Books in the Car

I love CDs of books in the car.  They have to be UNABRIDGED (very important) and the reader has to have a good voice.

Right now I'm listening to the classic The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.  I have to say, it was a little odd to be driving through the sweltering Texas heat, car air conditioner blasting, while listening to the English Mole and Rat slog through the snow of the Christmas chapter.  Odd but nice - in the same way as wearing sandals to the movies in the summer - your toes icing over as, you just KNOW, outside the sun is melting the asphalt on the cinema's roof.  A perverse pleasure.

Books on CD - The Traveler's Friends

Many of my shows this season have been in Fort Worth - a 100 mile round trip - so I try to make fewer, more efficiently planned and productive trips!  I also take along a book on CD.

I've driven my way through several classics that, reading all by myself, I might not have finished:  Beowulf, transformed into English poetry and read by Seamus Heaney was terrific and so was The Odyssey read by Ian McKellen.  I found myself driving in time to the rythm of the verse.  On the lighter side, P. G. Wodehouse is pretty good company.  My favorite is still Michael Chabon's Summerland, (earlier post HERE) a wonderful, imaginative tale.

But at Half Price Books...  Do you have one?  A treasure-trove of a used bookstore!  Ahem.  At Half Price Books recently there were irresistible CD books:  Alcott's Little Women crazy-cheap; Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, THE time-travel-romance-adventure book which, as my elderly mother phrases it, "gets a little warm"; and the charming Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame.

Almost makes me want to drive to Fort Worth.