Time flies – I have not shared my latest audiobook update since mid September.   Well, I guess today is the day.  Have I ever mentioned that I hate the word “eclectic”?  But as usual, I’m not sure how else to describe my reading (ok, listening) choices.

For newer followers, I switched careers late in my working life and now drive for a living. I cannot seem to find time for ink-on-paper books, but audiobook versions while I drive is (as we say in Indiana) a whole ‘nuther thing. So, here they are in order of completion.

“Dark Sacred Night”, Michael Connelly (2018).  This is the 21st novel in Connelly’s “Bosch” series, and the inspiration for a series of the same name on Amazon’s Prime platform.  I had previously read and enjoyed the initial installment and thought I was going for the follow-up. But there are several confusing sub-series’, and because I was out of credits on Audible and perusing my local library app, here we are.

Harry Bosch is a no-nonsense Los Angeles police detective, whose Vietnam war service left him jaded long before going into his LAPD career.  This novel picks up with Bosch retired and working for a small city police department, and introduces Rene Ballard (who is also the subject of a television spin-off on Prime) who reluctantly works herself into the older detective’s orbit as they work a murder and an unsolved heist that turn out to be related. Now two books into this long series. I am a fan of the neo-noir atmosphere of detectives who have to buck the system in order to close cases.

“Romeo And Juliet”, William Shakespeare (c. 1597).  After a popcorn detective novel, I forced myself back to my “shelf of classics”.  For personal improvement, of course. “Selected Plays” by Shakespeare was the hardcover that was next in line. And which, of course, is not available in audio.  But the individual plays are. R&J was the first one in my book and thus my first go here. You know the story.  Their families hate each other, they fall in love, and both die because of poor communication.   There, I saved you three hours.

OK, here is the problem. I am not a Shakespeare guy and was looking for an introduction.  But each of the three audio versions I tried were difficult to follow in the noisy environment of a truck (for a guy whose hearing probably isn’t as sharp as it once was).   These people are not reading text,  but were doing their best Shakespearian acting.  (Or Awk-Ting!).  In their best Elizabethan English, through laughing, sobbing,  yelling and whispering.   Being plays, of course, I cannot blame these sources for being “dramatic productions” rather than an audio version of a written play. I got through it (with the aid of a new open-ear headset) and maybe if I had read it in ink-on-paper first, I might have gotten more out of the BBC-produced version I got through. 

“The Jungle Book”, Rudyard Kipling (1894).  I have always been curious about this one from the time I saw the Disney adaptation as a kid.  The first three stories from the book were familiar from the 1967 animated film, but the other four were not. Although Riki Tiki Tavi, about a mongoose who keeps a family’s home free of snakes, was a story I remembered from grade school

All of the stories involve animals who live by the laws of the jungle and who strive to demonstrate the kinds of virtues celebrated by British society around the turn of the last century. Which are virtues that were also celebrated here in the U.S. until not so many years ago. Frankly, we could do a lot worse than to rediscover some of them. “The Jungle Book” is one old classic I wish I had read to my children when they were young.

“Frankenstein”, Mary Shelly (1818).  I was looking for a seasonal book as Halloween approached, and thought of this one.   Frankly,  I found it maddening.  Everyone knows the basics- Dr. Frankenstein sparks life into a form stitched together from parts, and soon regrets it. As I think about it, this could be the story of the people who invented the internet. But I digress.

I have a theory that authors of one sex struggle to create realistic characters of the other.  The Doctor seems to have been Ms. Shelly’s idea of a male.  He talks and talks and talks about the horror of his murderous monster, but never actually DOES anything about it until it is far, far too late.  Yes, by all means, leave your bride alone in her room early on your wedding night after the monster has told you he will kill her. Spending that time elsewhere in the house and in anguish over what to do about your rogue creation rather than protecting your bride is the kind of thing that makes this male reader yell back at the the speaker emanating from my phone. You can tell that men wrote the screenplay for the 1931 film adaptation because there is at least a mob with torches and pitchforks.  Which may or may not have succeeded in killing the monster, but it was more effective than merely talking about it.

“Dead Lions”, Mick Herron (2013). This was the follow up to the author’s prior novel, “Slow Horses”. The plot involves mostly the same group of men and women that Britain’s MI-5 has (rightly or wrongly) branded as misfits or screwups. In this tale, a too-clever “real” agent tries to use the “slow horses” as pawns in a plan to burnish his credentials with his higher-ups. But the slow horses have skills that go beyond the kind of political hackery that seems to rule in official circles. Like when one notices that the death of an old cold-war spy on a bus was not the accident it was intended to look like.

I am really loving this series and look forward to several more books. As in his prior book, Herron creates colorful characters which he writes with the kind of English wit that occasionally makes me burst out laughing.

“John Adams”, David McCollough (2001). This long (19 hour) bio, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, is the second in my new quest to read a bio on each American President in order of their terms. John Adams was, of course, our second U.S. President, and the first to serve only a single term. He began as a farmer and lawyer in Massachusetts and became one of the most consequential of the original band of patriots. If Thomas Jefferson was the one who wrote the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, it was Adams who was more responsible than anyone for getting it passed in the Continental Congress.

I came away from this book with a much higher appreciation for Adams than I had possessed going in. Adams could be prickly at times, but he carried all of the old New England virtues that are associated with that people – thrift, modesty, industry and stubbornness. Adams was principled, to the point of defending British soldiers in court after they had been charged with crimes during the Boston Massacre.

As President, Adams tried to preserve what George Washington had started, but without the benefit of a Vice President who supported him. In that era, the VP was the one who got the 2nd highest vote total in the Presidential election. Thomas Jefferson, who disagreed with Adams on almost everything, became Adams’ VP. I look forward to a good bio of Jefferson, because this book lowered my respect for him and I will await another biographer to present his case.

“The Big Nowhere”, James Ellroy (1988). I am clearly in a streak of sequels or book series’ and this is another – the second of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” of neo-noir stories set in Los Angeles in the years following WWII. The two main threads of this story set in 1950 are a L.A. County Sheriff’s detective who is trying to solve what looks to him like a series of murders and a politically ambitious prosecutor who is pushing a grand jury investigation into communist influence in the movie industry. As you might imagine, the two threads eventually come together.

I liked this book better than the first installment (“The Black Dahlia”). For one thing, “The Big Nowhere” is pure fiction and not based on a real unsolved case, so the ending is more satisfying. This one is also less salacious, although a story about the dirty underbelly of 1950-L.A. cannot avoid that sort of thing altogether. I will confess that I read this mostly to set myself up for reading the third in this series, L. A. Confidential (which was the source material for a favorite movie of mine). Hopefully I will get to that one in the next few months.

“Monkee Business”, Eric Lefkowitz (2024). I touched on this one a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about the band and television show called The Monkees. All I will add here was that it was a thoroughly entertaining read, both well researched and well told. If you have any interest in pop culture of the 1960’s, I highly recommend it.

“Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania”, Erik Larson (2015). A little over a year ago I reported on an earlier Larson title, “The Devil In The White City”. In this volume, Larson proves that his ability to write non-fiction with the presentation of a natural story-teller was no fluke.

The RMS Lusitania was a modern marvel when it was launched by the Cunard Line in 1902, a decade before the White Star Line’s Titanic. It was the first passenger liner powered by steam turbine engines. The steam for those four turbines was generated through twenty-four boilers, and the ship could sustain a cruising speed of 25 knots, a speed that got the ship nicknamed as a greyhound of the ocean. It was believed that the ship’s speed would be a protection against early German U-Boats that had begun to patrol the north Atlantic and sink ships after the outset of WWI. On the afternoon of May 7, 1915, a single torpedo from the U-20 caused the Lusitania to sink about 10 miles off the southern coast of Ireland in 18 minutes. Out of the 1,960 passengers and crew aboard, 1,187 lost their lives in one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century.

Larson’s book follows the intersecting stories of the ship itself and of the German U-boats in general (and U-20 in particular). The tale also takes us into the outbreak of WWI and inside the British Admiralty and German military authorities, as well as into the Wilson Administration as it desperately attempted to keep the U.S. as a neutral country. The result is that multiple things had to go wrong for a single torpedo to sink a ship with the Lusitania’s size and capabilities – and all of them did. It is a fascinating telling of a tragic story.

There you have it, a little something for almost everyone. Now to get to work on some more books for the next installment, which will come along in, well, I have no idea.