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Image above: Screen grab of my latest method for taking notes while running and listening to audiobooks. To say “while running” is not strictly right. I stop and try to make a quick note before my pulse has a chance to plunge. As you’ll see below, I misspelled “Schulz.” I realized the mistake after a couple dozen strides but didn’t stop to correct it. My cardiovascular system thanks me. ********* People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is off to a lush start. Look at this: I thought that the beautiful book had probably been part of the blizzard of burning pages—Ottoman land deeds, ancient Korans, Slavic scrolls—that had fallen in a warm snow upon the city after the flames of phosphorous bombs. And this: The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower, Crocus sativus Linnaeus, each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex … And this: I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste—I can bore the pants off anyone about wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the necessary amount of tension. Parchment, especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I’m sure, that I got this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers. And this: A tiny speck of something fluttered from the binding. Carefully, with a sable brush, I moved it onto a slide and passed it under the microscope. Eureka. It was a tiny fragment of insect wing, translucent, veined. We live in a world of arthropods, and maybe the wing came from a common insect and wouldn’t tell us anything. But maybe it was a rarity … And this: Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. The young country-cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world—Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture. And this: His mouth sort of turned down and up at the same time, like a Charles Schulz drawing. And, finally, this: The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns … With apologies for the long post, one more thing. I’m reading Geraldine Brooks, whose fiction I’ve never tried before, because I loved parts of her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011. I read her introduction because Roxane Gay wrote about it here. So thank you to Roxane Gay. Click for high-res photo

Image above: Screen grab of my latest method for taking notes while running and listening to audiobooks. To say “while running” is not strictly right. I stop and try to make a quick note before my pulse has a chance to plunge. As you’ll see below, I misspelled “Schulz.” I realized the mistake after a couple dozen strides but didn’t stop to correct it. My cardiovascular system thanks me.

*********

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is off to a lush start.

Look at this:

I thought that the beautiful book had probably been part of the blizzard of burning pages—Ottoman land deeds, ancient Korans, Slavic scrolls—that had fallen in a warm snow upon the city after the flames of phosphorous bombs.

And this:

The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower, Crocus sativus Linnaeus, each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex …

And this:

I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste—I can bore the pants off anyone about wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the necessary amount of tension.

Parchment, especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I’m sure, that I got this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers.

And this:

A tiny speck of something fluttered from the binding. Carefully, with a sable brush, I moved it onto a slide and passed it under the microscope. Eureka. It was a tiny fragment of insect wing, translucent, veined. We live in a world of arthropods, and maybe the wing came from a common insect and wouldn’t tell us anything. But maybe it was a rarity …

And this:

Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. The young country-cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world—Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture.

And this:

His mouth sort of turned down and up at the same time, like a Charles Schulz drawing.

And, finally, this:

The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns …
With apologies for the long post, one more thing. I’m reading Geraldine Brooks, whose fiction I’ve never tried before, because I loved parts of her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011. I read her introduction because Roxane Gay wrote about it here. So thank you to Roxane Gay.
Having enjoyed her Best American Short Stories introduction, I’m trying this. Click for high-res photo

Having enjoyed her Best American Short Stories introduction, I’m trying this.

“
I would see him there with his friends and bodyguards. He wouldn’t notice me, he would be shining, each golden hair on his arms would be shining. I would go to the jukebox and put on “All I Need Is a Miracle.” This would give me confidence. I would sit at the bar and order a drink and I would begin to tell a yarn. A yarn is the kind of story that winds people in, like yarn around two hands. I would wind them in, the other people at the counter. There would be one part of the story that involved participation, something people would be compelled to chant at key moments. I haven’t thought of the story yet, but I would say, for example: “And again I knocked on the door and yelled,” and then everyone at the bar would chant: “Let me in! Let me in!” Eventually, all the people around me would be chanting this, and the circle of chanters would grow as they gathered in curiosity. Soon William would wonder what all the the fuss was about.

- from Miranda July’s “Majesty” in No One Belongs Here More Than You

Same story: “His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty, and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for a local nonprofit and spearheading their neighborhood earthquake-preparedness groups. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.”

I’m listening to the audiobook version — Miranda July reading her own stories. Two and a half stories in, it’s pretty great.

remix

Convergences seem to snowball when I read to myself while my kids listen to an audiobook.

Just now, through my ears, this*:

“Amortentia doesn’t really create love, of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room — oh yes,” he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking skeptically. “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love …”

And this** through my eyes:

“Shush!” I clamped my hand over her mouth and pulled her down next to me. Our knees rested uncomfortably against the large ceramic pot. The green stalks growing out of it were plastic.

Paul and his friends reemerged. He was chewing gum, and wearing shorts. This is what he would be like, I thought, if we never had anywhere to be, if we were always on vacation. I didn’t care what Laura thought. I wasn’t even in the mall anymore, I was somewhere else. I was in my forties, in my fifties. I was in the grocery store and bumping into Paul. We were exchanging phone numbers, two grown-ups. It happened all the time.

————————

* from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

** from Emma Straub’s Other People We Married

air hockey and the “shifting phantasmagoria” of Didion’s Blue Nights

Think of air hockey, of that essentially frictionless surface, of the way the smacked puck glides, ricochets, glides, ricochets again, continues on and on. Now imagine many pucks sharing the essentially frictionless surface, ricocheting, gliding, inevitably colliding, propelling one another along novel trajectories.

I ask you to think of these pucks because I’m struggling to describe Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s new memoir. Blue Nights is a book of ricochets. Instead of pucks, there are memories — memories of the house at Portuguese Bend and the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica and a pink magnolia that could be seen from a sitting room and “Holly’s Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two” and Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton dinner plates and ICUs and a daughter’s depths and shallows and “quicksilver changes” and the bright-red soles of the same daughter’s wedding shoes and the “suburbia house in Brentwood” and a deep-voiced bogeyman vowing “Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.”

A phrase Didion wrote in 1979’s The White Album seems newly important here. The phrase is in this sentence:

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The phrase I care about is “shifting phantasmagoria.” I love the phrase. But let’s switch it out. Let’s oafishly replace it with “pucks” and think about the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, about the ideas with which we he have learned to freeze the air-hockey pucks which are our actual experience.

Blue Nights could have been a book about using ideas to freeze the pucks of actual experience, about scrutinizing each puck in its turn, telling its story, and never ever mentioning it again. Instead, Blue Nights is the messy splendor of lots of pucks in motion, of ricochets, of collisions, of many unhappy returns.

Blue Nights has 35 chapters. Of those 35, I’ve finished 140.

35 + 35 + 35 + 35 = 140.

The whole book. Four times since Sunday. This is not something I planned to do, but it turned out to be something I couldn’t not do.

To be strictly accurate, I have never set eyes on Blue Nights; I listened to the unabridged audiobook four times. I mention this because: 1) You’re free to judge that I haven’t read Blue Nights even once; 2) Hearing Didion’s words, instead of seeing them, may explain why I disagree with those people — including Didion herself, it seems — who mourn that the rhythm and the music is finally gone from Didion’s sentences.

Before starting Blue Nights, I came across several reviews or blog posts — I didn’t keep the links — that accused Didion of writing a cold, remote book. Those claims left me especially unprepared for some of the more quietly potent passages about her daughter’s adoption, childhood, adulthood, and premature death. This passage, I can now say after four times, wrecks me every time: 

One day after she had asked me for a Magic Marker I found her marking off an empty box into “drawers,” or areas meant for specific of these “sundries.” The “drawers” she designated were these: “Cash,” “Passport,” “My IRA,” “Jewelry,” and, finally—I find myself hardly able to tell you this—“Little Toys.”

Again, the careful printing.

The printing alone I cannot forget.

The printing alone breaks my heart.

Novelist John Banville concluded his thoughtful NYT review of Blue Nights like this:

Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.

While it’s true that art can’t resurrect Didion’s daughter or Didion’s husband, I question this idea that “nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.” Didion writes about a poem’s “sixteen lines that during the days and weeks immediately after John died spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling.” The poem was W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which ends like this:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Dismantle Blue Nights. Make stanzas of its paragraphs. What you find — what I find, at least — is a book that is itself a poem. A very long poem but a poem with rhythm, a poem with music, a poem of pangs, a poem of “how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here,” a poem about seizing the chance to love avidly, a poem I needed to hear four times, maybe five.

sweater weather forever

Back when I knew more than I do now about Michael Ondaatje, I would have been able to remember whether he’s a poet who took up writing novels or a novelist who made a poet of himself. Regardless, he’s both, and one of the joys of listening to him read comes from hearing how he does nothing to call attention to sentences that are themselves poems. Like this from The Cat’s Table:

I think about Mr. Fonseka at those English schools wearing his buttoned sweater to protect himself from English weather, and wonder how long he stayed there, and if he did really stay “forever.”

To start by stating the obvious, I am not a cartoonist. This is just something I found myself drawing after I read these words in “How to survive the age of distraction” by Johann Hari: “The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone.” The sentence struck me as something that wouldn’t be written by anyone who has ever been circled by a shoal of sharks. Nor can I fathom these words coming from anyone whose own “Sophie’s choice” saved one child and doomed another: “Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice …” I’m nitpicking like this because Hari’s mostly strong essay is about distraction, and those sentences of his distracted me — more than any urge to check Twitter or email or Instagram or whatever else. Here’s something from Hari’s essay that I liked a lot: “It’s precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen’s apartment – that the book matters. That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive.” Hari writes, though, that “it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. … If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.” This made me think of a passage in a May piece by Bella Bathurst: “In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people.” I don’t know how many of those Bethnal Green books actually got read. Surely, some did, and surely the Blitz was more distracting than “your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room.” My point is not that we’re weak nowadays or that Hari’s attention span is defective. My point is that distraction should make us question whether we’re reading the right book.* Given the right book, there’s nothing impossible about “trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other.” After getting distracted by the excess of Hari’s “Sophie’s Choice” reference, I did some quick trolling for William Styron quotes. I wanted evidence that Styron is as prickly as I am on the subject. But I found something better, something that sings in the same key as Hari’s essay. It’s from Styron’s 1999 interview with The Paris Review: Not long ago I received in the mail a doctoral thesis entitled “Sophie’s Choice: A Jungian Perspective,” which I sat down to read. It was quite a long document. In the first paragraph it said, In this thesis my point of reference throughout will be the Alan J. Pakula movie of Sophie’s Choice. There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron’s novel for clarification. This idiocy laid a pall over my life for a dark brief time because it brought back all these bugaboos we have about the written word. But in the nineteenth century they said that the railroads were going to jeopardize the written word; in the 1920s they said that the appearance of sound movies was guaranteed to drive novels into purdah; then later, television. All of these means of communication have existed happily side by side and parallel with writing. I don’t think for a minute that literature is going to perish. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of forty years ago simply didn’t pan out. Even the Internet and the idea of the electronic book reinforces my belief—they will not threaten the written word but actually complement writing, and perhaps even ultimately enhance it. —————————— * Beyond the search for “the right book,” there’s also the matter of how some of us are wired. My literary world would shrink so drastically without audiobooks and my Kindle’s text-to-speech feature. For more on this, see my post inspired by E.B. White’s statement that “It takes more than a genius to keep me reading a book.” Click for high-res photo

To start by stating the obvious, I am not a cartoonist. This is just something I found myself drawing after I read these words in “How to survive the age of distraction” by Johann Hari: “The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone.”

The sentence struck me as something that wouldn’t be written by anyone who has ever been circled by a shoal of sharks. Nor can I fathom these words coming from anyone whose own “Sophie’s choice” saved one child and doomed another: “Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice …”

I’m nitpicking like this because Hari’s mostly strong essay is about distraction, and those sentences of his distracted me — more than any urge to check Twitter or email or Instagram or whatever else.

Here’s something from Hari’s essay that I liked a lot: “It’s precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen’s apartment – that the book matters. That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive.”

Hari writes, though, that “it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. … If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.”

This made me think of a passage in a May piece by Bella Bathurst: “In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people.”

I don’t know how many of those Bethnal Green books actually got read. Surely, some did, and surely the Blitz was more distracting than “your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room.”

My point is not that we’re weak nowadays or that Hari’s attention span is defective. My point is that distraction should make us question whether we’re reading the right book.* Given the right book, there’s nothing impossible about “trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other.”

After getting distracted by the excess of Hari’s “Sophie’s Choice” reference, I did some quick trolling for William Styron quotes. I wanted evidence that Styron is as prickly as I am on the subject. But I found something better, something that sings in the same key as Hari’s essay. It’s from Styron’s 1999 interview with The Paris Review:

Not long ago I received in the mail a doctoral thesis entitled “Sophie’s Choice: A Jungian Perspective,” which I sat down to read. It was quite a long document. In the first paragraph it said, In this thesis my point of reference throughout will be the Alan J. Pakula movie of Sophie’s Choice. There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron’s novel for clarification. This idiocy laid a pall over my life for a dark brief time because it brought back all these bugaboos we have about the written word. But in the nineteenth century they said that the railroads were going to jeopardize the written word; in the 1920s they said that the appearance of sound movies was guaranteed to drive novels into purdah; then later, television. All of these means of communication have existed happily side by side and parallel with writing. I don’t think for a minute that literature is going to perish. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of forty years ago simply didn’t pan out. Even the Internet and the idea of the electronic book reinforces my belief—they will not threaten the written word but actually complement writing, and perhaps even ultimately enhance it.

——————————

* Beyond the search for “the right book,” there’s also the matter of how some of us are wired. My literary world would shrink so drastically without audiobooks and my Kindle’s text-to-speech feature. For more on this, see my post inspired by E.B. White’s statement that “It takes more than a genius to keep me reading a book.”

“
We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the earth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. But Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse. Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory wallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antimacassars droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment come back and take up their daily business. And then—crash! the guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives of a vanished city-full hung dangling before us in that deathly blast.

- Edith Wharton in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, a collection of her WWI dispatches for Scribner’s magazine.

Free, legal audiobook here. Free, legal text here.

I learned it existed a few days ago and finished it yesterday, so I don’t trust myself to write much without sliding into sloppy superlatives. Let me stick to saying this: Never once during this book did I wish that Hemingway or Didion or Orwell or Herr or Filkins or Finkel could just take over and show this Age of Innocence lady how to do it properly.

She’s vivid:

Five times, while I was dressing, the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled with a noise that may be compared—if the human imagination can stand the strain—to the simultaneous closing of all the iron shop-shutters in the world.

A town’s  ruins “seem to have been simultaneously vomited up from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado.”

She is literally in the trenches:

It is hard to guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage with different levels and countless turnings; but we must have descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a half-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but its outer walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had been transformed into an observation post. In each of its corners a ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole. Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was going on. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table, others mending their clothes, or writing letters or chuckling together (not too loud) over a comic newspaper. It might have been a scene anywhere along the second-line trenches but for the lowered voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit in the wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presence of these helmeted watchers overhead.

Back in Paris, among the arriving refugees, she gives us the “men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders.” She strives to convey the bewilderment and dislocation of people “whose knowledge of the world’s affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple”:

They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a meal-ticket—and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes …

OK. Enough. Time to stop. Thanks for indulging me.

Psyched for this. Thanks, Seattle Public Library.

Psyched for this. Thanks, Seattle Public Library.

I’ve been looking forward to this ever since hearing Egan read on the New Yorker fiction podcast. Eager to start. Also, I see exactly what you probably see up there: “You have 1 items …” My public library has a free phone app, a really useful one. I’m too grateful to be bothered by having to read “1 items” every so often.

I’ve been looking forward to this ever since hearing Egan read on the New Yorker fiction podcast. Eager to start.

Also, I see exactly what you probably see up there: “You have 1 items …”

My public library has a free phone app, a really useful one. I’m too grateful to be bothered by having to read “1 items” every so often.

David Byrne is playing with new ways to sell an audiobook: free introduction; individual chapters for $2.49; the full audiobook for $19.95; American Apparel T-shirt for $24.95; audiobook plus T-shirt for $29.95. My copy of the audiobook is downloading and my T-shirt is headed for the mailroom. But I don’t want to gloss over what to me is the best part of this: individual chapters (!!!!) for $2.49. This is the sort of thing I was dreaming of back in April when I wrote a post called “Why doesn’t Ken Auletta want my money?” Click for high-res photo

David Byrne is playing with new ways to sell an audiobook: free introduction; individual chapters for $2.49; the full audiobook for $19.95; American Apparel T-shirt for $24.95; audiobook plus T-shirt for $29.95. My copy of the audiobook is downloading and my T-shirt is headed for the mailroom.

But I don’t want to gloss over what to me is the best part of this: individual chapters (!!!!) for $2.49. This is the sort of thing I was dreaming of back in April when I wrote a post called “Why doesn’t Ken Auletta want my money?”

The unsettling number of harsh iTunes reviews almost scared me out of trying the free iPhone app from OverDrive that syncs up with the downloadable audiobooks available through the Seattle Public Library. Almost. I tried it anyway. The app has some idiosyncrasies, but I’m patient and forgiving about anything that gives me free, legal access to unabridged Walker Percy, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, and Jon Lee Anderson. You can search by zip code here to see if your local library pays for OverDrive.

The unsettling number of harsh iTunes reviews almost scared me out of trying the free iPhone app from OverDrive that syncs up with the downloadable audiobooks available through the Seattle Public Library. Almost. I tried it anyway.

The app has some idiosyncrasies, but I’m patient and forgiving about anything that gives me free, legal access to unabridged Walker Percy, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, and Jon Lee Anderson.

You can search by zip code here to see if your local library pays for OverDrive.