I just read a wizard’s guide to defensive baking. I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s a young adult novel about a 14 year old girl with a very minor magical talent, and how she used it. It’s the most light-hearted presentation of genocide I’ve ever read (genocide of magic workers, that is). But it’s thoughtful, and fun, and well written.
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A Man Called Ove.
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You might like Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams if you enjoy fantasy fiction in the world of cats.
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I’m not sure what you like, but here’s a variety;
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman (same author as A Man Called Ove)
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Good book. Tom Hanks will be starring in the miniseries.
My favorite audiobooks are the Flavia de Luce series of mysteries. The narrator, Jayne Entwistle, adds so much more humor to the reading than I would have read into it. The mysteries themselves aren’t great. It’s just the character that makes it so fun. The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie is the first of the series.
I looked it up and Audible seems to have two different versions of every one of the books in the series. The Jayne Entwistle versions are the ones I’ve listened to and recommend. I’m curious as to how the other narration is and why they have the two different versions.
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I think you recommended this to me before, so I got it.
I suggested it because it seems to have wide appeal.
I started this today. It’s interesting.
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It is a bit dry but I found it very informative.
I’m listening on audiobook and the narrator is decent.
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I’ve only listened to the Jane Entwistle versions.
My adult son was an avid reader until a horrific bicycle accident impaired his eyesight along with much other damage. I have been trying without success to persuade him to get into audiobooks as he no longer can read a book without much difficulty.
I have taken note of some of the audiobook recommendations made to date in this thread but if others have specific recommendations, that would be great as the quality of audiobooks seems to vary significantly for any given book. Some of his favorite authors overlap with mine: Dave Eggers, Douglas Copeland and Cormac McCarthy are some authors to give an idea of his taste. Good audio versions of some of those books might get him into books again.
Thanks
Alan
Does his library system offer downloadable audiobooks? I listen to audiobooks from my library on the Libby app. Maybe with it being free he might give it a try? I didn’t think I’d like audiobooks until I started downloading them from the library.
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If he’s interested in history I highly recommend Mike Duncan’s podcast The History of Rome. It’s around 200 podcast episodes of around 10-15 minutes each.
I’m up to the Punic Wars episodes.
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It’s…certainly out there, ha. If Kafka had written Faust, i suppose.
After finishing that I started A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay (set in a fantasy version of 12th century Toulouse pre-Albigensian Crusade), read Dragonsong (book one of the Harper Hall trilogy, the second Dragonriders of Pern trilogy), and started Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel.
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I finished Grandad, There’s A Head On The Beach. Of Colin Cotterill books, while the Dr Siri Paiboun mysteries have a humorousness to them, mostly sarcasm about things that don’t make sense in post-war Laos, the Jimm Juree mysteries have more funny parts involving characters and Jimm Juree’s fish-out-of-water-ness in rural Thailand. It got more serious about 2/3 of the way through, which seemed to slow it down and hurt the book.
I guess next is Sea of Tranquility
I just started Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Not sure i like it, but I’ll probably finish it.
(Can’t help with audio books, i don’t do that. I don’t really have a good place or time to do it, either.)
That sounds interesting. Tell me more about the author and other books.
Recommend this one, if just to give a flavor of Gilded Age politics… got more to the Guiteau story than I had heard before.
The main thing the book did to give me an interest in Arthur (whose main interest to me was the “Chester A. Arthur fall down” in the hall of Presidents’ Heads in Futurama, before) was that he was the main person to thank for the Art Nouveau renovation of the White House (to be sure, it got re-renovated… multiple times), but it was one of the nice things he did.
It’s a fairly short book about a one-term President who had the good grace (as many Presidents used to do) to die soon after he left office.
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