One advantage audiobooks have over their physical counterparts – rarely mentioned either by fans or detractors – is that the reader doesn’t speed up or slow down. They force us to devote the same amount of time to each page. It is all too easy when reading a physical book to separate it unconsciously into important and less important sections, to read the latter more quickly, with less attention or to skip them altogether. As long as you don’t fast forward, Juliet Stevenson will make you pay equal attention to all sections of the text and there will be sentences of real beauty and insight in those supposedly less important sections that you will not have noticed before.
For Margaret Renkl, a cedar waxwing is "A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation." The squirrel at her squirrel-proof finch feeder surprises by "pulling it to his mouth like an ear of sweet corn at a Fourth of July potluck." The old dog howls "for his crippled hips" and "because it's his job to protect this house, but he is too old now to protect the house."
The 112 essays in Renkl's first book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, range from seven lines to just over four pages in length. Together they create a jeweled patchwork of nature and culture that includes her own family. This woven tapestry makes one of all the world's beings that strive to live — and which, in one way or another, face mortality.
Can a debut novel be a masterpiece of cultural criticism? Chanelle Benz makes an earnest effort to answer that question in the affirmative. “The Gone Dead” is a startling work that will set your skin tingling and interrupt your sleep. It explores racial issues — old, new and forever unsettled — but to define a novel this sweeping by those terms alone seems too reductionist.
In “The Shanghai Free Taxi,” NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt puts a new twist on the cabbie narrative: He becomes the driver. Langfitt rents, and later buys, a car to drive people around Shanghai and further afield, in exchange only for their stories. (This arrangement came about after he tried to become a registered cabdriver but local taxi companies blocked him.) He meets and follows a range of people, weaving their perspectives into his own commentary on China’s high-speed trajectory. The result is an engaging and dynamic narrative that offers readers an unusual perspective on modern China.