunately for my husband and I, the narrator, Jesse Bernstein, is... well. In addition to a gritted-teeth Queens accent that would make Archie Bunker proud (shtreet, frushtrated, firmiliar, foward, bedgeroom), the guy continually misplaces the emphasis in sentences and phrases. Also? A word to audio book producers? When your narrator encounters the word "ichor" and pronounces it "icker"? Stop the tape and look it up. He does animal voices really well, though.


And at bedtime:
Since the boys share a room, I can read to them both at bedtime, usually a long chapter book, while they fall asleep in their beds. I have read Nurse Matilda, The True Meaning of Smekday, and A Hat Full of Sky in this way. My Boov voice was irresistable, as I predicted, but the Nac Mac Feegles nearly did me in.



On the road I started reading the second Skulduggery Pleasant book, Playing with Fire. I am pleased to report that it is starting out just as sardonic and action-packed as the first book, and I am proud to say that I am working Skulduggery's deep velvet voice almost as well as Rupert Degas, who read that first book so amazingly well that we replayed sections again and again.

Here's to beach chairs, lounge chairs by the pool, couches in shady living rooms. Anywhere you get a chance to just sit and read. That's vacation, baby.

Audio book roundup - little kids

Well, it's road trip season again. Ostensibly. Although I would have thought that my family would be the only ones fool enough to be paying for gas from here to the Gulf of Mexico and back this summer, I have already walked plenty of people though the kids' audio book section, trying to fix that panicky look that parents get when they contemplate 9 hours trapped in a vehicle with a semi-incontinent person who doesn't know how to read yet.

For really little kids, say, up to 4 or 5, you have to go with collections of shorter stories. Long narrative is kind of lost on them, and they can get bored and cranky when they've lost track. On the other hand, you the parent are going to be in that vehicle too, and all is lost if the story or voice makes you so crazy that you drive into a bridge abutment before you make it to the family reunion. Unless your goal is to give everyone else something to talk about in years to come, and hell, you could do that just by talking about your intestines every chance you get (we miss you, Cousin Roy!).

Luckily for you, some of the most accomplished professional voices in the world occasionally record children's books. Here's a good long list (remember, they're short, so grab a big stack!) of audio books that small people enjoy and bigger people don't hate:




The One and Only Shrek by William Steig, read by Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci
I reviewed it this March, and I was incredibly impressed. Worth listening to again and again, whether you're an adult marveling at Meryl Streep's virtuosity, or a kid who thinks that a talking bone is just funny.




The Stink books by Megan Mcdonald, read by Nancy Cartwright
Nancy Cartwright is one a hard-working person. Among other things, she's Bart Simpson - Bart Simpson! Some adults (my husband, for one) find her Stink voices grating, but kids think they're hysterical. She injects plenty of variety, so kids can tell the characters apart, and the mechanics of her reading - pace, emphasis, etc. - are flawless.

In addition, I find Stink Moody to be a more sympathetic character than his older sister Judy. McDonald includes informative sidebar material and unexpected incidental funny stuff. I love that one of Stink's friends insists on being called Sophie of the Elves, and that bit is carried through all the books. Also available: Stink and the World's Worst Super-Stinky Sneakers & Stink and the Great Guinea Pig Express and Stink and the Incredible Super-Galactic Jawbreaker.


Three Tales of My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, narrated by Robert Servra
This CD of three stories is gentle to the point of lullaby. But kids love 'em. We listened to this CD last summer in the car, and this year when my son's first grade teacher read it aloud, he was a big celebrity in class because he knew what was going to happen. It's old-fashioned and well-written and original and underappreciated.




Dr. Seuss on audio
Anyone who's ever had to read If I Ran the Zoo every night for about two months knows that reading Dr. Seuss aloud is no laughing matter. It's written in anapestic tetrameter, a term that certainly sounds like it was invented just for him, and is chock-full of made-up words and names that would stop even the most nimble-tongued truck. The Bippo-No-Bungus, the It-Kutch, the Tizzle-Top-Tufted Mazurka, and the Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill? You've got to train for that kind of thing, else you're going to injure yourself.

John Cleese, Walter Matthau, and Dustin freakin' Hoffman are among the name-brand voices that read Seuss stories on The Cat in the Hat collection (image above).
On Green Eggs and Ham and Other Servings of Dr. Seuss, we are read to by brave enunciators such as David Hyde Pierce, John Lithgow, and Michael McKean, who will always be Lenny to me.
Billy Crystal, Hoffman and Mercedes McCambridge (also the voice of the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist!)do the voices on Horton Hears a Who and Other Sounds of Dr. Seuss.
Lithgow and Ted Danson read the more message-y stories on Oh, the Places You'll Go! and The Lorax.
If you can't find these collections, the British comedians Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall (Vyv and Rick from The Young Ones (dating myself, fine, but it was a very funny show)) are the improbable narrators of the cassette-and-book versions of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back . I would give a lot to get my hands on those.




Other audio collections for very young audiences that I would recommend:

• Geronimo Stilton (read by Edward Herrmann)
• Hank the Cowdog (my colleague Mercedes swears by these from when her boys were younger)
• Flat Stanley (above)
• Russell Hoban's Frances (narrated by the throaty yet refined Glynis Johns)
• Little Bear (read by Sigourney Weaver - perfect!)
• Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories read by the author
• ...and Piglet Meets a Heffalump and Other Stories read by Dame Judi Dench, Mister Stephen Fry, and Jane Horrocks (Bubble from AbFab and Angelina from Angelina Ballerina) among others.

Round it all out with Fry reading A Bear Called Paddington, and there you are, pulling into the hotel parking lot.

Whew!