Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Source: LibriVox (zipped mp3s)
Length: 24 hr, 38 min
Reader: Stewart Wills

The book: Moby Dick. For years this was a book that I didn't feel ready to tackle. Of course, I knew the hype of it being the Greatest American Book Ever Written, but I'm often disappointed by hype and wary of nineteenth century literary prose. I'd heard about the long passages that dealt entirely with whaling practices or the whiteness of the whale. I'd also run into innumerable references to it in other works, which is usually a cosmic sign from the Literary Gods that I should read a particular book. Like the White Whale itself, this book held both fear and fascination for me.

So, when I started actually reading it, I was surprised how much I liked it. The legendary Ishmael I had heard so many jokes about is a funny, sarcastic guy himself. The view of the world is surprisingly enlightened for its time, simultaneously taking part in and subverting the view of non-Europeans as savages.The parts on whale anatomy are there, sure enough, but as a biologist, I found that I actually enjoyed them. My fears relieved I was able to get into the book.

What a book! Peeking at an annotated copy in the library, I begin to realize how many symbolic and historical references I was missing. Even so, I caught many of the Biblical and literary allusions Melville was throwing out. Catching these morsels made the reading like an obscure game - great fun for people who can play, but baffling if you don't know the rules. I don't think this is a book that I would have liked as a high schooler, and I'm glad my English teacher never assigned it. This is a book that rewards a mature mind with the background of years of reading.

Rating: 9/10

The reader: Like with many long audiobooks, this is one I read part as an ebook and listened to part as an audiobook. As I went along, I found myself more and more listening to Steward Wills excellent narration and going back to the printed text only to reread parts I didn't fully understand. Wills is a great narrator for such a complex book. He has a patience to his pace without being so slow as to make the story boring. His characterizations of the different sailors are magnificent, especially important in the chapters written as stage directions. I'm sure there are some pretty high-priced versions of Moby Dick read by famous people, but you couldn't do much better than this free production.

Entered in Cym Lowell's Book Review Part Wednesday. Follow the link for more book review blogs,

Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace

Source: LibriVox (zipped mp3s)
Length: 23 hours, 22 minutes
Reader: Mark F. Smith

The book: Nowadays, Ben-Hur is mostly known as the basis for the Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Charlton Heston in the title role, usually shown in reruns in this week before Easter. In its own time, the novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was an unprecedented publishing success, spending years atop the best-seller list and sparking an expanded market for novels.

The novel continues to appeal mainly because of its Count of Monte Cristo-like core story of action, romance and revenge in which the title character, a Jew living under Roman rule, is stripped of all his possessions and sentenced to row in the galleys. The subtitle, A Tale of the Christ, refers to the story of Jesus, which intersects Ben-Hur's life. To modern readers, this religious theme seems tacked onto the beginning and the end, but it was an important reason for the novel's success as Victorians dropped their previous views of the immorality of novels and embraced religious fiction.

Part of the appeal of the book was that Wallace applied the best research of his time to put the story of Jesus into historical context. Of course, having done the research, Wallace feels the need to explain it at great length. These long descriptions, along with a tendency to indulge in religious-philosophical debates in King James English tend to drag down the story. Despite these failings, Ben-Hur is still a good book, though not a great one.

Rating: 7 / 10

The reader: I feel like I'm saying this every few months, but Mark Smith is a solid reader. I'll admit I didn't listen to the entire book; I alternated between reading a few chapters on my phone and listening to some chapters in the car. But when I was reading on my own, it was Mark's voice in my head. He's got a wholesome American accent that he modifies for the different characters, but his voices are not overdone or hammy. The sound quality is perfect and although his pacing is a bit slower than I prefer, that's better than being too fast.

(Entered in the Book Review Wednesday contest at Cym Lowell. Follow the link for reviews of other books by various bloggers)

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

Source: Lit2go (iTunes U link)
Length: Over 30 hours
Reader: Rick Kistner

The book: Set during the exile and return of Napoleon, The Count of Monte Cristo begins with the unjust imprisonment of Edmond Dantes. Dantes eventually escapes prison, and with the help of a massive fortune, becomes the Count of Monte Cristo. With his disguise in place, Dantes proceeds to find those from his former life, rewarding the families of those he loved and punishing those who betrayed him.

What a doorstopper! Reading The Count of Monte Cristo is a massive undertaking but one that is very rewarding. Getting through this novel would be a tedious chore if it weren't that the tale is so full of adventure and intrigue. Knowing a bit about the reign of Napoleon, especially the events of the Hundred Days, will help, since Dumas certainly assumed his audience in the mid 1800s was familiar with their own country's no-so-long ago history. Still, there are so many twists and subplots that it's easy to get lost. You just have to trust in Dumas's storytelling and know that everything will be explained in the end.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: This is an epic undertaking for any reader. Rick Kistner does a pretty good job with it, as usual. There are some audible lip smacks and slight noises, but that's easily overlooked for an unabridged free copy of such a large book read by a single reader. To be honest, I didn't listen to the entire book; I listened to some chapters and read some chapters.

(This review was entered in a contest for Book Review Wednesdays. Follow the link for other book reviews from other blogs.)

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Source: Lit2Go
Length: Approx. 20 hours
Reader: Rick Kistner

The book: Even within the lofty lists of Western canon, there are some books that stand above the rest in reputation. Even if you haven't read them, you don't challenge the placement on these lists of books like Ulysses, Moby Dick, or Anna Karenina. Crime and Punishment is one of these classics and up until a few months ago, I had never read it. Then I started to notice references to the book or its protagonist Raskolnikov in articles, books and even in music. Clearly, the universe was telling me what to read next.

It's not an easy read. Raskolnikov is mentally unstable through most of the book and Dostoevsky reflects his character's delirium in dreamlike imagery. To make matters more difficult, the characters are often hiding their true motives, and part of the effort of reading is figuring out how much each character knows about the other and how much each knows the other knows about the first.  The on-again, off-again lucidity of the protagonist, combined with the web of deception make the book a challenging, but rewarding puzzle.

Beneath this puzzle lies a theme that is familiar to many people nowadays: the tyranny of money. Almost every scene in the book concerns who has or doesn't have money, how much they are spending, or how they plan to get enough money to live a few more days. In doing the research for this review, I wasn't surprised to find that Dostoevsky himself was deeply in debt and wrote the book to pay his bills. Of course, there are other themes as well - morality, justice, love, and all the other big themes of human existence - but I find it comforting that this book about poverty is now available to people who can't pay for it.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: Rick Kistner again does an excellent job with this reading. For a full evaluation of his reading style, see my recent review of The Jungle. My problem in the audiobook is not so much with the reader or the recording, but that it's a difficult book to listen to. Several times in the novel, the narrative tends to change direction in a few sentences, so that if you missed a phrase or short sentence, you completely miss the twist. It's a book that requires your full attention and several re-reads of important paragraphs, so listening as an audiobook is perhaps not the best approach to take to this demanding novel.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Source: Librivox  (Zipped mp3s) 
Length: 25 hr, 34 min
Reader: multiple


The book:  As the book opens, artist Walter Hartright is about to embark on a new job: he'll be the drawing master for the heiress of Limmerage House, Miss Laura Fairlie and her half-sister Miss Marion Halcolme. While out for a stroll before leaving for Limmerage, he chances to meet a young woman, dressed all in white and behaving very erratically. The extremely long novel that follows this encounter starts out as a standard English romantic tragedy, but then takes a turn into a exciting yarn about hidden identities, secret agendas, and a intriguing mystery.

In its own day, The Woman in White was apparently a blockbuster bestseller, and it's easy to see why. Modern audiences may grow annoyed with Marion's constant lamentations that she would be better if she were a man, but she proves herself more heroic than any of the male characters in the book. Laura, on the other hand, I found to be weak, shallow, and unworthy of all the love and attention spent on her. Walter Hartright is an appropriately good-hearted hero, while the villains are self-centered and casually evil, but not so evil as to be cartoonish.

For all the book's length, it managed to hold my attention as an interesting read. To play the "If author 1 and author 2 had a baby" game, I would say it's like what would happen if Charlotte Bronte and Arthur Conan Doyle collaborated on a novel: you get the mystery and outre villains of Sherlock Holmes with the dark backstory, frustrated romance, and class inequality of Jane Eyre.

Rating: 9/10

The readers: Collins writes in his introduction, "the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offense against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness."  The story unfolds as an epistolary novel, with the viewpoint switching between diaries written by protagonists, statements for the court from minor characters, and "documents" procured by Hartwright. The readers for LibriVox take up this theme by having different readers voice the different narrators of the story. Most of the readers are very good, with none being absolutely unlistenable. Especially talented are Tim Bulkeley as Walter Hartright and Ruth Golding as most of Marion Halcolme's parts. Since these two make up most of the narration for the book, many of the other readers have only a chapter or two. Of these minor characters,  Glen Halstrom is truly chilling as Count Fosco.

(This review was entered in a Book Review Party Wednesday contest at Cym Lowell's blog.)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Source: Lit2Go (iTunes link)
Length: Approx. 21 hrs
Reader: Amanda Eland

The book: Jane Eyre can be divided into five parts, neatly defined by Jane's five main places of residence. The first two sections, when she is with her Aunt Reed and at Lowood school made me think I would not enjoy the novel very much. Like Charles Dickens, Brontë spends a large portion of these early chapters beating the reader into sympathy through the injustice and hardships of an innocent orphan. Yet, I got the sense that Jane is not the Shirley Temple character she makes herself out to be in her first-person narrative. This tension of an unreliable narrator kept me interested in the book through the first two acts.

The real heart of Jane Eyre is the third section, when she becomes a governess at Thornfield. These chapters are a marvelous body of writing, encompassing romance, comedy of manners, mystery, and gothic horror. The momentum of the plot built up in this third part is so great that it carries the story through the fourth section, which starts out strong, but devolves into a "yes you will / no I won't" battle of wills. The fifth section brings the novel to a satisfying conclusion.

If you are reading this review, and are already a Jane Eyre fan, I would like to suggest, dear reader, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. This novel has a great story with a number of parallels to Jane Eyre. I was able to pick the unabridged CDs for around $3 from the sale table at a Borders Bookstore, then after I listened to it, sell it to a used bookstore for $10. I can't recommend it as a "Free Listen", but for me, that was better than free.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: Amanda Eland has a pleasant girlish voice that suits the calm character of Jane quite well. The repartee between Jane and Mr. Rochester does not come across as engaging as perhaps it should be, but otherwise her characters are well established. Although I'm no foreign language expert, Ms. Eland seemed to have trouble pronouncing the French and German phrases in the book. Overall this was a good reading in a high-quality recording. The main fault I had was not with the recording itself, but how it is presented. To download each chapter, you have to follow a link from the table of contents to that chapter's page, then download the file for that chapter separately. The files are quite large in size, with some chapters weighing in over 90 MB. However, this large size translates into good audio quality, so if you have a fast connection and plenty of memory, this book is certainly worthy of a download.

(Entered in the Book Review Wednesday contest at Cym Lowell. Follow the link for reviews of other books by various bloggers)