Most visitors know I spend a lot of time every month travelling across the U.S. and the way I pass the hours upon hours of driving is through audiobooks. I thought I’d start sharing what I’ve been listening to and some quick thoughts about each title.
I suppose I should call the column a listening list as opposed to “reading” but road trip reading has a better ring to it… Here are the three audiobooks I’d loaded up on my MP3 player during my drives to Hamburg, New York and Portland, Oregon.
As a lifelong Chicago Bears fan I especially enjoyed this unvarnished look at the life of possibly the greatest running back the NFL has ever seen. Although Walter Payton was far from a saint, I believe covering both the countless moments of kindness and generosity, as well as the near constant self-doubt and serial adultery, grounds Payton’s football legacy as delivered by an all too human being.
Malcolm Hillgartner’s narration is spot on and thankfully I didn’t catch any obvious mispronunciations of Chicago area suburbs or past NFL players. I have to admit a pet peeve of mine is listening to an audiobook where names or places are mispronounced.
Altogether a good listen for any football fan.
I’d say it’s a steep challenge to tackle the history of the world, from the first stirrings of civilization up to the near present day (2009), while keeping it approachable and – dare I say – fun. The folks at Mental Floss have taken it upon themselves to do just that, and while I can’t say the book is as funny as the publishers would like to lead you to believe, the audiobook is still an entertaining listen.
Johnny Heller does a fine job with some tongue-in-cheek delivery and there’s loads of interesting tales which are sure to open people’s eyes to the amazing history of the globe. While a true retelling of world history would clock in at a few million pages, The Mental Floss History of the World is a good start.
The Innocents Abroad: The New Pilgrim’s Progress by Mark Twain, Read by Grover Gardner – Blackstone Audio
Amazingly enough I’d never read Mark Twain’s early classic (don’t ask me why, I haven’t a clue why I’d never gotten around to it) and the trademark Twain humor and wiseassedness are in fine form as the author recounts his 1867 trip through out the Old World – to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. The Innocents Abroad has plenty of laugh out loud moments, which is a real compliment for a book which was published over one hundred and forty years ago.
Strangely enough whenever I listen to a book narrated by Grover Gardner I don’t think I’m going to like the performance yet, when it’s all said and done, it turns out I enjoy it quite a bit. I’d think by now I should know better than to doubt Gardner.
If you’ve never read The Innocents Abroad I highly recommend you do so!
