Harriet

The use of language in "Telegraph Avenue" is so rich and seductive that I really didn't want the book to end. Listening to the reader was pure joy. The language conveyed not only the bones of the story, but also varied according to each personality. In addition, the language revealed the ages of the protagonists by being apropos to each person.Mr. Chabon must have done a mountain of research or be an aficionado of vinyl himself. He reveals an encyclopedic familiarity both with jazz of the fifties to the seventies, but also of contemporary music. Listening to stories is one of my all-time favorite activities. The excellent reader sustained the voices of the four pairs of protagonists.

There are passages that reminded me of Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu," in the minutia of details about the music; of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" in its panoply of characters and of Joyce's "Ulysses" in the sweep of time.

This question--"what scene was your favorite" is like asking whether you prefer dark chocolate with or without nuts--because there were so many indelible moments. Here are two: the executor's daughter cleaning out Cochise Jones' apartment and releases his parrot, or the undertaker's nephews chatter while "tailing" Titus and Julie.

A tag line for a film might be "The Karma of Vinyl."

Since my undergraduate and graduate studies concentrated on Europe and the west, I was excited to learn about Peter the Great, and the making of the Russian state. Generally, I become totally rapt when learning something new. That said, the narrator made this a particularly arduous task.

Watching a young man on the brink of adulthood become a force to be reckoned with was fascinating.

He had many

This book, which was long and complicated, was not served by the supercilious and condescending voice of the reader, who stumbled over the names of Russian towns and assumed a weird feminine voice when quoting from letters written at that time.

Although the history is fascinating, I hesitate to recommend this book because the narrator was so hard to listen to.