Renee

A couple of classic stories -- Arthur Clarke, Le Guin, but some painful duds.

No.

Overacting, especially loud to soft variations (turn it up, turn it down) and cloying enactments of children's parts (not that they weren't cloying to begin with. The wise child in SF is a deeply annoying stereotype.)

The hero begins as a little boy with a truly dreadful father and an alcoholic mother, wealthy English layabouts living in the south of France. In the second novel, he's 22, a hopeless junkie, and his father has just died. In the final volume, he's 30, clean, and finally pulling himself together to get on with his life.

Each novel takes place over just an eventful day or two in Patrick's messy life, but they all feel rich and enveloping, due largely to St Aubyn's wonderful prose and the mordant wit that runs through all the books. The novels are a little like Evelyn Waugh, a little like Proust (in the parade of vivid, mostly awful characters who come into Patrick's life), a little like A Dance to the Music of Time, and and yet they seem very original and wholly heartfelt. The themes that run through them, the repeated scenes and recurring characters, the current of profound outrage at the abuse that's distorted the hero's life -- it all feels like part of a fully imagined whole. I was truly sad when I finished the 3rd book -- and looking forward to St. Aubyn's new one.

The narrator was very good with the voices and English accents -- shakier with the others. But that's okay.

Just an awful, silly book. The hapless first-person hero -- a journalist who never seems to do any actual work -- investigates a unbelievable, sadistic crime in a totally vile world. Lurid, showy, impressionistic prose makes the whole thing that much worse.

A waste of a credit.

Lu-u-ved it. Reacher reasons and muscles his way through intricate difficulties and unspeakable difficulties as only he can. Very, very nice.

The writer, Weatherford, is not what you'd call a great prose stylist, but the story he tells is stunning, and he did all the leg-work. His heart is in it. If you want to know how the modern world was born, listen to this.

Davis' narration is thrilling. Loved it all.

I cannot recommend this too highly.

"Contributors to this analysis include R.H. Smith, in Great Britain, G.B. Smuythe, in the Netherlands, D.H. Lawrence, in Germany, L.D. Clark, in Poland. . . " and on and on and on. For those who like it, it's what they like.

There's interesting stuff in here, somewhere, but when it's on your iPod you can't just turn the page.

All I can say is that I wish that Rowe reading the whole of "A la recherche" -- unabridged -- were available: I'd be happy for months listening to the great sonorous flow of minute psychological observation, social comedy and exquisite description of nature that is Proust. I was especially entranced by Rowe's rendering of the scene in which Maman reads to young Marcel. Magic.