A quick list of audiobooks I’ve enjoyed over the last several months:
- The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Han Kang. Both of these were a tough listen for different reasons, but I’m glad I had to really slow down and pay attention to the way that Kang develops her characters. Even in translation, Kang’s layering of memories, observations, and reflections makes for the most fully realized characters I’ve read in years; even if I didn’t like them, which I didn’t for many of them, I believed and sympathized with them. Kang’s handling of brutality, which is really her central theme in both books, is equally layered and sympathetic—and all the more disturbing for that reason; it’s hard to disavow violence when you see so much of yourself in the people perpetrating it.
- Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes and Circe by Madeline Miller: two retellings of Greek myths from a feminist perspective. Haynes and Miller are both Classicists, so they know their stuff, but these books are anything but dry and pedantic. Haynes reads her own work, and Circe is read by Perdita Weeks, and they’re both phenomenal performances. Highly recommended.
- Greenglass House by Kate Milford and The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones. These are two young-adult fantasy adventures, the first taking place in an alternate, steampunk mid-Atlantic seaboard setting and the second in a world inspired by Welsh mythology. Greenglass House is a cozy Christmas mystery, and The Wild Huntress is a classic quest. Both are well-written, fun, and engrossing; Wild Huntress is a little less successful, but only because it takes more narrative risks: it goes for a couple of big swings right at the end emotionally but doesn’t have enough story left to really connect.
The Rookery 