Grover's Audiobook Blog

A Little Mozart 4 U

2011-11-10T05:08:00.000-08:00

It was something of a revelation to me, six months after moving from an inner-city DC neighborhood to quiet little Medford, that I could listen to music while walking the dogs at night. That might not seem like much of a revelation, but as a music lover and audiophile with an eight-year-old running around the house, there isn't a whole lot of time for extended listening in a quiet place. The problem in the city, of course, is that you sort of want to stay alert to what's going on around you. Our old neighborhood, while very pleasant and convenient, wasn't immune to the occasional mugging or car-jacking. Walking around at night with earbuds inserted, oblivious to one's surroundings, wasn't exactly advisable. It took me a while to realize that in Medford I don't need to be looking over my shoulder all the time. This has freed me to get some quality listening done while strolling through our peaceful suburban enclave, gazing at the stars.

While I often listen to new acquisitions, I also poke through my CD library to revisit old favorites I haven't heard in a long time. Thus it was the other night that I heard again one of the most thrilling classical recordings in my collection, and I thought I'd share it with you. Lots of people enjoy Mozart, especially the piano concertos, but many are not familiar with some of the great historical recordings in this genre.

Walter Gieseking was one of the most extraordinary pianists of the previous century. German by birth, he made a name for himself as one of the foremost proponents of French piano music--notably the works of Debussy and Ravel. What distinguished Gieseking's recordings was his refusal to indulge in excessive pedaling, relying instead on an extremely subtle sense of touch and fingering to convey the delicate, impressionistic sounds wrought by these composers. The effects he achieved were magical--instead of drowning in a wash of sound, the music emerges with crystalline clarity and precision.

Though noted mainly for his recordings of the great impressionists, he also excelled at Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and others. His recordings of Grieg, Mendelssohn and Schumann are still considered by many to be without peer.

Gieseking was a fascinating character. His staggering technical prowess came so naturally to him that he disliked practicing and preferred to devote his energies to reading, composing and collecting butterflies (he was a noted lepidopterist and discovered several species which were named after him). He had a photographic memory and could memorize an entire concerto during the train ride to a concert and play it flawlessly that same night. This casual approach sometimes betrayed him and, depending on his mood or health, resulted in the occasional sloppy or indifferent performance. It was sometimes suggested (supposedly by jealous colleagues) that he sight-read during his recordings, an accusation that friends and students hotly denied. His refusal to leave Germany during World War II damned him in the eyes of the international music community, and for many years after the war he was persona non grata in much of Europe and America. By the early 1950's however, enough time had passed that he was able to resume playing outside of Germany.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more contrasting personality than that of Guido Cantelli. This highly-strung, fiery-tempered conductor emerged from post-war Italy to become a protege of Arturo Toscanini and a frequent guest conductor of both the NBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Strikingly handsome and charismatic, he was also a notorious perfectionist, and rehearsals were often exhausting affairs that left tempers frayed on both sides of the podium. But the results were well worth the trouble. Under his baton the most complex works took on a rich, glowing transparency and beauty. His phrasing was impeccable, his tempos were perfectly judged and faithful to the composer's intentions, and the sound he drew from the orchestra was both precise and jocosely robust. He maintained a constant rhythmic drive and urgency that kept listeners on the edges of their seats.

In March of 1955, these two geniuses were thrust together for what must have been an unforgettable evening at Carnegie Hall. With Cantelli leading the New York Philharmonic, Gieseking was the featured soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, the famous "Elvira Madigan" concerto. The performance was recorded by radio engineers and has come down to us in pretty decent shape, along with dozens of other wonderful concerts from that era. I was introduced to it, oh, probably 20 years ago by a fellow collector and it has become one of my favorite recordings. I'm not alone in considering it one of the greatest Mozart recordings in existence. If you love Mozart but have never heard this famous performance, you owe it yourself to give it a listen.

It's apparent from the the opening bars that something special is going on. If you prefer your Mozart in dainty little nibbles, you'd better stop here. The orchestral introduction rumbles and chortles, then explodes with ferocious glee. After wringing every ounce out of the main theme, Cantelli subsides for a moment and Gieseking makes his entrance with a coy little improvised run that teases the listener into momentary complacence. He states the main theme without fuss, then gradually builds the intensity and force of his playing. The orchestra comes back into play and now commences the best example of an "argument" between soloist and accompaniment that you are ever likely to hear. Each side eggs on the other, echoing themes and introducing new ones in a contest of wit and will. Gieseking's tone dances and sparkles, while the orchestra growls and shouts. It's a fascinating collaboration. The cadenza is Gieseking's own and introduces some shocking harmonics--his personal tastes in composition ran toward twelve-tone techniques--but it's also tender and childlike in its treatment of the thematic material.

Cantelli begins the second movement with a brisk, singing rendition of the tune made famous by it's prominent use in the 1967 movie Elvira Madigan. It's beautifully judged, but Gieseking isn't content to let it go at that, for immediately upon entering he pushes the tempo ahead, forcing the orchestra to scramble to catch up. He seems to find even Cantelli's unsentimental take on the music too "drippy" and opts for a more driven approach. The result is a taut, sustained tension that emphasizes the eternally aching, yearning quality of Mozart's gorgeous theme.

The third movement is taken at a death-defying pace, and after "shaking things out" in the opening passages, Gieseking and Cantelli dash breathlessly to the finish in a virtuosic whirl. The audience responds with a shattering roar of approval.

The performance is available on a number of CD issues, most of them currently out of print. It's easiest to obtain on iTunes by searching for "gieseking cantelli." In addition you get a contemporaneous performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with Cantelli and the great Jascha Heifetz. It's an excellent companion to the Mozart.

Sadly, neither Gieseking nor Cantelli were to live long after this momentous event. They died within a month of each other in late 1956--Gieseking at age 61 from medical complications following a car accident, Cantelli at only 36 in a plane crash. While Gieseking was nearing the end of a long and distinguished career, there's little doubt that Cantelli would have developed into one of the most famous conductors of the modern era.

Sunday in Southern Oregon

2011-10-23T20:59:00.001-07:00

We took a short day trip today to Briggs Creek, which is in the Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass and feeds into the Rogue River. Exiting I-5 north of Grants Pass, you pass through Merlin and then Galice. The road takes you along the Rogue Gorge...

...and past the Hellgate portion of the Rogue River, famous for its thrilling raft rides. It's also the setting for numerous movies and television shows, including Gunsmoke, Rooster Cogburn and The River Wild.

Eventually you turn off onto a single-lane road that snakes its way up a mountain and deep into the Rogue Forest. Many miles of winding road later, you come upon several popular recreation areas. Big Pine is home to the tallest known Ponderosa pine tree. There's a wonderful interpretive trail with a series of hiking loops, each one longer than the next but all of them suitable for kids and tired parents.

Someone put a lot of effort into the layout, evidenced by the beautiful wooden bridge, the well-kept paths and the interpretive signs. It was once a highly "accessible" area, with talking exhibits for the blind and other features. Much of that has deteriorated, but it's still a charming place for little ones.

Big Pine itself is truly awesome...

...and over 300 hundred years old.

Driving a bit further you come to the Sam Brown Horse Trails and Campground, named for a miner who had a habit of fooling around with other miners' wives and paid a hefty price for it. Apparently there's a grave site nearby but we didn't look for it. Briggs Creek trail is more rustic but still well-defined and maintained. I can't begin to describe how good it smelled here.

The trail is about 4 miles long, makes several fords across Briggs and Turkey Creeks and passes some abandoned mining camps and cabins. The swimming holes along the way are well-known and popular in the summer. Here's one surrounded by lush umbrella plants:

After a couple of fords we grew less adventurous and veered off onto a logging road that loops back to the campground. We spotted a garter snake sunning himself in the middle of the road. He was very sleepy and only slithered off when we tried to touch him.

It was a beautiful fall day, 70 degrees, with bright sun, clear blue sky and a light breeze. The air was filled with hints of pine, rotting leaves, campfire smoke and other autumn scents. Just heavenly.

Just a Spoonful of Sugar...

2011-07-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

Tonight my daughter had to take an antibiotic. Medicine has always been a huge struggle with her, from the time we had to administer a little liquid children's Tylenol when she was two, up to the present day. Last time we had to do an antibiotic, it was in the form of an evil-looking pink liquid with "cherry" flavoring. Getting it inside her was a daily struggle--tears, wailing, threats, shouting, you name it.

This time the doctor prescribed pills and suggested we crush them and mix them in sorbet or applesauce. Great! So I'm blissfully out on the porch doing some emails this evening, when I hear all hell break loose inside. Apparently tempers had reached the breaking point after an hour of trying to do the medicine thing again. My daughter was near hysterics and my wife was at wit's end. "I'll handle this, " I manfully announced.

I crushed another pill (two had already been sacrificed to the cause) and mixed it in some raspberry sorbet. My daughter eyed me tearfully.

"We tried that. I can taste it!"

"Well," I replied, "I'm sure you can, a little bit. But how bad can it be? Mommy probably didn't mix it up enough. Yummy sorbet, it'll be great, you won't even notice."

"No, I will, " she wailed.

"No, you won't," I said calmly, "just relax! It'll be fine. It's yummy! Look, I'll take bite myself."

I took a tiny nibble of the sorbet with the crushed pill mixed in.

"See, it's fi...UFF! ACK! GAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHH. URK! BLLLLEEEEEECCCCCKKKKKHHH. PTOOEY! PTOOEY!"

She was right! It was just incredibly horrible tasting, like eating frozen battery acid, just unbelievable awful. How could a little bit of antibiotic powder completely overwhelm a half a bowl of sweet, delicious, gourmet sorbet?

We're going back to the liquid. At least it's over in five seconds, as opposed to five minutes of choking down a bowl of atomic waste.

Blasts from the Past, Day 30

2011-06-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

For my last post I want to discuss some issues, not about the past, but about the future. My featured title is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, which I recorded for Blackstone last year.

Now here's a great audio program. It has everything going for it: a evergreen non-fiction title, an epic journey for narrator and listener, and subject matter that never gets stale. It's doing extremely well on Audible and I'm sure it will make a lot of money.

Do I wish I had a little back-end participation? Yeah, that would be nice. Would Blackstone have offered it to me? That's debatable. On a sure money-maker like this, they're probably better off getting me out of the picture as soon as possible, rather than risk paying me three or four times my usual fee over the course of seven years.

Am I sorry? Well, no, because for every book like this, I've done eight or nine that probably won't come even close to making that kind of money. They're good books but they don't have the broad appeal of a book like The Rise and Fall.

Royalty sharing has become an issue lately, and it's worth looking at for a moment. It's not that it can't work. It can if you're very canny, or get lucky and hit the jackpot. But if you don't, the returns may not be what you expected. One problem is that most audiobook rights are limited to 7 years, at which point they revert to the rights holder. They might be renewed, but there's also a chance that they won't or they'll be transferred to someone else. Bear in mind that, of the over 750 titles I've recorded in my career, only about 300 are currently in circulation. Over half my output has disappeared.

Before jumping into anything like this, a narrator would be wise to have some knowledge of trends in the industry, as well as access to research tools like BookScan (though even that won't help with first-time or self-pubbed authors). It's no secret that book acquisition, for anyone except the major publishers with best-selling authors in their stables, is a gamble. Obviously it's worth the gamble, or companies like Blackstone wouldn't be able to stay in business. And with a catalogue of 4000 books, you're likely to pull in a decent profit over the long run.

My point is not to bash the idea of royalty sharing. It's to make it clear that, as more and more narrators are forced into entrepreneurial positions, you have to find out as much as you can about how the business works and how it's changing. And it's definitely changing, with breath-taking rapidity.

I was relieved not to be on a panel at APAC this year because my answer to just about any question about the future of audiobooks would have been,"I have no frickin' clue." Having spent a week in New York at BEA, however, I've got a little better idea. The most encouraging thing about the business right now is that those on the receiving end (talent, producers, directors, and so forth) are very willing to exchange information and insights with each other. This sharing of information is very beneficial, particularly to talent, because until various union efforts and rate scales are settled (if they ever are) the only way to support a stable rate structure is for people on the talent end to know what's going on. This works the other way, too. As a producer, it helps to have some sense of the range of what's acceptable to the majority of narrators. There's always the danger of collusion, but we're a long way from that right now: The market is too fragmented, and there are so many variables to take into account--timing, schedules, location, experience levels, book length and complexity, special language or character skills, and so on. Price is just one consideration in the production process. In fact, I think it would be very healthy to see more freedom of negotiation in the rate structure depending on all these factors.

About 90 percent of audiobook production is based on relationships. This is perfectly logical--you don't trust someone to do a 15 hour book in two weeks if you have no idea who they are. It also behooves me from a casting point of view to know who my narrators are, what they like and how they work. When these relationships are not fully engaged in and realized, the production process falters, sometimes disastrously. Maintaining these relationships is about 50% of my job as a producer who relies on a consistent stable of available readers.

As JIAM draws to a close today, my hat is off to all the new people coming into the business who have negotiated a path through what is still an incredibly loosely-structured, Wild West sort of industry. It's about to get wilder. Stay informed, ask questions, learn as much about the business as you can. Don't be afraid to pump people for information. The more you know, the better you'll be able to benefit from the changes going on as we speak.

Blasts from the Past, Day 29

2011-06-30T11:36:00.000-07:00

Napolean Hill.

What is it about this guy? He's the self-help guru to end all self-help gurus. Eighty years later he's still going strong. You can get his books for free from various web sites. You can buy deluxe editions of them. You can download numerous audio versions. It doesn't seem to matter, the guy has a huge following and people will pay whatever to read him.

He puts forth some pretty wacky ideas, from "mind-meld" to "atmospheric vibrations," some of which make a little sense if you believe in "karma" or things like that. His behavioral insights are generally sound, though. Always do more work than is required of you. Be pleasant, positive and cooperative. Work as a team and draw on the intelligence and experience of others to help you get ahead. Take care of your health and mind your hygiene.

This is useful stuff, and though it's presented as an astonishing set of revelations, it's nothing common sense wouldn't dictate. But back in the day, before there was a real middle-class, this advice to people seeking advancement was no doubt highly pertinent.

He's very entertaining to narrate, I'll give him that.

Blasts from the Past, Day 28

2011-06-29T10:36:00.001-07:00

The Wall by Jeff Long was the first book I recorded for Tantor Media in 2006. It was nominated for an Audie Award in 2007. This was kind of startling to me because, as much as I enjoyed it, I hadn't been quite sure what to make of it when I was narrating it. Part action novel and part mystical ghost story, it doesn't fit snugly in either category. It's not that I want to pigeonhole books when I narrate them, or resort to a "stereotyped" read, but it helps to be able to determine what sort of audience the book will appeal to. This one was hard to pin down. The writing was excellent and the images were vivid enough to stay with me all these years.

Today I got curious and looked up Jeff Long on Amazon, and I understand a bit more about him now. The Wall is in fact typical of his writing, which blends mystery, adventure and the supernatural in a way that defies easy categorization. Surprisingly, none of his other books are currently available in audio, which seems odd because the descriptions are appealing, the reader comments are strong and at least a couple of them have decent sales rankings. In fact, they look downright interesting. I may purchase a few for vacation reading.

Blasts from the Past, Day 27

2011-06-28T07:10:00.000-07:00

I mentioned Gore Vidal's series of historical novels in my first post. The recordings I did are long out of print, but if you enjoy historical fiction, delivered with a gimlet eye and healthy dose of (mostly cheerful) cynicism, you should pick up this series for summer reading. Burr is excellent, and the later novels spin out the family saga sub-plot in a clever way, but Lincoln is the jewel in this richly figured crown--probably one of the best historical novels of the last century. The author's fondness for his subject is obvious on every page. His portrait of Lincoln is deeply affectionate and fully fleshed out. You feel you get to know Lincoln in a way few other novelists or biographers have managed. Whenever I read a book about Lincoln these days, I can't help picturing Gore Vidal's Lincoln, a complex, humorous and immensely loveable figure.

What I never knew until I scouted around on Amazon looking for a copy of my old recording, is that Vidal himself recorded an abridged version for Random House. You can pick one up for as little as $4. I imagine the entertainment value would be well worth the price--plus the trouble of digging out an old cassette player to hear it.

Blasts from the Past, Day 26

2011-06-27T10:15:00.000-07:00

I know I'm going to hell for yesterday's post. Let's see, which famous author or high-end publisher can I offend today?

We might as well get this out of the way: What's the worst book I've ever recorded?

Without question, hands-down, no-brainer, it was The Cry of the Panther by James. P. McMullen.

It was a well-intentioned effort, I suppose: A memoir by a Vietnam vet who, struggling to exorcise the demons that haunt him, immerses himself in a hunt for an elusive black panther named Shakespeare who lurks in the gloom of the Everglades.

And when I say immerses, I mean it. In one unforgettable passage, he douses himself in panther urine and buries himself in swamp muck up to his eyes, all the while chanting "I am a panther, I am a panther, I AM a panther." Reading that with a straight face was one of the challenges of my career.

It got to the point where both the engineer and I concluded that it had to be a hoax. Nothing about the story made sense. When, after hundreds of pages of tortured prose, he finally meets up with Shakespeare and they exchange a "meaningful" glance, we both howled. That's it? We waited four hundred pages for this?

I recall that the book received a plug from James Dickey, which makes sense in a perverse sort of way.

I know I'm going to get an email from James McMullen's son or niece or someone close to him, saying that this book saved his life. Or some vets' organization will tell me how meaningful it was to them. I can't even find a picture of the cover, though it's still listed on Amazon with, astoundingly, a handful of five-star reviews. If you're still out there James, I'm sorry. But it was murder to pull this one off.

Regardless of whatever backlash I might incur, I've answered the question that only the boldest of interviewers dares to pose.

UPDATE: I found an old People magazine article dated from the time the book appeared. "The Scatman"--I'd forgotten that part! I guess the book really meant something to him, so I feel bad. But it really was a grueling read.

Blasts from the Past, Day 25

2011-06-27T09:18:00.001-07:00

Pace, James Michener.

I did two of his sprawling, noodle-headed behemoths for Books On Tape in the 90's, Caribbean and Mexico. I also recorded The World is My Home, a sort of random memoir about his travels, and The Novel, which was actually an interesting look at the publishing industry from a writer's point of view.

How many of these "blockbusters" did he write, anyway? At least a dozen: Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, Chesapeake, Iberia, Poland (!)...the list goes on and on. My parents loved these things, as well as the prolific Irving Stone. I guess it was "substantive" reading for people who didn't like to read that much. They were almost impossible to manage from a narration standpoint: a unending flash flood of under-developed, two-dimensional characters and sub-plots that raced along without ever developing any teeth or guts. It was like an automated panorama at a hi-tech amusement park that just keeps scrolling past you, devoid of thought or emotion. I ran out of voices about halfway through the first one. A tremendous amount of work with very little payoff.

The first time I ever turned down work was when BOT proposed sending me a third one, and I said I'd had enough, maybe someone else would enjoy it more than I would.

Question: Would anyone want to hear these again? If so, I've just botched my chance at recording them.

Blasts from the Past, Day 24

2011-06-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold was my first Audie nomination, in 2006. There's not much I can say about this series that hasn't already been said by Lois' fans. It's a wonderful joy ride, all the way from Shards of Honor to the recently-released Cryoburn, along with the numerous spin-off books and novellas. I'm not much of a sci-fi fan, but you don't have to be to enjoy these witty, exciting space operas featuring the ever-resourceful and ever-heroic Miles Vorkosigan. He's a marvelous invention and he grows more complex and endearing with every book.

I started recording the series with The Warrior's Apprentice, the first book that features Miles. The series really begins with Shards of Honor and Barrayar, which relate the story of Miles' parents. I only recorded these recently, and was under the impression that they had been written later to flesh out the back story, but Lois actually wrote them all in order, clearly with a very grand scheme in mind. For me, they provided wonderful insights into characters I was already familiar with, and I'd recommend that newcomers to the series start with The Warrior's Apprentice, complete the Miles books, then read the first two. To me, they are a lot more rewarding when you understand what's to come.

That first nomination, by the way, was the year I hosted the Audie Awards in Washington, D.C. I was working on a project for GraphicAudio in Bethesda, and one of their people was organizing the ceremony that year. She stopped me on my way into the studio one morning and asked if I would be willing to host the Awards that year. I was flabbergasted. Apparently Tony Roberts couldn't make it and they needed a last-minute substitute. I gladly accepted, knowing that it would be the one and only time I would be asked to fulfill this function. I say that because I've hosted and presented at various theater things over the years and I never like the scripts they give me, so I make up my own. This doesn't go over well with organizers and I'm never invited back.

That turned out to be the case, but it was a fun evening, except for the opening. Dinner had been served and, knowing that the ceremony itself was about to begin, I made a trip to the restroom. On my way I stopped at the check-in table and told one of the people there not start without me. I came out five minutes later and this same person said, "They started without you." I thought it probably wasn't going very well absent the host, and sure enough, upon entering the dining room I noticed a pall of silence, an empty podium and two hundred pairs of eyes staring my way.

There was only one thing to do. I strode camly to the dais, mounted the steps, stepped up to the microphone and said, "I had to go to the bathroom."

By the way, I didn't win that year. Simon Vance, who was sleeping on my sofa, took the category and dashed my first hopes for audiobook glory.

Blasts from the Past, Day 23

2011-06-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella is a lovely book, better than the movie they made of it, Field of Dreams. Blackstone just re-released this on Audible. They also have my recordings of Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and Box Social on cassette--apparently they haven't been digitized yet. I hope they get around to that soon.

I remember doing research for this by watching both Field of Dreams and John Sayle's excellent movie about the Chicago Black Sox, Eight Men Out. I was struck by the fact that several of the players' names were pronounced differently in the two movies. I called the Baseball Hall of Fame and found out that Field of Dreams had it wrong and Eight Men Out had it right.

Eight Men Out is a far better movie about the Black Sox (and baseball in general). But Shoeless Joe is wonderful book about life. Recommended.

Blasts from the Past, Day 22

2011-06-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

I didn't narrate Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy but I did direct it, and it's probably the toughest project I've ever worked on. The book is written in a made-up language, somewhat resembling English but (according to Chuck) drawn mostly from the cadences and syntax of his Lithuanian relatives when they tried to speak English.

Many of you will not be old enough to remember the Sid Caesar Show, which was must-watch comedy TV in the 1950's. (I'm not old enough either, but I loved watching reruns of 1950's TV shows when I was a kid in the 1960's.) They had a regular series of sketches based on what was then a trendy influx of foreign movies flooding the American market. Caesar, Carl Reiner and other members of the cast would play out a ridiculous scenario involving some melodramatic situation, improvising the dialogue in a made-up language that vaguely resembled French or Italian or something else, depending on the costumes and set dressing they'd pulled out of storage. What was so fun about these pieces was that you always understood exactly what they were saying, even though they were talking gibberish. Typically, in a climactic moment, one of the actors would burst out with an exclamatory word or phrase, like "Pastamajamatooboo!!!" and the other actors would pick this up and run with it. "Aaaaahhhhh, pastamajamatooboo!!!" "Si, si, pastamajamatooboo!!!" "Aaaahhh, non so pastamajamatooboo!!!" and so on. The word clearly had some shocking or profound (or even lewd) implication, but exactly what that was was left to the viewer to decipher.

As a young acting student, I remember doing exercises that involved playing out a familiar story with made-up words, similar to what they did in these Sid Caesar sketches. The idea was that if you knew what you were saying, it didn't matter how you said it. This has important implications for the performance of, say, Shakespeare, where a modern audience won't grasp all the vocabulary or syntax, but they must be able to understand everything you are saying.

For Pygmy, Paul Garcia and I had to parse the sense behind the nonsense of every single sentence. For example, if you listen to the sample on Audible, it will hopefully not take you long to understand that our young "foreign exchange" student, dubbed Pygmy by his American host family, is first shaking hands with his Host Father (in the process assessing his weight and general health), then notices a badge pinned to his shirt pocket alerting Pygmy to the salient fact that Host Father works in a nuclear facility. And so on.

My approach was to pre-read the script to grasp the general story; then I set aside the text during the recording sessions and just listened. If I didn't understand exactly what was being said, I would ask Paul to read the sentence or paragraph over until I did. Sometimes we had to do eight or nine takes, crafting the emphasis and phrasing so that the meaning was absolutely clear without any strain on my part. This required a tremendous amount of visualization from the narrator, so that the listener would get a clear picture of the action. In some cases it took us a while to figure things out, as when Pygmy describes the songs he has to learn for Chorus. We'd sit there puzzling over it until one of us would shout, "I've got it! Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head!!"

It was an amazing experience for both of us, working together in a way that we usually don't have the time or opportunity to do. On the other hand, I'm not sure every book would withstand the scrutiny we had to bring to this project.

Blasts from the Past, Day 21

2011-06-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

When Jonathan Kellerman's "Alex Delaware" books first started appearing in the 1990's, it was common practice to do two versions--an unabridged "library" edition read by a journeyman like myself, and an abridged "retail" version with a celebrity narrator, in this case John Rubinstein. I recorded the first ten or twelve in the series, then the abridged-unabridged thing became moot and John has been doing the full-length versions ever since. He does a great job with them. I enjoyed them up to a point, then they became rather formulaic and it took some effort to keep them sounding fresh and interesting. The gimmick was a semi-retired child psychologist who gets involved in bizarre cases and has to do some dangerous sleuthing to save his young clients. There was a fair dose of gluey PC stuff--a crusty gay cop/best friend, a beautiful-but-smart girlfriend who makes musical instruments, and so on--but, at least initially, the stories involved intriguing psychological phenomena. As the plots grew more outlandish, it was a struggle to maintain believability. I wasn't sorry to see my involvement come to an end, but they were fun while they lasted.

This is an example of what I call "the best-seller curse." So many of the so-called "top titles" are churned out in cooky-cutter, assembly-line fashion, aimed at quick consumption. It's hard work to make them sound credible in audio. I, for one,would gladly forego whatever cache these titles might bring in favor of something with more meat in its bones.

Blasts from the Past, Day 20

2011-06-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

Havana Heat is a neat little novel about baseball, history and politics, an imaginative take on what would have happened if Fidel Castro had really been a professional minor-league pitcher. There has always been speculation the Castro spent some time playing ball before he became a revolutionary, but such legends have pretty much been debunked.

The reason I mention this title, apart from it's entertainment value, is that it presented me with a real stumper of a problem when I recorded it. The main character is an American who travels to Cuba with a minor league team in the 1950's. He speaks Spanish, but it isn't always clear what language he's speaking when, and to whom. Sometimes the author refers to Cubans speaking English, but often the English-speakers and the Spanish-speakers simply chat away with no indication of what language they are speaking. The problem for the narrator, of course, is when to use accents and when not to. If the Cubans are speaking English, should they have accents? If they are speaking Spanish, then presumably they shouldn't, since they wouldn't have "accents" when speaking their own language. If two Cubans are speaking to each other but then speak in English to the American character, should they have no accents at first but accents when they speak to the American? But then, should the American sound like he's speaking Spanish? How do you do that? Occasionally the text gives some hints ("she said to him in Spanish" or "they spoke in broken English") but for the most part the story rattles along with everyone talking to everyone else, and after a few attempts to indicate who speaks English and who doesn't, the author sort of ignores the issue.

That's not to say it's a bad book. On the contrary, it's a charming story and very nicely written. A print reader really wouldn't be aware of the issue. But clearly the author never considered what would happen if the book were to be read out loud. There's no easy way to establish any sort of convention for who speaks what how when.

I can't remember exactly what my solution was, except to improvise as I went along. But I must have pulled it off because it got some nice reviews.

Later this month I'll revisit this issue in light of an international thriller I've got coming up.

Blasts from the Past, Day 19

2011-06-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Raft is a terrific survival tale, detailing the 34-day ordeal of three airmen whose plane came down in the Pacific during World War II. A while back I got an email from the son of one of the men thanking me for narrating the book. I'd forgotten about it and had to check around to make sure it was still available. It's up on Audible and it's another one of those Blackstone titles recorded on cassette which have held up so remarkably well.

Along the same lines, I travelled to New York a few years back to record In Harm's Way, a chilling and somewhat grueling account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the wretched experiences of the crew members who struggled to survive in shark-infested waters. Talk about Jaws--you'll have trouble enjoying the beach after this one. Unfortunately the audio seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the rights expired, I don't know, but it was a fine story and worth reading if you like survival and endurance tales.

Blasts from the Past, Day 18

2011-06-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Stand was one of the first major books I narrated for Books On Tape under the contract that Flo Gibson arranged with them. It was a memorable experience. This was the edited-down version, which was the only one available at that time, but even so it was a monumental undertaking. Of course, back then we didn't bat an eye at thousand-page books--in fact, what was the point of going to all that trouble for some little dinky thing?

I still get fan mail about this recording. The last time I heard an excerpt (when it was still available from Books On Tape) the speed was off and I sounded too fast. I don't know if the cassette editions still floating around sound like this, but it would be a pity if they did. At that point we were recording on reel-to-reel tape and would dub the masters onto cassette for Books On Tape to duplicate. The problem was that cassette machines regularly got out of whack and what sounded fine on one machine could come out too fast or too slow on another. Also, high-speed cassette duplication was a clumsy process fraught with technical issues that could lead to pitching boxes worth of cassettes when a run failed to execute properly.

All that aside, what's astonishing to me is that no one has ever re-recorded this masterpiece. It's the granddaddy of "virus" novels and remains as chilling and effective as the day it was written, in spite of King's penchant for overwriting. It's hard to believe it isn't currently available in audio. What are they waiting for? I wouldn't expect that my old recording would be salvageable at this point. I'd certainly love to do it again. I narrated The Dark Half last year for a new series of King recordings issued by Blackstone and Penguin Audio. It was every bit of fun as I anticipated it would be. But regardless of who does it, it's a huge disservice to King fans both new and old to keep The Stand under wraps.

Blasts from the Past, Day 17

2011-06-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

Before we get into today's post, I want to give a hat tip to Megan Fitzpatrick of Hachette Audio, who inspired yesterday's post. I hesitate to name names in a forum like this, but she said she didn't mind, so I'm happy to give her the nod for helping me to come up with a topic.

This showed up in my email yesterday, from a newspaper editor in Canada:

"Are you the actor who did the 1992 narration on The Adventures of Augie March? If so, it was a drop-dead brilliant performance. You're a genius."

Why yes, yes I am that guy, thanks!

At the time of it's release, this recording got excellent reviews, including the following from the Saul Bellow Journal:

Parker’s reading...is masterful...a model of balance and control; he brings a dimension of performance to the novel you simply cannot get by reading the novel yourself. His clear voice and exact tempo capture the spirit and rhythms of the text. Parker's performance allows you to visualize the images of the novel with amazing vividness. Listening to this superb reading of the novel makes clear that this is one of Bellow’s most entertaining and profound books.

Library Journal wrote:

Tom Parker creates all of Augie's extraordinary acquaintances while merging, in one compelling voice, Augie's own conflicting traits into a fate that is never final because his "character" is to dream something better. This must-listen should be in most collections.

Look, I quote these things as a tribute to Bellow more than myself. The book is amazing and probably his most engaging and accessible work. As for me, I remember thinking it was very difficult, and feeling a little self-conscious because I wasn't really the right voice for it (as a rule, I don't do "Chicago" and I certainly never considered myself an expert on Bellow). And the story itself is hazy in my mind, probably because I was so busy threading through the breathless virtuosity of the writing. It's entirely possible that I read it cold. But something went right because, listening to it today, I'm surprised at the synergy of it. It's not typical of my "style" back then--it's extremely relaxed and fluid, as though I just surrendered myself to the book and never looked back. It reminds me of a story about (I think) Laurence Olivier, who gave an amazing performance one night but, upon being complimented by his fellow actors, remarked that it depressed him because he couldn't remember what he did right.

Unfortunately the recording is in bad shape. Blackstone has a new recording of Herzog up on Audible, and we have four more Bellows coming out later in the year: Seize the Day, To Jerusalem and Back, The Dangling Man and The Victim. (I've got my eye on Seize the Day, lest anyone out there get any bright ideas.) Augie is showing his age. I've asked our engineers to look into remastering it with some of their new techniques. I'd like to redo it, but I'm not sure I could do it as well. I'd be thinking about it and would probably ruin it. Then again, I'd love to rediscover what I did right. I might learn something.

It's a strange commentary on my career that the books I spend the least amount of time thinking about usually get the most attention. Maybe there's a lesson for others in there--or maybe not.

Blasts from the Past, Day 16

2011-06-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, someone in the Twitterverse mentioned my recording of Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. This is a coincidence because I was going to blog about it so I'll do it now.

I love good bios. They're fascinating, inspiring, transporting--they take you to another time and place and introduce you to people you'd love to meet, or even be like. I recorded a lot of them way back when--the wonderful Horowitz/Collier books about the Fords, the Kennedys and the Rockefellers; William Manchester's stunning book about General MacArthur (still up on Audible); David McCullough's fantastic books about Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and so on. To me, this is Narrating with a capital N--sitting down in the booth every morning and learning incredible stuff about people and history. It doesn't get better.

I did the Carnegie bio for Gildan Media, which is run by Gilles Dana, formerly of Simon & Schuster Audio. Gilles is an interesting guy, very busy and very elusive. In the five years I've done books for him I've only met him once, and that was a ten-second hand shake at APAC. But he picks some cool books and you should do a search on Audible, since his products are download-only.

I was fascinated, in a gory way, by the few comments on Audible for this one. I mispronounced something (ZOMG!!!11!!) or it was too "detailed." Phooey. The two sensible comments have it right--it's a wonderful bio that, like Caro's books about LBJ, makes you admire and loathe the guy at the same time. Very much worth a read.

But my TOTAL FAVE kind of bio, my "chocolate bon-bons and martinis in front of the fire" kind of bio, is a really good Hollywood bio. Not the sleazy tell-alls, but the really incisive, atmospheric ones. I'm particularly fascinated by books about "B" actors and directors-- the people who slogged along and occasionally hit a high note, like Robert Mitchum (Baby I Don't Care) and Gloria Graham (Suicide Blonde). But there are also some towering works about the real greats. So now I compose a prayer to the Audiobook Gods:

Please please PLEASE let me record every single book by Scott Eyman, the superstar of Hollywood historians. If you love movies and have not read his books, get thee to Amazon and buy them NOW. The Speed of Sound is a brilliant book about the transition from silents to talkies, and made me appreciate the art of silent film in a way that I (and probably a lot of us) never have. (Blackstone actually has this one--oh, that I could have read it!) It's also something of a myth-buster, dispelling many cliches about silent films and the early talkies, which is fun. His bio of John Ford is just exceptional. Here's a director I was never that crazy about but you really learn to appreciate his work by reading this. (Now, every time I take a hike in the glorious Oregon mountains and high grazing country, I can't help but think of a John Ford movie.) The Cecil B. DeMille book is great, the Ernst Lubitsch book is very nice, and the Louis B. Mayer bio is a revelation. Again, the "Caro" syndrome kicks in here, wherein a biographer was prepared for one thing and discovered something quite different. Eyman is a fantastic writer and you always feel that there is a real person behind the writing--his occasional personal comments are like little "Easter eggs," as they say in the gaming world. I'll sit by the computer and wait for the flood of emails.

Blasts from the Past, Day 15

2011-06-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

Goodness! Here we are halfway through the month already.

Speaking of abridgements, I'd nearly forgotten, until it was called to my attention the other day, that the first couple of David Rosenfelt titles I did for Listen and Live were actually "abridged." Fans of the series have complained that they wished the complete versions were available. Given the average running time of these titles when they are not abridged, I feel comfortable assuring people that very little was left out in shortening the books from eight to seven hours. The folks at Listen and Live soon realized that it wasn't necessary to abridged these.

And speaking of series--how about when another company picks up an author in mid-series and changes the narrator? Hoo boy, that's some fun!! The virulent, outraged and often obscene reactions of fans is something to behold. I think Audible's "instant feedback" feature has been instrumental in reducing this practice to a minimum. I've noticed that usurpers are more inclined to track down the original narrator these days, if they can, so the series can continue without disruption. This is generally a good thing. Unless there's some shatteringly compelling reason to make the switch, you're better off to leave things as they are.

When I see a new book in a series coming up, I'm quick to contact the narrator immediately to give them a heads up and make sure they reserve the time, even if it's a year from now.

Blasts from the Past, Day 14

2011-06-14T06:36:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's post I touched on the issue of abridgements and how they can differ from the full-length versions, and not just in a textual sense.

Once, when I was recording one of the Star Wars abridgements for Random House, I remarked to director Charlie Potter that abridgements took a lot more energy than full-length titles. He looked surprised and said he thought it would be the other way around. I said that when faced with bleeding chunks of a story it was more difficult to maintain a sense of continuity and momentum. As a narrator, you have a responsibility to make the story feel seamless, and when the text jumps from episode to episode without the usual bridges, you have to create the transitions yourself, using a combination of quick shifts in energy, focus and emotion to trick the listener into thinking they haven't missed anything. Also, the narrative passages that are usually cut from abridged versions contain a wealth of visual and emotional cues that the narrator now has to "invent" in order for things to make sense. And narrative bridges offer places to "coast" for a bit and rebuild your energy for the next important bit of dialogue or action. In that sense abridgements demand non-stop energy as you move from crucial scene to crucial scene, with no rest stops in between.

An interesting question might be, should you read the whole book before embarking on an abridgement? In one sense, it would help to know what was left out so you can "fill in the blanks" in your own head and convey at least of some this to the listener. On the other hand, is it a distraction to know what's missing? Are you better off just playing what's in front of you, for better or worse? Hard to say. Might be interesting to know what other narrators with experience in this area think.

Abridgements have always drawn the scorn of audiobook devotees, but I think the hostility is somewhat misplaced. When retail audiobooks first started appearing in book stores, they were geared toward the casual listener, who might pick up a bestseller for the occasional car trip. They were never intended to be definitive, and most were available in full-length library editions for the "serious" listener. There were, in those days, two distinct markets that had to be served. Nowadays there's still a market for abridged versions of very long novels and non-fiction works, because there are people who really don't want to sit through a 20 or 30 hour book. But the distinction between "retail" and "library" markets has largely disappeared, except in matters of packaging and pricing, though even that is becoming moot as digital downloads take over almost every area of sales and distribution.

I think there will still be a market for abridgements, even in the download world. Maybe even more so, since as the customer base for audiobooks broadens, there will be more people looking for less challenging listening than that offered by a 15 or 20 hour book.

Blasts from the Past, Day 13

2011-06-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote about the break that introduced me to the New York audiobook scene of the late 1990's and early 2000's. This was a rarified world that thrived on lavish production budgets and the high profit margins afforded by the burgeoning market for retail audiobooks. Production was largely outsourced to audio producers, who hired directors, who in turn hired the studios and the talent. It wasn't unusual for a publisher to drop upwards of $30,000 on production for a best-selling title.

Sadly, those glittering days are now behind us as the demand for hard goods (with their juicy profit margins) subsides and downloads become the norm. But they provided some great opportunities for me, a lowly little "home narrator" with a knack for efficiency and a lack of ego issues. Any producer from that era will regale you with stories of the movie star who showed up without a clue as to what the book was about, or the author's preferred celebrity reader who turned out to be dyslexic. I once overheard two producers discussing a very famous actor who had just backed out of an audiobook gig. The one producer was complaining about having to find another narrator. The other one smiled and said, "You're lucky."

While it shouldn't be said that the push for celebrity readers as a means of promoting audiobooks was frivolous or misguided, it definitely created some headaches for conscientious directors and producers. Of course, it also spawned a distinctive class of notable film, stage and television actors who excel as narrators--including Ed Herrmann, Will Patton, Jim Dale, Tim Curry, Jay Sanders, George Guidall and numerous others--and who now constitute the upper firmament of audiobook "stars." But you can imagine the relief of a producer or director who, faced with a hefty history book or modest non-fiction title, could call on the services of an eager bloke like myself who was willing to schlep to the big city and, for a modest fee, knock out a project in record time and without any fuss.

One of the most enjoyable projects I worked on during this period was an abridged version of Who's Your Caddy?, Rick Reilly's hilarious account of his stint caddying for an assortment of professional and celebrity golfers. It's a charming and, at certain points, moving book, well worth a listen even if you aren't a fan of golf.

What was odd was that, not long after I got home to D.C., I received a call from Books On Tape asking me if would record the unabridged version of Who's Your Caddy? I said I had just recorded the abridged version in New York, so maybe they wanted someone else to do it. They said no, that was fine, all the better since I'd already passed muster with the author. So I did it again, this time in my home studio, including all the bits that had been left out before. Sometime later I received copies of both versions, and I was curious as to how they might have differed. The abridged version is distinctly more "on"--the energy is higher, reflecting the heightened stakes involved in recording in New York, with a director ogling you through the glass window and a host of producers and editors dodging in and out. The "home" version is more relaxed, but no doubt benefited from the takeaway of the sessions in New York. Frankly, it was pleasant to do it again without the pressure, and be able to include more of the background and setup material.

Both versions are on Audible and the curious can listen to the two samples. It's very rare in the audiobook business to have an opportunity for "do-overs." I've had a couple others, maybe I'll write about those in a day or two.

Blasts from the Past, Day 12

2011-06-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

In the mid- to late-1990's, the big publishers like Random House, Harper and Time Warner started selling unabridged audios. Whereas previously they had confined themselves to abridged productions, the advent of compact discs enabled them to sell unabridged recordings in retail packages that were less bulky and more economical than the old cassettes. As a way of cutting down on the costs of these full-length programs, they contracted for co-publications with some of the "library only" companies. Books On Tape, for instance, would produce the recording and distribute it in the library market, and Harper or Random House would repackage the recording for distribution in retail stores. This worked out well for everybody, and in one instance it turned out to have a considerable impact on my narration career.

In the fall of 1999 I was directing a production of Arthur Miller's The Price for Everyman Theatre in Baltimore. We were three days from opening when it became clear that the show "wasn't happening," as we say in the business. The leading actor was suffering from a horrible case of nerves and couldn't master his lines or his blocking. We searched for someone to replace him but came up empty, so I had to step in and do the part with script in hand. With all the stress I developed a ferocious cold which I only managed to overcome with heavy doses of medication. In addition, I had to cancel a ski vacation to Taos, New Mexico that Tanya and I had long been planning to celebrate her birthday. She ended up going alone, a sorry turn of affairs that has never been forgotten and is invariably dredged up whenever I try to take on more than I can handle.

In the midst of this crisis, on a Wednesday evening, I got a phone call from Books On Tape. They had just finished recording Terry Brooks' novelization of the first installment in the new Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace, but evidently no one had told them that narration alone wasn't sufficient: LucasFilm expected a full-blown production with music and sound effects. They had to start all over with two weeks to go before the release date, and Random House was taking over production. Was I available to go immediately into a Washington, D.C. studio and begin recording? I said that apart from the fact that I needed to be in Baltimore at six o'clock every evening and had a terrible cold, I was willing, so we set up the first session for that Friday morning.

Friday came around and things immediately got off to a bad start. A director from Random House was flying down from New York to take charge of the process, so I offered to pick him up at the airport and drive him to studio. Well, I tried to pick him up but I couldn't find him anywhere. Figuring that he must have taken a cab, and worried that I would be late for the first session, I headed to the recording studio only to discover that he wasn't there. I sat around for a while with two bewildered voiceover engineers who were looking at this enormous, four-hundred page script and saying, "We're gonna record all this?" Finally the phone rang and it was the irate director who was still waiting at the airport. One of the engineers told how to find a cab and gave him the address of the studio.

Thanks to my bungling he arrived in something of a state, and following a brief discussion with the engineers he came into the booth and announced that he knew how I was "used to working" but that we were going to have to do things "very differently." I surmised what that meant: I was one of that lowly species called "home narrator" who worked without supervision and supposedly rattled off a book without much thought for style and content. I got the impression he felt it would take a lot of effort on his part to draw out a reading of any skill or sensitivity. This wasn't particularly encouraging, but I figured fifteen years of experience had to count for something and somebody thought I could do it, so I steeled myself for a rough ride.

The biggest challenge came when I had to imitate the voices of the principle performers, including the colorful cast of aliens. But since the film was such a huge deal and everything surrounding it was top secret, all we were given was the trailer, from which I had to extrapolate a whole novel's worth of characters and plot line. A brief glimpse of Jar Jar Binks, a couple of shouts from Liam Neeson, and some garbled alien chatter were about all I had to go on. But there was no time to waste, so we plunged in.

The first page, describing the desolate landscape of Tatooine, took about half an hour and seven takes. There were a lot of exasperated sighs and mutters from the control room. Apparently I wasn't "painting the picture." I was doped up on antihistamines and thinking about the enormous role I had to perform for the first time that night with only two days of rehearsal, so frankly I wasn't in the mood to argue and was just trying to go with the flow. We pressed on and finally got to some dialogue passages, and the mood improved a little. After I managed to pull off a couple of alien voices with some aplomb, the sailing got fairly smooth. We broke for lunch and over catered sandwiches the director admitted that I "wasn't too bad at this." That was a relief.

Four days later it was "in the can" and there were smiles all around. The voice track was shipped off to New York to be dolled up with music and foley, and that was that. It turned out pretty well, but I figured that was the last I'd hear from George Lucas or Random House.

Surprisingly, a few months later I got a call from producer David Rapkin, asking me to come to New York and do a series of Star Wars spin-off novels. These were snappy little abridgments with a boatload of music and effects, but the scripts were laid out in such a way that I always knew what was going on underneath the voice track. During the battle scenes, for instance, it would say "Laser fire" in the margin, and they'd play me a bit of the effect, so I could adjust my pace and volume accordingly. I ended up doing eight "Young Jedi" programs before there was a change in plans and someone else took over the series (it was Jonathan Davis, in fact.)

But these were enough to raise my profile with New York producers, and thereafter I travelled to the Big Apple about six times a year for one project or another. It was a huge boost to my freelance career, as well as my income, and led to some very fun projects--more about which tomorrow.

Blasts from the Past, Day 11

2011-06-11T01:05:00.000-07:00

Perusing the web for my old recordings, I came across the "Toby Peters" series by Stuart Kaminsky, read by "Tom Parker." Kaminsky has written some fairly hard-hitting stuff, including a series about a Pittsburgh cop and another about a Russian police inspector, but the Toby Peters books were fun little romps involving a private eye operating in 1940's Hollywood. They featured an amusing cast of secondary characters, including a Swiss midget and a batty landlady. But what really distinguished them was that each one featured a famous movie star from the period, who was in some sort of fix and needed Toby's help to straighten things out. Thus, A Fatal Glass of Beer involves a road trip with W. C. Fields as he tries to rescue his numerous, far-flung bank accounts from the clutches of an imposter posing as one of Fields' own fictional radio characters. In You Bet Your Life, Chico Marx has gotten into dutch with some gangsters over a gambling debt, and his brother Groucho hires Toby to get him off the hook. Fred Astaire is being bothered by women and mobsters in Dancing in the Dark, which features an especially funny sequence in which Peters stumbles into a musical number with Betty Grable. And so forth. The writing was snappy and the protagonist was an endearing schlumpf with one clean suit and a perpetually empty wallet.

What made them unusually challenging, however, was that you had to muster a pretty fair imitation of a different celebrity for each one. Sometimes they were little more than cameos, but at other times they dominated the book, as in A Fatal Glass of Beer. I'm a classic film buff and managed to memorize most of the W. C. Fields and Marx Brothers movies when I was a kid. Even so, it's not an easy trick to pull off. It's one thing to imitate a few famous lines, but to place that particular voice and character into a completely new setting is difficult. Listening with trepidation to the samples on Audible, I think I did okay, even if my W. C. Fields sounds more like Jimmy Stewart than W. C. Fields. What struck me most, however, was how sleek and charming the writing is, and I found myself sitting back and going along for the ride all over again, after all these years. If you're in the mood for something light with an extra twist, you'll enjoy them.

Blasts from the Past, Day 10

2011-06-10T09:58:00.001-07:00

On Day 3, I listed some of the recordings I did for Books On Tape which have been deleted from their catalogue. Among them was A Time to Kill, John Grisham's first (and many think his best) novel, written when he was struggling to make his mark as a novelist. It's an excellent story of race and justice in the vein of Harper Lee and William Styron, original and beautifully crafted. I thought this recording was long gone, but I see now that it has been re-issued for download and is available on Audible, along with the abridged recording by Michael Beck. The unabridged version includes an interesting introduction by Grisham, detailing the genesis of the book and how it came to be published. Initially released in a tiny print run, it was re-published to critical acclaim following the success of his blockbusters The Firm and The Pelican Brief. Popular as these books have been, many wondered what happened to the wonderful writer who lurks behind the breathless, improbable cliff-hangers he began churning out.

If you haven't read this, it's high time to do yourself a favor. It's a terrific book, a legal thriller with substance, style and heart that hasn't dated a bit.

Apparently no one could be bothered to make a cover with "Alexander Adams" on it. No matter; below is a picture of the old library edition I found on Amazon.

Blasts from the Past, Day 9

2011-06-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Robert Caro's masterpiece of historical biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, is as relevant today as it was when he began writing this epic over twenty years ago. The first volume, The Path to Power, is a political thriller of the first rank. Caro details Johnson's early life in the poverty-stricken Hill Country of Texas and his lust for recognition and popularity. Johnson's election to the House of Representatives and his subsequent first bid for a seat in the Senate are related in all their color and excitement.

The second volume, Means of Ascent, chronicles the lean years when Johnson was languishing in the House and his career appeared to be heading for obscurity. This all changed when he ran again for the Senate in 1948, ekeing out an 87 vote win against former Texas governor Coke Stevenson. The legitimacy of his victory is debated to this day.

The third volume, Master of the Senate (there is a fourth volume supposedly nearing completion) is the longest and most fascinating of the three. It begins with a lengthy but critical primer on the Senate itself--why it was formed the way it was and why it operates the way it does. This setup pays off when we join the titanic battle to pass the first Civil Rights bill. Johnson's political genius is on full display as he grovels, cajoles, bullies and threatens his way to the bill's successful passage.

I recorded all three for Books On Tape over the course of nearly a decade. Inexplicably, Parts I and II have never been transferred to CD or download. This is truly unfortunate, for while the second volume is not quite as gripping as the others, Part I is indispensable reading if you are even remotely interested in American politics and Southern culture. Luckily Master of the Senate is still available on Audible. I highly recommend it as one of those history books that never goes out of date.

Blasts from the Past, Day 8

2011-06-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

Today's pick is Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. This is the very first book I narrated for Blackstone back in 1989. It's the sort of book no one writes anymore: a charming, breezy, informative bit of popular history with no agenda to promote and no axe to grind. Allen wrote for a post-war generation newly awash in technological marvels who found comfort in revisiting a simpler, less hectic time; a time that, after the horrors of the Depression and World War II, must have seemed as distant as Ancient Greece.

The recording was made on that wonderful little Akai cassette deck I mentioned earlier, and it's remarkably crisp and clear. You can also hear a healthy dose of the print-through or "echo" I also mentioned. They managed to clean up the quieter parts, but you can't get it out from under the voice itself, and in the breaths and short pauses you can hear little bursts of it. If you listen in the car you won't notice, but over headphones it's a little disconcerting.

In 1989 I was living in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., so this must have been done in the single closet off the living room, though I have a memory of sitting at a little desk in my bedroom reading this. Honestly, I recorded just about anywhere in those days, depending on how hot it was or what sort of noises the neighbors were making. I never worried about it, because I could tell if things were amiss and would just throw up another blanket or move closer to the microphone. I even recorded a book in the bathroom of a Holiday Inn in Raleigh, N.C. while visiting my father, who was sick in the hospital at the time. If you were smart about it no one would notice, and I doubt I could listen to those old books now and determine were I was when. Even today my home studio is a little appalling-looking, but I don't care, it's how it sounds that matters. You can spend a fortune on booths and equipment but if you don't know how to use them it doesn't matter.

A word about the narration style. After joining the Library of Congress program, I devoted a considerable amount of energy to trying to sound like Alexander Scourby. I failed. It's a little embarrassing to listen to now, and I couldn't replicate it if I tried. There's also a certain blandness to the approach, which is partly attributable to the need for efficiency (punch-ins could be audible and it was important to keep them to a minimum) and partly to confusing Scourby's legendary ease and fluidity with emotional detachment from the text. But I think it's more than listenable, though it would be fun to do it again and warm it up a bit.

Blasts from the Past, Day 7

2011-06-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a movement in the audiobook industry these days toward recording everything under the sun, and doing it as cheaply as possible, with the idea that the more audiobooks we produce, the more people will listen to them.

That may be true to some extent, but I think there's a danger in overestimating the demand for audiobooks, and underestimating the expectations of current (or future) audiobook customers when it comes to quality. To be of real value, an audiobook has to do more than just deliver information, or simply replicate the reading experience--it has to improve upon the reading experience, to the extent that it becomes desirable in and of itself: an entertainment, worth seeking out for its own sake, not just an adjunct to the text. That's what's exciting about the current state of the business: there are so many programs out there now that enhance, even supercede, the print experience. If it's only about information, it's easier and cheaper to substitute currently available (and rapidly developing) technologies--which, while they may leave something to be desired, are reliable, ubiquitous and FREE. Just tap a button on your laptop or Kindle and let it read to you.

Driven by three decades of growth and competition for market share, audiobook standards have reached a remarkable level of consistency, such that today you can browse a clearing house like Audible or WeRead4You, select a title at random, download it, and be reasonably sure you're getting something you can relax and listen to. Truly sub-standard audio programs are becoming pretty scarce these days. In fact, I'll bet if you asked most audiobook consumers, they couldn't tell you what "brand" of audiobook they were buying--Blackstone or Brilliance, Tantor or Hachette. They buy titles, not brands. I really don't think most consumers can distinguish these days, which speaks well for the industry as a whole.

But what happens when you start flooding this market with inferior products? What if standards are diluted, or even abandoned, to the extent that buying an audiobook becomes a crapshoot instead of a sure bet? You can't flip through an audiobook, you can't "try it" and, in the case of downloads, you can't return it! Once you commit, you're pretty much stuck.

The fact is that the vast majority of Americans have neither the time nor the inclination to listen to audiobooks--and they never will. The people that do, form a small but dedicated core audience--one that will grow and solidify as more people get hooked on listening, which is not difficult. They won't get hooked, or stay hooked, however, if we're so focused on quantity that we forget about why people are drawn to audiobooks in the first place. It's not just about information, or convenience, or being able to hear anything you want. It's about the uniqueness of each and every listening experience.

With this is mind, I'd like to offer today's title, The Flight of the Phoenix by Elliston Trevor. It's a terrific book, but in my opinion it really comes alive in audio. With crackling dialogue, vividly drawn characters and a plot that lifts off from the first page, it's a great example of an audio program that attempts to create an experience you can't get just reading the book. I say attempts--I'll leave you to judge, but it was a tremendous amount if fun for me.

Blasts from the Past, Day 6

2011-06-06T05:03:00.000-07:00

I see there's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the audiobook Twitterverse regarding the topic of pre-reading titles you are going to narrate.

In my opinion, there are arguments in favor of not pre-reading. There's a feeling of fun and adventure that comes from discovering the story as you go. It can impart a certain drive and spontaneity to the reading--you're just as eager to find out what happens as the listener is. There's a tiny sense of disappointment when I pre-read a mystery or thriller these days. "Shoot, now I know how it ends!" But these things are pretty much balanced out by being prepared for anything that crops up in the book. Every narrator has stories of the unpleasant sense of shock when you get to page 367 of a 368 page spy novel and learn that the main character has a German accent.

On the other hand, if you think I pre-read all 11,000 pages of The Story of Civilization, you're nuts. A book like that pretty much reads itself, I was just along for the ride. Plus, I already knew how it ended.

An amusing example of what can happen when you're unprepared occurred many years ago when Flo Gibson was recording a book called California Rich for the Library of Congress. This was a breezy history of the family dynasties that acquired wealth and fame following the Gold Rush and the explosion of Far Eastern trade and commerce. Flo's maiden name was Anderson, and she hailed from one of the oldest and richest of these families, so it was thought that she would bring a special verve and interest to the story. Which she did--until she came to a passage that chronicled a lavish debutante ball thrown by a group of these families during the Depression years. The author clearly regarded it as a crass affair, a vulgar display of wealth during times of economic hardship. He particularly mocked the tasteless "theme" of the event, which involved costumes and decor harking back to the days of Marie Antoinette and Versailles--or something equally absurd, I don't remember.

Well, suddenly there was dead silence in the booth. The engineer kept the tape running for a bit, thinking that perhaps Flo was simply gearing up for the next chapter. But nothing was forthcoming, so he hit the STOP button, engaged the talkback mic and asked, "Everything okay?"

Nothing, save the sound of heavy, distressed breathing.

"Flo, are you okay? Do you need some water or a break?"

Finally, in a low, grumbling growl, came the words, "That was my coming out party."

The worst argument for pre-reading is so you can "craft" the performance. I use that term in the pejorative sense. A calculated performance draws attention to itself and distracts the listener from the text. I have to battle this every time I step into the booth. It's one thing to know where the story is going and help guide the listener there. It's another to impose your own sense of style and tone on the text at the expense of the author and the listener. I've "crafted" very few performances in my career, a notable exception being The Sound and the Fury. In that case, the reading had to be carefully crafted, otherwise both I and the listener would be lost. But in most cases, every time I've set out to "craft" a "great reading," I'm pretty much disgusted with the final product.

When I conduct classes and workshops, the single most valuable piece of direction I can give is this: "Think of the end of the book when you start the beginning." This simple encomium yields startling results with fledgling narrators. What was previously an ambling, moment-to-moment reading now takes on subtle colorations and a sense of momentum that foreshadows the author's ultimate goal. It imparts an "arc" to the narrative. When you narrate with the end of the book in mind, a mulititude of issues disappear. You stop thinking about "pace" and "tone" and "emphasis," and instead invest your energy in moving inexorably toward the conclusion of the story. Descriptive passages, the various characters, the dialogue all fall naturally into a proper perspective. Seemingly momentous questions--"What kind of voice should I give this character?" or "How much should I linger over this description of the lake at sunset?"--answer themselves when you consider that someone out there is waiting for you to get to the point.

Another thing is that I can't NOT prepare these days. My eyes and brain aren't what they used to be, and if I don't know what's coming I start to fall apart and my mind wanders. It's sad.

So by all means, be prepared. But don't take preparation as license to manipulate the text in some way that detracts from the author's intentions.

An excellent example of what preparation can do for you is a title I narrated for Random House a number of years back. I went up to New York to record the abridged version of James Hornfisher's The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, an excellent but lengthy history of the tiny fleet of U. S. destroyers that managed, through a combination of tenacity and heroism, to scuttle what remained of the Japanese navy during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In pre-reading the book, I immediately sensed a problem: The "setup," which was crucial to understanding the magnitude of the feat these men pulled off, comprised fully half the script. The author took what seemed like forever in fleshing out the situation in the Pacific theater up to that point, describing in detail the classes and types of ships involved, introducing the various captains and commanders of those ships, and laying out the dire tactical situation that confronted them. As a reader, I found myself growing impatient and eager to get to the good stuff. Some of this could be attributed to the nature of the abridgement, but be that as it may, what promised to be a brisk and exciting story threatened to get bogged down in seemingly pointless details, unless I found a way to pull it all together somehow.

Fortunately, there was a wealth of material about the Battle of Leyte Gulf to be found online, so I spent hours looking at maps and pictures, and reading about the various people involved, until I had a clear picture in my mind of how the whole thing had played out.

When I arrived in the studio, the director was standing at the door and the first thing he said was, "We have a problem."

Guessing what his concern was, I replied, "Yes, we do, and I think I can solve it."

With that we got down to business and I launched into the opening passages with a clear sense of the goal ahead, imparting every bit of drive and interest I could to each character, each ship and each turn of the developing plot. (Yes, non-fiction books have a plot.) In the back of my mind, I repeated over and over to the listener, "Stay with me, hang in there--you'll be glad you learned all this! The reward is coming."

And it did, because the climactic battle, when it finally arrived, was thrilling and moving in a way it couldn't have been without this wealth of background information.

And with that I navigate you toward today's pick, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. There is an excellent unabridged version available as well, but performing the abridgement was one of my most challenging and enjoyable experiences, and taught me a valuable lesson about preparation and the narrator's role in supporting the text while remaining absolutely faithful to the author's intentions.

Blasts from the Past, Day 5

2011-06-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

Today I reveal some of the dark, unsavory secrets of the audiobook business in its early days.

To quickly review, audio programs have been around for a long time. In the days of LPs, you could find recordings of poets or famous authors reading excerpts from their own works. Perhaps someday Caedmon or whoever will reissue the beautiful recordings made by Gertrude Stein, Somerset Maugham and others (or perhaps they're already out there, I don't know.) And of course there were children's stories on those fun, multi-colored discs some of us remember from our youth. But audiobooks as we know them today didn't really exist, except for the Library of Congress' "talking books" that were only available to the blind and handicapped. It was in fact this program that gave some enterprising folks the idea to start producing unabridged audio programs for the general consumer as a way to pass the time sitting in traffic or during long business trips in the car.

Basically, Recorded Books and Books On Tape were founded on opposite coasts in the late 70's. Recorded Books originated in Maryland and employed actors from Arena Stage in Washington D.C. This is where Frank Muller, the legendary late narrator, got his start. Within a short time they moved their studio to New York City and hired a host of narrators who were working for American Foundation for the Blind.

Books On Tape started in Newport Beach, CA. They went a different route and employed narrators who worked from their homes. This kept overhead low and allowed them to reach out to talent all over the country.

In the early 80's, an adventurous consumer might find a few abridged audiobooks in the bookstores, but addicts depended on a handful of audio publishers for unabridged titles, which you rented from the company or borrowed from the library, because bulky cases full of cassettes were simply too expensive to buy outright. For years, this was the core of the audiobook industry: rental and library sales. I should also mention Brilliance at this point. They attempted to end-run the problems of size and expense by producing four-track cassettes that played at half speed (similar to the Library of Congress tapes). You bought a special player that enabled you to listen to these. It worked after a fashion, but ultimately they dropped this in favor of standard cassette tapes.

The thing was, you had to grow your catalogue very quickly in order to attract customers. So there was a huge push to record as many books as possible. All the titles were backlist, so a productive narrator for, say, Books On Tape, might receive boxes full of books every so often, and then proceed to narrate them at his or her leisure. I always had a shelf full of books waiting to be done. Pardon me while I pause to brush a nostalgic tear from my eye.

Now, in the previous article I kept referring to "punch-ins." I should probably explain this to the uninitiated. The standard mode of recording in those days was to gallop along through the book, and if you made a mistake, you rewound the tape a bit, played back the end of the previous sentence, then punched the RECORD button and picked up where you left off. There were three very simple reasons for this. First, splicing the outtakes from a 20 hour program on reel-to-reel would have entailed a staggering amount of work. Basically, the process went as follows:

You listened to the recording, heard a fluff, backed up to a good spot to edit, wiggled the tape back and forth across the playback head a few times to find a clean break without a breath or noise, marked the tape with a grease pencil, pulled it down to a splicing block in front of you, made a diagonal slice with a razor blade, and set the loose end aside. Then you had to run the rest of the tape off the reel onto the floor until you found the next good take. You made another mark,whipped the tape onto the splicing block, sliced it with the razor blade, found the OTHER end of the tape and pasted them together with a tiny piece of special adhesive tape. Then you moved on to the next mistake. You can see why this would not be an attractive proposition.

I remember the time a famous actress came to the Library of Congress studio to record her own biography. She refused to do "punch-ins" but insisted the we just let the tape roll and edit out her mistakes later. Some time afterward, I asked the head of Quality Control how this had worked out. He turned bright red, muttered that there had been something on the order of a thousand splices, and said he didn't care of God came in to record the Bible, we were never doing that again.

Also, those little adhesive strips could, under the right circumstances, eventually dry out and fall off. If the master reel wasn't stored properly or was exposed to temperature extremes, you might open that box ten years down the road and find yourself with several hundred random pieces of magnetic tape on your hands. Good luck putting it all back together.

The second reason for punching in was that, even back then, high quality reel-to-reel tape was expensive. A 90-minute reel of Maxell tape could run $10-12 a box. So naturally you used both "sides," that is you recorded 45 minutes one way, flipped the tape over and recorded 45 minutes the other way. Then you'd dub this bi-directional master onto the two sides of a 90 minutes cassette. The point is, of course, that you COULDN'T splice anything, because in the process of chopping up one side, you chopped up the other!

The third reason for punching in was that you needed very little, if any, post-editing. Basically, once you completed the project you were done and the book could be hustled to duplication and distribution. This was important for fledgling audio publishers trying to build their catalogues while keeping costs as low as possible.

So "punching in" became more or less the norm. It's really not difficult to do once you get used to it. In fact, it helps to hear the end of the last sentence so you can preserve the same tone and energy.

Now, a lot of the early home narrators got their training from various "talking book" studios around the country. It was very common for a narrator to double up as an engineer and proofer. So a lot of us learned to punch in on the engineering side. It involves all of three buttons, so after a few days of practice, you don't even think about it. I can't NOT do it--my right hand floats around looking for something to do--and I'm inclined to get impatient with an engineer who isn't "quick on the punch," as we say. Plus, I have a horror of leaving a mess behind that someone else is responsible for cleaning up.

Speaking of messes--here's a dark secret that no one likes to talk about these days. A lot of the stuff--heck, MOST of the stuff--we home narrators produced was never proofed. There just wasn't time. And frankly, listeners weren't inclined to be too fussy in those days. The fact is, a remarkably high percentage of those recordings are still in circulation and you rarely hear a complaint about them. In fact, for many years I had a recording out there with a very bizarre error that I can't quite account for. Right in the middle of a narrative passage, I clear my throat loudly and say, "God, I need a cigarette." I have no idea how, with the punch-in process, that might have happened. My sole guess is that we took a break and, upon returning, the engineer simply hit record and we pressed on. The weird thing is that no one, not the publisher nor myself, heard about it until at least ten years after the recording had been released. It goes to show the high tolerance for error listeners had back then. Either that or the book was so boring everyone fell asleep before they got to that point. I don't know.

Nowadays the standard is very different, and an audio publisher is taking a huge risk not QC-ing their recordings. One stumble and it's all you read about on Audible.

Finally, a word about research. This, frankly, is a little painful to discuss. But you have to understand that before the age of the Internet, if it wasn't in Webster's, your chances of finding it were slim. You could spend hours on the phone with experts to find one little thing. I remember a name that cropped up in a book about Thomas Hardy that I simply could not figure out, so after numerous calls to the publisher and academics around the country, I managed to track down the world's leading expert on Thomas Hardy. I dialed the number of his university office somewhere in England, and a dry little voice answered. "Hellllooooo?" I explained why I was calling, and recited the name I was trying to pronounce. There was a long pause. Finally he said, "I'm sorry, I don't know." Feeling a little sick, I tried again, spelling it out this time, but after another long pause he said, "No, I'm afraid I don't know what that is."

"Well," I said, a sense of despair washing over me, "can you make any suggestions?"

He thought for a moment, then replied, "I should just leave it out."

Today, with all the resources literally at one's fingertips, and given the level of most listeners' sophistication and knowledge, the idea of "winging it" through a book about ancient Greece or World War II is unthinkable. The Internet is a fantastic tool for narrators (and proofers as well.) These days, if you draw a blank on Google, you can be pretty sure nobody knows what it is or how to say it.

Here at Blackstone, we recently remastered the recording of Shelby Foote's The Civil War that I narrated over two decades ago. This was a chance to right a wrong that had been weighing on my mind for years. I did a search of the text and found a few dozen names, places and terms I wanted to fix. I dug out my old microphone (never, never pitch them out or sell them, by the way) and recorded about 600 corrections. I am proud to say that the recording is now a far better one than it was before. I can rest easier.

Speaking of Shelby Foote, I had the immense pleasure of recording not only his magnum opus, The Civil War, but his four superb works of fiction--Tournament, Jordan County, Follow Me Down, and Love In a Dry Season. It's astounding to me that more people haven't read them, because they are magnificent examples of the "New South" style. I adore them all, but if I had to pick one I'd opt for Love In a Dry Season. These were recorded for Blackstone as Tom Parker, and are available from Blackstone's web site or on Audible.

Blasts from the Past, Day 4

2011-06-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

I thought a little history of home recording might be in order at this point. When Books On Tape first asked me to record from home, I constructed a crude booth in the basement and managed to acquire a reel-to-reel tape machine. I hired an actor friend to engineer the recordings. We would dub the reels to cassettes for duplication purposes, then ship the whole mess to California.

I think it was Blackstone who came up with a cassette machine that actually worked well for home recording. It was three-head Akai with a switchable tape/monitor function. (Blackstone had contacted me around 1990 about recording for them, but they didn't want to annoy Books On Tape, so I used yet another name, Tom Parker, for their recordings. Again, no one was fooled but it kept the peace.) This little Akai deck was quite handy. If you made a mistake, you could rewind a skosh, press play, punch in at the appropriate spot with the record button, then deftly tap the tape/monitor button to hear yourself as you recorded without an annoying delay. Naturally, this made shipping and dubbing much easier. They could duplicate right off the master cassettes. It was a very good machine--in fact, just recently someone was digitizing some of these old cassette masters at Blackstone and remarked on how good they sounded!

I was always looking into new technologies, and throughout the 80's and 90's I spent a lot of time at the local pro audio shops investigating and testing new gadgets that would make the work easier and more efficient. In the late 80's the first DAT (digital audio tape) machines appeared. The advantages were many, including no print-through (the process by which a magnetic signal will imprint itself across several layers of tape wound on a spool) and the cassettes were even smaller than audio cassettes, which made shipping a breeze. But the disadvantages were frustrating. You couldn't "punch in" on the run with a DAT machine. You had to stop the tape, locate an approximate spot, then hit record and hope you had the right place. I can always tell an old DAT recording by the slight random pauses here and there. These were punch-ins that didn't quite time out right. Also, if you over-modulated on a DAT (in other words, got too loud) the signal fell apart and you got digital garbage for a second or two. Analogue tape, by contrast, had a very high tolerance for recording at too high a level. There was some distortion but nothing that the average listener would notice. So you had to watch your recording levels very closely to make sure you didn't exceed the tolerance of the DAT tape.

The other problem with DAT was that the recording heads, which spun very fast like a VCR recording head, were tiny and would easily get out of alignment. A tape that played on one DAT might produce a lot of digital glitches on another DAT. To this day Blackstone keeps several different machines on hand to remaster their old DAT tapes, in the hope that they'll play back without errors on one of those machines.

Sony made a very fancy DAT machine that allowed for punch-ins, but they were very expensive and you still had to account for the lag between the playback head and the recording head when you punched in. Flo Gibson used these successfully for many years, but few home narrators could afford them. They cost about $3000. A basic Sony or Tascam DAT machine cost about $1200.

Then in the early 90's, Alesis developed the ADAT machine. This was a huge step forward. It recorded eight parallel digital tracks on a Super VHS tape. It worked just like a reel-to-reel recorder, in that you could rewind, play and punch-in on the run effortlessly, and the timing was always spot on. The little remote control was silent and easy to use in the booth. I think I was the first one to use this machine, and it took me a while to convince Books On Tape and Blackstone to convert, but within a short time they did and the ADAT became standard for many narrators for a number of years. Alesis used an excellent digital-to-analogue conversion chip, resulting in an unusually warm, pleasing sound. You could fit eight 45 minutes cassette sides on one tape. You'll still see some recording studios that keep their old ADATs in running condition, for back-ups or other purposes. It was a dandy machine.

Then in the late 90's, Digidesign came out with the first affordable computer-based recording system, the DIGI 001. This consisted of a sound card you installed in the computer and an eight-channel interface for audio input. The package included a scaled-down version of ProTools, still the best and most popular digital recording software on the market. Again, I think I was one of the first to adopt this for home audiobook recording, but I can't say for sure. It wasn't easy--the publishers didn't know what to do with raw digital files, so I would dub eight tracks off the computer onto an ADAT and send those out. But it wasn't long before computer work stations became the standard. Nowadays you can put together a professional digital recording system for under $2000, and that includes everything from the microphone to the computer itself.

It's hard to imagine what a break-through non-destructive, hard-drive recording was. You could cut, paste, re-edit the length of a side, record a correction and paste it into place, compress, expand, de-ess--all with a touch of a button. You didn't have to do these processes in real time, it only took a couple of seconds. It has transformed home recording, as we all know.

Someone tweeted a question yesterday about why older recordings would be deemed unusable. As I mentioned in passing above, reel-to-reel and cassette tapes work by imprinting a magnetic signal into a strip of tape coated with a magnetically sensitive oxide solution. The magnetic force from the recording head rearranges the particles in the oxide coating in such a way as to imprint a sound signal on the tape. The problem is that reels and cassettes are wound one layer upon another. When stored this way for many years, the magnetic imprint from one layer of tape will bleed through to the layer next to it, creating a faint "ghost" or echo of the sound from the adjacent layer of tape. If you listen to an older audiobook, sometimes you will hear this echo in the pauses between sentences. It's distracting. In some cases it can be silenced or edited out, but this is a laborious process and often destroys the natural sound of the recording. (Blackstone actually has a proprietary process that enables them to remaster these recordings quickly in a manner that eliminates most of this print-through effect.) In addition, the oxide coating on old tapes tends to dry out and flake off, leaving "drop-outs" or slight gaps in the original recording. Thus, older performances are often deemed irretrievable.

Okay, great, but what about today's book? As a tie-in to my own "obsession" about home recording gadgetry, I nominate Noble Obsession by Charles Slack. It is, as the subtitle so aptly states, the story of "Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the 19th Century." That would be, of course, the vulcanization of rubber. It's a corking good story of science and American inventiveness, and extremely well-written. It's remained another one of my favorites over the years and is currently available on Audible.

Blasts from the Past, Day 3

2011-06-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

Today we move forward to my long association with Books On Tape, which began when Flo Gibson negotiated a contract to produce recordings for them around 1985, and ended shortly after Random House purchased the company in 2000. Since there was only one booth at Flo's, Sigrid Hecht of BOT asked several of us if we would be willing to record at home. In order not to upset Flo, she suggested that perhaps we could narrate under different names. Thus began decades of confusion over who was actually narrating many of the hundreds of books produced by Books On Tape each year. It didn't matter to us--who ever thought you'd become famous narrating audiobooks? Heh! In the end no one was really fooled by this arrangement, but it kept the peace.

Unfortunately, the bulk of things I recorded for BOT (as Grover Gardner and alternately, "Alexander Adams") have disappeared from their catalogue. They reside on the shelves of their Los Angeles studio, but it's doubtful any of them will ever see the light of day again. Either the audio rights have expired or the recordings were too dated to consider digitalizing. Just to give you an idea of what's sitting there collecting dust: John Gardner's October Light and The Sunlight Dialogues; nearly all of Elmore Leonard's books; the entire Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant (yes, I recorded all eleven volumes, or about 11,000 pages); Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty and The Laws of Our Fathers; the entire Fletch series by Gregory MacDonald; Gore Vidal's American history epic, beginning with Burr and ending with Hollywood (I was especially fond of Lincoln); The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester; Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy; John Grisham's A Time to Kill; and dozens of others. I also recorded most of David McCullough's books, including the marvelous Truman, but some of these have been re-recorded with Ed Herrmann, and you can't ask for a better replacement than that. Some of them aren't things I would weep over, but others I was very proud of and wish they were still available.

But what's the use crying over spilt milk? A few things have survived, including the one of the last recordings I made for Books On Tape before we parted company: William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Talk about a labor of love! I had to keep the Cliff Notes handy in order to navigate this dense and challenging work. Especially difficult is the first section, in which Benjy's consciousness flips back and forth in time, with very few written cues as to what is happening when, and italicized passages to top it all off. But I think I made it about as clear as it could be. Jason's acidic rantings in the third section were especially enjoyable to perform. All in all it's one of the recordings I'm most proud of, and it's still doing service on Audible and, mirabile dictu, in retail.

Blasts from the Past, Day 2

2011-06-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday's post got a nice response. Seems people are rather curious about "the old days" of audiobook recording. In the 30's and 40's (well before my time, of course), "talking books" were recorded on vinyl discs that played at 16 3/4 rpm and lasted about 30 minutes. Page turns and minor slips went uncorrected. If you really fumbled it you had to start all over again on a fresh disc. Then reel-to-reel came along, but because of the way the Library of Congress recorded the tapes, on both sides at 3 3/4 speed, you couldn't cut them up. Retakes had to be punched in and punched out on the fly. If the engineer's finger slipped and you recorded over the start of the following sentence, you had to record that sentence again. If you slipped once more and went over the mark, you had to redo the next sentence, and so on and so forth. Young engineers these days marvel at how I can exactly reproduce the timing of a re-take. I had a lot of practice!

Did I mention that we smoked in the booth? It wasn't unusual to have a cigarette going in the ashtray and pause for a few puffs between paragraphs. Hard to imagine these days.

Flo Gibson was a larger-than-life personality in more ways than one. She was very tall--"statuesque" would have been the polite word back then--while her husband Charles was very short and rattled around the house like a character from a Wodehouse novel. The stairs to the basement were narrow and steep, and Flo would hurl herself down them in a state of perpetual haste. Sometimes this was a literal phenomenon and she would end up in a heap at the bottom of the steps. In one of these plunges she broke her neck (really) and this was the start of some of the physical problems that plagued her in later years. Eventually she had an elevator installed that could take her from her bedroom directly to the recording booth two floors below.

Flo held a rather idealized view of her favorite authors. A spunky young woman who was engineering one of her Edith Wharton recordings remarked that she found a certain passage "sexy." Flo stopped dead in her tracks, glared at the poor thing through the glass window of the booth and replied frostily, "There is no sex in Edith Wharton!"

I did a lot of nifty recordings for Audio Book Contractors, including a special translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy by a local college professor that attempted to explicate the many topical references without resorting to lengthy footnotes. It read very well, actually, and can still be found on Audible. I also recorded Cyrano de Bergerac and King Lear, O. Henry and Arthur Conan Doyle, and a host of other entertaining things. One book I do NOT remember recording was Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--yet there it is on Audible, much to my surprise, along with a highly complimentary review. I listened to the sample and was startled to hear myself reading something I simply don't recall having done. (Must have been all that wine.) But it's definitely me, and it's not bad at all, if I do say so. Back then, when there were few British narrators working in America, we Americans did a lot of classic British lit, using a sort of "faux" accent that resembled a cross between Basil Rathbone and Alexander Scourby. Nowadays we get real Brits to do these things, of course.

Blasts from the Past, Day 1

2011-06-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

As my contribution to June Is Audiobook Month, I'm going to do a post a day about books that I've particularly enjoyed recording over the course of my career--those that are still available, of course. Even if you don't want to listen to them, you might get some good ideas for reading!

Today we'll set the Audiobook Wayback Machine to 1984 when I was a young narrator for the Talking Books program in Washington D.C. and was invited by Flo Gibson to join her fledgling company, Audio Book Contractors.

Flo passed away earlier this year after a long and fruitful career narrating the great classics. She managed to top a thousand titles before failing health made it impossible for her to record. We young folks would take the bus over to Foxhall Road, a very ritzy part of D.C., where the maid would admit us to the basement of her palatial Georgian home. Usually there were snacks or hors d'euvres left over from some fancy event the night before, and we'd walk to a nearby gourmet store and buy a bottle of wine to sip while working. On hot summer days we could take a dip in the pool. Flo's husband Charles, a retired Chilean diplomat educated at Eton, would occasionally drop downstairs to chat and offer the fellows a cigar. At some point Flo was sure to burst in and whirl around for awhile, complaining about an argument she was having with Polly Roosevelt or boasting about her lunch with Barbara Bush. It was a remarkable place to work. Eventually she started contracting to Books On Tape, which is what launched several of us on our commercial careers.

Anyway, one of the first titles I did for her was The Aspern Papers by Henry James. It's remained a favorite of mine after all these years. There are several version on Audible, but I'm amazed at how well this one holds up, even though the recording was sourced from old reel-to-reel tapes. I was probably smoking a cigar and sipping Cabernet as I read, which would account for some of the liberties I took in the more dramatic passages! The climactic scene sends chills down my spine to this day.

And don't you love the cover? This is for the Audible re-issue. Always frugal, Flo kept packaging costs low by photocopying typewritten cassette labels and tucking arty postcards into the plastic slipcases.

Latest from the "Couldn't Put It Down" Department...

2011-05-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

Morag Joss's Among the Missing is a brilliant take on a theme explored by Thornton Wilder in his famous novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey--how fate or coincidence causes the lives of random people to converge in extraordinary ways. The three characters presented in the novel are all at crisis points in their lives. Ron has just been released from jail after serving time for causing a bus accident that took the lives of a group of school children. Anabel is a slightly frowsy forty-something whose marriage to a man she met online is disrupted when she learns she is pregnant. Sylva is an illegal Polish immigrant who lives with her husband and child in an abandoned trailer.

When a bridge collapses in Inverness, Scotland, these three people are thrown together in circumstances that will test their collective courage and their individual sanity.

Joss is the author of a popular mystery series and several stand-alone thrillers. This is a hybrid--part thriller, part literary fiction. She combines a beautiful writing style with rich characters and taut plotting. I picked this up with the intent of skimming it for casting purposes, but ended up reading it in one sitting. Couldn't. Put It. Down. The casting was challenging, especially the role of Sylva, but I couldn't be happier with the results. In fact, our proofer, Alison Raleigh, emailed me just yesterday saying she was completely blown away by the book and the performances, and was off to the bookstore to find more by this author.

Among the Missing is narrated by Robin Sachs, Kate Reading and Cassandra Campbell for Blackstone Ausio and will be released on June 21.

My previous entry in the "Couldn't Put It Down" Department was Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which has become a huge hit with rave reviews for the novel and the audio production. If you haven't listened to that one yet, by all means do so. And don't miss Among the Missing, it's a winner.

Recent Projects

2011-04-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy spring, I'm happy to say, and I haven't had the luxury of blogging, but I'm way overdue and feel the urge again, so I'll indulge in a spate of posts while the inspiration lasts.

Drinking with Miss Dutchie by Ed Breslin, for Blackstone Audio--A short, sweet paean to man's best friend from a guy who learned the hard way. Breslin was a two-fisted drinker and smoker whose marriage and over-driven career were teetering on the edge of disaster when he came up with a scheme to distract his wife from bugging him about his self-destructive behavior. Buy her a dog! Yeah, that'll do it! The result was a gradual but dramatic turn-around in his own life, due in large part to Miss Dutchie and her endearing ways.

Labrador owners will particularly relish this one. We joined the club two years ago when we adopted Maggie the Blonde Bombshell, the happiest dog in the world. Now she has an adopted sister, Ruby the Black Madonna of the Bedroom, a huge Lab-Newfie mix who situates herself on the bed all day and barks for room service.

The ending is about as wrenching as you'd expect, so be prepared. But it's a wonderful reminder of the effect that animals can have on our lives.

Secretariat by William Nack, for Audible.com--A terrific story, as you might expect. It's not quite the rags-to-riches tale that made Seabiscuit such a heart-warming favorite, but it's a fascinating glimpse into the world of horse racing and breeding. There are plenty of engaging characters and some excellent descriptive writing. Nack lays solid groundwork for a rousing finish that doesn't disappoint.
And that was one amazing animal. It wasn't until i watched a video of the 1973 Belmont Stakes that I realized what all the fuss was about. Simply incredible.

As part of my preparation I watched the movie, a rather lackluster Disney production with some amateurish acting and editing. I'm generally a fan of John Malkovich, when he's cast well, but he looks so uncomfortable here playing a "good guy" that it sets your teeth on edge. And his "French"! Was a language coach not part of the budget, or what? Anyway, the racing scenes are well done and worth a download or rental if you're interested in complimenting the book.

Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov, for Gildan Media--Every teacher and parent should read this. It's a "how-to" for some of the most effective teaching techniques in circulation today. Lemov is the founder of Uncommon Schools, a training and evaluation center that has turned out terrific teachers and helped establish a string of wildly successful charter schools in the Northeast. Watching the accompanying videos (available online for purchasers of the book) makes you realize what an exhausting, but ultimately rewarding, job it is to teach at this level. Even if you aren't a teacher, the book helps you understand the challenges of running an effective classroom. As a parent I found it helpful in homework sessions, in terms of staying focused on the work and engaging more fully with my daughter in her lessons.

Yeah, I know, lucky daughter!

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, for Tantor Media--The grandaddy of futuristic dystopian novels and a precursor to the more famous 1984. Written in the form of a fictional diary, the novel tracks the spiritual awakening of D-503, a drone-like member of a future society in which everything is made of glass, such that no thought or activity can be concealed from the leaders of One State. There are strikingly imaginative touches and some unforgettable images. As far as I know this is the first time the book will be available in audio, and fans of dystopian sci-fi should not miss it.

Babbit by Sinclair Lewis, for Blackstone Audio--Perhaps not Lewis' greatest achievement, but it's one of my favorites, after Dodsworth, and it's a wonderful chance to ham it up a bit, if I may say so. It was particularly interesting to me coming on the heels of We, in the sense that Babbitt undergoes a brief but explosive "awakening," only to be brought back into line by the forces of conformity. And it's disturbingly relevant to recent trends in politics and society, if ya know what I mean.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, for Blackstone Audio--Okay, if you want to feel like you work for bastards and your life isn't worth two cents, read this. I mean, this book can lead to some serious paranoia. No, I'd never read it in school, so the impact has been fresh and potent. I thoroughly enjoyed Oil, which I narrated for Blackstone two years ago. That book, though less famous than The Jungle, is a satirical juggernaut bursting with rich characters and dialogue. (If you've only seen the movie, There Will Be Blood, do yourself a favor and read the book. You can't really understand what a hideous botch the film was until you do.) The Jungle, of course, is another matter. What makes it so damnably compelling is the same power of hope and salvation that drives Jurgis Rudkus in his quest to find some humanity in the world. Will someone, somewhere, give this guy a break?

Plus, you'll never eat deviled ham again.

Authors on Deck

2010-12-04T23:14:00.001-08:00

An article by physicist Lawrence Krauss in today's Wall Street Journal ("The Lies of Science Writing") reminded me to post about some marvelous author reads coming up for Blackstone.

The idea of having authors read their own books is a controversial one in the audiobook business. Sometimes the effect can be splendid, as when T. C. Boyle (Tortilla Curtain, Wild Child and Other Stories), Rick Bragg (Ava's Man, The Most They Ever Had) and David Sedaris, among others, exceed expectations by bringing vividness and warmth to their own creations. In other cases, the results can be disappointing--or even downright disastrous. (I won't names names--all audio publishers have a few of these to their credit--but this unfortunate series of customer comments on Audible gives you an idea of how badly things can go.)

Whenever an agent or book publisher casually remarks, "Oh, by the way, the author is interested in narrating the book..." a lump forms in the pit of my stomach, and I immediately begin thinking of ways to discourage such folly. Writers often live in remote places, far from an appropriate recording venue. Generally a specialized director has be brought in at no small expense. And the process itself can be agonizing--I am familiar with at least one instance of a famous politician who required literally thousands of edits because he couldn't read a whole sentence (no, it wasn't "W") and another case in which a celebrity author didn't make it through her ghost-written autobiography because she couldn't pronounce most of the vocabulary and wasn't familiar with the events and people as related in the book!

When they go well, there are advantages to author reads. You don't have to struggle with research (at least most of the time); there's a natural connect between the text and the reader; and the absence of slickness and polish lends an unforced, authentic feel. In addition, retail outlets are more interested in carrying the audio version if the author reads the book, and you've got a better shot at a Grammy--all the Spoken Word nominations this year went to author reads!

Whatever the joys and hazards, Blackstone is fortunate to have several super author reads coming up, which brings me back to Lawrence Krauss, who will be coming to Blackstone's studios in Ashland later this month to narrate his new book, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, to be released in March of next year. Professor Krauss narrated an abridged version of his book The Physics of Star Trek some years back. He is a gifted, engaging public speaker and a superstar in the world of physics. This will be a lively and authoritative experience for Feynman fans as well as anyone interested in popular science.

Ron Reagan has written a wonderful new book about his father, the former President. Entitled My Father at 100, it's an affectionate look at this remarkable and, in many ways, enigmatic man. Recording sessions were recently completed at Cedar House Audio in Seattle, where Ron lives, and the results are terrific. Regardless of your political persuasion, this will be a intriguing listen. The book hits the stores on January 18th.

Finally, Andre Dubus III arrives in Ashland next week to record Townie: A Memoir. Andre's latest book details his own youth in a small, violence-ridden Massachusetts town and explores the strange relationship with his father that eventually pushed him towards a career in writing and virtually saved his life. Most of you will be familiar with at least the movie version of his best-selling novel, The House of Sand and Fog. If you haven't heard Andre's recording of the book, performed in tandem with his wife, you owe it to yourself to give it a listen. It's a wonderful performance--what it lacks in ultimate polish it more than makes up for in utter conviction and total command of the story and characters. I expect that his approach to the story of his own life will be equally, if not more, compelling. Townie: A Memoir pubs at the end of February.

Chalmers Johnson

2010-11-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

Chalmers Johnson, the brilliant and famously contrarian foreign policy expert, passed away on Saturday. Steve Clemons has written an interesting summary of his career for The Washington Note.

Johnson published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire just prior to 9/11. After the tragedy, the book was so much in demand that the publisher ran out of stock and had to initiate several new print runs. An updated edition was published in 2004. His other major books--Nemesis, The Sorrows of Empire and Dismantling the Empire--variously explore the perils of a militaristic, imperialist foreign policy. All have been produced for audio by Blackstone and are available at our website or digitally at Audible, iTunes and other download venues.

Mr. Blah Blah Blah Visits Down Under

2010-11-14T19:31:00.000-08:00

My cell phone rang last Friday evening. I didn't recognize the number and I almost didn't answer, thinking it was a robocall or something equally obnoxious. But curiosity got the better of me and I picked up. It was the Australian Broadcasting Company, of all things. They wanted to do a live interview with me the next day. One of their hosts, Tony Peacock, had decided to give audiobooks a try, and his first purchase was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, which I narrated earlier this year for Blackstone.

We arranged to talk the following day at 4 p.m. PST, which is 11 a.m. Canberra time. Of course, Saturday I was dithering around and almost missed the call, but we managed to connect and I did the interview, which lasted about 10 minutes. They sent me an audio copy, which I've posted so you can hear me blabbing away. The sound quality is poor, unfortunately, but if you listen carefully you can occasionally hear me say something interesting.

The Captured

2010-11-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

I was doing a vanity search on Audible tonight, typing in my own name to see how I'm doin' and what's sellin' or not sellin' (yes, I do this often; I'm not ashamed of it). I was surprised to see The Captured by Scott Zesch up there in the top ten. I recorded this back in 2005 for Blackstone and absolutely loved it. Booklist summed it up this way:

On New Year's Day, 1870, Adolph Korn, the author's ancestor and son of German immigrants, was captured by three Apaches near his family's cabin in central Texas. Adolph was traded to a band of Quahada Comanches, with whom he lived until November 1872, when the Comanches traded their captives for those held by the U.S. Army. Adolph was irrevocably changed. Considering himself Indian, he lived in a cave, and died alone in 1900. The author's search into Korn's sad life led him to the similar stories of eight other children captured in Texas between 1865 and 1871. Drawing on his tenacious research and interviews with the captives' descendants, Zesch compiles a gripping account of the lives of these children as they lived and traveled with their Indian captors. He delves into the reasons for their "Indianization," which for most of them lasted the rest of their lives, and discusses why they couldn't adjust to white society. A fascinating, meticulously documented chronicle of the often-painful confrontations between whites and Indians during the final years of Indian Territory.

If that sounds interesting, it is, and I was so fond of this book that I tracked it for some time following its release and was disappointed that it didn't get more attention. Now it seems to have re-emerged, I'm not sure why--perhaps a movie or TV series has sparked interest in the topic. Anyway I highly recommend it. The narrator is adequate but the book tells a fascinating story, and tells it very well.

UPDATE: It was part of a big half-price sale on Audible. Well, good, I'm glad it's getting a new audience.

There Never Was Such a Frantic Guy...

2010-11-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

At the end of October, Blackstone Audio wrapped recording sessions for its audio adaptation of Hamlet, as originally presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

For years now, Blackstone narrator and OSF star Tony Heald has been encouraging a collaboration between the two companies, and his efforts have finally born fruit. Hamlet is the first of what will be an ongoing series of audio adaptations of OSF's distinctive, American-flavored Shakespeare. The current production incorporates some fascinating visual and interpretive touches. Stylistically speaking, the defining sequence is the "Players' scene," in which Hamlet engineers an entertainment designed to reveal his uncle's complicity in the murder of his father. In the OSF production, the hired troupe improvises a "hip-hop" version of the play-within-a-play, complete with wireless mics, electronic instruments and a scratch track, while the tonily-dressed members of the court look on in growing apprehension. The famous "nunnery" scene similarly references modern technology, Ophelia being fitted with a listening device, the better to capture Hamlet's presumed insanity; Hamlet discovers the "wire" mid-scene, adding fuel to his suspicious rage. The ghost of Hamlet's father is played by deaf actor Howie Seago, who signs his lines while the actor playing Hamlet (Dan Donahue) voices them for the benefit of the audience.

As you can guess, not all of these interpolations will translate effectively to audio. Working with OSF's artistic director, Bill Rauch, we've come up with alternative ideas that both reinforce and enhance the up-to-date concept.

Once in the studio, the actors adapted quickly and creatively to the challenges of working in a more intimate medium. It was fascinating to watch them adjust to their environment and discover things that were exciting and effective in the imagined world of audio.

The production is now in the mixing stage, which can take three weeks or more of intensive work to embed the voices in a convincing "soundscape." Blackstone plans to release the final product early next year. It's going to be a very exciting, uniquely American take on this most famous of Shakespeare's plays.

The title of this post comes from a Frank Loesser song written for the 1949 movie, Red, Hot and Blue featuring the inimitable Betty Hutton. Unfortunately, whenever I think of Hamlet I can't get the lyrics out of my head:

Hamlet,

Was the prince of a spot called Denmark (mark my words!)

There never was such a frantic guy either before or since (he was a dreamboy)

And like a hole in the head, Denmark needed that prince!

'Cause he bumped off his uncle,

And he Mickey Finned his mother,

And he drove his gal to suicide,

And stabbed her big brother,

'Cause he didn't want nobody else but himself should live--

He was whatcha might call...uncooperative!

You can watch a video of it here. My apologies to purists.

What the...

2010-11-01T22:52:00.000-07:00

Well, looky here. Harper Audio seems to have purchased another one of my ancient recordings from Books On Tape. Years ago they bought my performance of John Irving's The Cider House Rules, which is still doing service on Audible and seems to be quite popular. I still get emails about it. Now they've hijacked one of my Elmore Leonard recordings. I think I did all of Leonard's books for BOT, and they were all a blast (though my favorite is still Maximum Bob, but that is long o.o.p.). Looks like Harper did some picking and choosing between various publishers' versions of these warhorses. George Guidall's wonderful renderings were done for Recorded Books, for instance, while I was doing the same titles for BOT. Those were the days of non-exclusive rights and you actually had a choice of narrators for some of the more popular authors. And if you're wondering who "Alexander Adams" is, well, the fact is that a lot of us freelancers used to change our names to avoid trouble with competing publishers, who thought we ought to be working exclusively for them--without the benefit of a lucrative contract, of course. Those days are gone, happily. Not that we cared much. I mean, who would have thought you'd get famous doing audiobooks? Seems like Harper might have put my real name on it, it certainly has more cache these days than "Alexander Adams," for what it's worth.

Books On Tape has retired about 90 percent of the titles I did for them throughout the 1980's and 1990's. Not that I blame them, they were old things recorded on tape, most of them, and fashions have changed since then, when it was a point of pride to tally how many pages you could read without stopping. And to be sure the audio rights have expired and economics argues against renewing them. Still. Some of the top-tier stuff has been re-recorded, most of it by Ed Herrmann. People used to tell me I looked like Ed Herrmann, back when I wore wire-rim glasses. "You look like that guy that played FDR!" Ed and I don't look much alike these days, but he's doing all my old books now, and doing them beautifully--the David McCulloughs, the Scott Turows, the list goes on and on. But most of the others have disappeared into the ether. I particularly regret the John Gardners: October Light and The Sunlight Dialogues. I was awfully proud of those. Boy could that guy write. And Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of the best books I've ever read about anything.

I certainly talked at a good clip back then! I don't think I could do that now. I see from the cover there's a new series on TV featuring the main character. I hope it's better than that Maximum Bob series with Beau Bridges from a few years back. Eek.

Here's a sample I saved from Maximum Bob all those years ago. I still think it's funny, but then I'm biased.

Halloween in Ashland

2010-11-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Halloween in Ashland is a trip. Everybody--and I mean everybody--shows up in costume to parade down Main Street. The crowd starts to form around 2 p.m. in front of the public library. At 3 p.m. a drum corp thunders and the marching begins! It's more like strolling, actually, because it's so darn crowded, and everybody stops to chat with bystanders and admire everyone else's costumes. I find it wonderfully cheering and relaxing and could have sauntered along like this all the way to Portland.

We brought along our Vampire Queen (Alicia) who met up with her friends the Vampire Cheetah (Macy) and a Dragon (Owen).

Guess who I went as? (No, I'm not the mummy.)

Afterwards we had martinis and pot luck with some friends (guess who made the martinis?) and then took the kids trick-or-treating.

If you guessed from the big pumpkin that our friends own a fly-fishing shop, you guessed right.

Autobiography of Mark Twain

2010-10-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

Well, it's done--proofed, edited, "in the can" and out in the world. I refer to Blackstone Audio's production of the first volume of the University of California Press's magnificent new edition of Mark Twain's complete, unexpurgated autobiographical dictations.

Twain struggled for years to find a suitable method of laying down a record of his life and thoughts. After numerous written attempts, none of which proved satisfactory, he hit upon the idea of dictation. In 1906 he began a series of oral reminiscences that continued on and off for the next three years and resulted in a full file drawer of typed manuscript. Apart from a few excerpts he prepared for magazine publication, Twain placed an embargo on this enormous project, to be observed until 100 years after his death. The knowledge that he--and anyone else concerned--would be safely in the grave by that time liberated Twain to speak frankly about any person or topic that struck his fancy.

Despite the prohibition, in the decades following his death various editions of the "autobiography" appeared in heavily edited form. The current venture represents the first complete release of this material in what is believed to be the form Twain actually wished it to take.

This first volume includes an introduction, various early materials that he contemplated including in the final manuscript, and the first series of dictations from 1906. Two subsequent volumes will be released over the next couple of years. The entire text can be viewed at www.marktwainproject.org, and additional material can be found at www.thisismarktwain.com. The explanatory notes, appendixes and other supporting materials are very interesting and worth a look. There's a fascinating explanation of how they decrypted the four different typescripts and managed to decipher Twain's actual intentions. It's a forensic tour de force and goes far to explain why the project was 20 years in the making.

Things get off to something of a slow start as the editors explain the scope and logic of the project, and we wend our way through the various abortive attempts and peripheral material. (Don't get me wrong, it'll all very interesting.) But when the actual dictations kick in, we are off and running. A coherent pattern begins to emerge, and it's illuminating.

Those familiar with Twain will know that by the end of his life he was a disheartened and embittered man. A misplaced trust in others led to a series of disastrous financial endeavors that left him debt-ridden and cynical, and robbed him of any chance of a secure retirement. He was similarly robbed by Death, who took his wife and two of his daughters before their time. War and politics disgusted him, and the rising tide of American imperialism and religious sanctimony prompted responses that are, even to modern ears, startling in their savagery. Even passages that begin in a light-hearted manner are likely to conclude with a gloomy, "What's it all for?"

But by and large we are treated to exactly the sort of warmth, wit and insight we would expect from this great humorist and lion of American letters. His dazzling, fluid style and impeccable timing are on full display. When he approaches matters of the heart, he speaks with a direct simplicity that is extraordinarily moving.

I have narrated several of Twain's books for Blackstone--among them The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the latter as "Tom Parker')--and am in the process of recording or re-recording the rest of the canonical works for them. Life on the Mississippi will be released in in December and A Tramp Abroad in January, with Innocents Abroad, Roughing It and others to follow through the year. I feel a strong affinity for Twain's style, and listeners, for the most part, seem to agree. That said, I was not a shoo-in for this project. The publishers wanted approval over the narrator, and I bit my nails for three weeks waiting to hear if they would allow me to do it. Good taste triumphed and I was selected.

Discussions ensued about what to include in the audio version and what to leave out. Notes and references were rightly considered too cumbersome, and the appended speeches and other material, while interesting, are a bit anti-climactic. We settled on the editorial introduction and the main body of Twain's writings and dictations. One significant piece had to be bypassed, which is unfortunate because it is published for the first time. It is an introduction Twain wrote to a translation of the transcripts of Joan of Arc's trial. An exuberant editor took it upon himself to brutally blue-line Twain's prose, regularizing the punctuation and smoothing out the syntax. Twain composed a savagely funny response (which he never mailed). This part is well-known and is included in the recording, but the edited introduction itself (which the clever UC Press typesetters have meticulously reconstructed) is full of strike-throughs, inserts and comments that would have been impossible to read with any fluency or coherence. As noted in the audio version, it can be viewed at www.marktwainproject.org.

Finally, I was confronted with the question of how to voice Twain himself. As far as anyone knows, no recordings of Mark Twain have survived. In 1891, he attempted to dictate An American Claimant onto a series of wax cylinders, filling four dozen of them before giving up in frustration. These have never been found, though they reportedly contained a great deal of swearing at the machine itself. Thomas Edison made some recordings of Twain in 1909, but these were lost in a fire in 1914. The American actor William Gillette knew Twain well and mimicked him as part of a touring show he put together in the latter part of the 19th century. In 1934 he performed his imitation for a group of Harvard students, and a recording of the event can be heard at http://www.salwenpr.com/mtspeaks.html. It's a fascinating document, but I have little doubt that 20 hours of this sort of delivery would drive even the most patient modern listener around the bend.

Hal Holbrook's impersonation is justly famous, and unlikely to be bettered in ours or any future generation. It's also sui generis and I, for one, wouldn't presume to improve upon its daft brilliance. After experimenting with different approaches, I decided to do what I've done before in Twain's works--speak more or less in my own voice, avoid any hint of caricature, and devote my energy to connecting with Twain's heart and mind. It was rewarding from my standpoint; I can only hope listeners agree.

Here's a sample from the first set of dictations, a little story that exemplifies the sort of self-deprecating charm that permeates the whole work:

I Get Mail...

2010-10-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of mail that keeps you going on rough days:

Dear Sr. A few year's ago I heared a book and the voice has got to be yours. I've been to your web directory but just can't find it. I even went to my Indianapolis Library where I had gotten it. They can;t even find it. Your my last hope of ever finding my all time book. The book had on it's cover a young slim very tanned pilot of ww2 that flew off an aircraft carrier then lost his route then rain out of fuel. The pilot and 2 other planes that went down with him they servived apx 15 to 20 days on a life raft. My dad lost both legs on Iwo Jima, I've got photo's of him with Ira Hayes so a true story like this means a lot. Me and my wife are team truck drivers 30 books a month. I'm purchase several then put them on my ipod. I If you can please send me the name of that book.

Best regards David...

He's referring to The Raft by Robert Trumbull, one of my all-time favorite books, too--a beautifully written story of heroism and survival during WWII. It's always wonderful to hear that the stories we tell mean so much to people...

Why I Love Narrators: Part 1

2010-09-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

If I haven't mentioned before how often, in the course of casting 30 or more books a months, our narrators pull my sorry, inefficient b*tt out of the fire, now would be as good a time as any.

Here's this week's example:

When Bo Caldwell's City of Tranquil Light landed on my desk over a month ago, I took a couple of shots at reading it, but I always got interrupted by something urgent and never got a chance to delve into it as deeply as I wanted to. To judge by the opening chapter, it appeared straightforward enough: An old man reminisces about his life as a missionary in China--how he left his life as a midwestern farmer to pursue a calling, how he met his wife in China and how much they both loved their adopted homeland. But I knew there was more. Caldwell's previous novel, The Distant Land of Our Fathers, was based on family experiences and had profound spiritual aspects, and some research told me that she is considered a lyrical writer and masterful storyteller. I yearned to get a better handle on it so I could do it justice. But as the production deadline loomed and I started running out of time, I made a logical, if hasty, choice. I decided to send it to Bronson Pinchot.

If you aren't yet familiar with Bronson's narration work, you should be. He has an exceptional ability to adapt himself to just about any sort of book you can think of, from sardonic humor (The Learners) to vampire-laced thrillers (Blood Oath) to taut war dramas (Matterhorn). I've also been struck by the fact that each author he encounters (and he's not shy about contacting them) thinks that he's the PERFECT narrator for their book. Being an exceptionally well-read person, he's acutely sensitive to the style and tone of a book. And if you've seen his work on stage or in film, you know that he's preternaturally quick on his feet. It's not that his approach changes drastically from book to book--it's just that he puts all his energy into serving the text in detailed and nuanced ways.

So I figured if anyone could help me out here, it would be Bronson. Imagine my relief when I received this email:

"You mentioned being slightly on the fence about the book...it is STUNNING. Takes her 90 pages to get going, which is, admittedly, a lot. Yesterday read the diary entries of a young couple slowly watching their baby die and wept through the whole thing, quite restrainedly of course, but it was perfect for the tone of the writing. The book is a watercolor masterpiece.

B"

If anyone wants to know what I think audiobook narrating is about, this pretty well sums it up. Here's someone who's frankly assessing the mechanical challenges of the material, but completely giving himself over to the emotional and intellectual rewards found therein. And it's reassuring to hear him pat himself on the back a bit--it tells me he thought about his choices and likes what he's done.

Best of all, he's done a huge part of my job for me--the part I wish I had more time for! How grateful should I be for that?

Now I want to listen to it--don't you?

Bo Caldwell's City of Tranquil Light pubs September 28th.

Cryoburn

2010-09-16T23:00:00.000-07:00

If you're a big Lois McMaster Bujold fan, you probably already know this. If you're sort of a fan and haven't heard, you'll want to know. If you've never heard or read her stuff--well, you really should.

Cryoburn is the latest installment in Lois's wonderful series featuring Miles Vorkosigan, the frail, dashing, ever-resourceful and hopelessly romantic space-traveler who uses brains and charm to overcome severe physical handicaps as he flits around the universe in the service of his home planet's security force. If you're not familiar with these books, I can barely attempt to sum them up. Ms. Bujold has created a finely-textured, richly detailed, eminently logical--and deeply human--universe. The first in the series, Shards of Honor, finds Miles's future parents on opposite sides of a planetary war. Romance blossoms and in Barrayar they have married and are attempting to conceive in the midst of a fierce political battle that turns violent, with devastating effects on the child they finally manage to bring into the world. With Warrior's Apprentice, we jump ahead sixteen years to pick up the story of Miles and his struggle to live up to his father's--and his own--high expectations. And on we go from there--for ten (now eleven) terrific books, plus some short stories and spin-offs--following Miles as he learns the ropes of war and politics to become ever more respected--and powerful.

I've never been a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy stuff, but from the very first book in this series I was hooked. The characters grow and mature and take on wonderful shadings and subtleties. The dialogue is priceless, and Lois never misses an opportunity to mingle wry humor with taut action and a sprinkling of philosophical commentary.

I think her fans assumed that with Diplomatic Immunity, she had pretty much wrapped up Miles's tale. To our delight, she has sprung Cryoburn on us and I can safely say that it does not disappoint. Miles, now married and with a growing family, and thoroughly enjoying his job as an Imperial Auditor (read: galactic trouble-shooter), is sent to Kibou-Daini (also known as "New Hope") to investigate peculiar goings-on in that planet's cryogenics industry. Getting cryo-ed is now big business and virtually everyone, at some point, opts to be frozen alive, in the hope of awakening to a cure for disease or old age, or simply a more pleasant future. But corporate shenanigans threaten to wreak havoc on millions of slumbering customers unless someone gets to the bottom of a burgeoning scandal.

The writing, plotting and character development are as sharp as ever, and the philosophical issues make for some hair-raising contemplation. So cheers to Lois for giving us yet another Miles Vorkosigan novel. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for more.

Cryoburn will be released October 19th.

Why I Haven't Been Blogging

2010-09-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

If you're wondering why I haven't blogged lately, I'll sum it up in two words:

Sixty. Eight.

That's the number of titles we've been preparing to release for October.

Just for some perspective, twenty-five is a healthy average. Thirty-five is a very busy month. Sixty-eight is insane.

What accounts for this madness? Well, we've been making a big push into the library market and have been responding to requests. Thus--eight Amish romances, eight English bodice-rippers, a smattering of young adult stuff...oh, and vampires, let's not forget vampires! Half-dead, sort-of-dead, not-so-dead, really dead, nearly dead--you name it.

Also, a lot of topical material, mostly politics. We won't delve into it too deeply, suffice it to say that there's a lot of anti-this and anti-that that's very hot right now and we'd be fools not to cash in on the various sentiments flying around this season.

Add to that a number of what we call "drop-ins"--hot titles that pop up out of nowhere that nobody's grabbed for audio, and which need to be rushed to market if we're going to catch the wave.

Anyway, I'll be blogging about these and other new stuff in the coming weeks. I promise to be better! In the meantime, picture me trotting back and forth between the copying machine and the shipping department, my arms loaded with stacks of manuscripts. The narrator in me finds it thrilling. The producer in me is exhausted!

Our Summer Vacation

2010-08-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

It's been a very busy three weeks and I haven't had time to really sit down and write something decent, but it's time to get caught up.

I'll start with our summer "vacation" at the end of July. "Vacation" is in quotes because out of a two-week trip we actually end up with about three days to ourselves as a family. We headed to Washington, DC on the 15th and spent five days with Tanya's parents. Alicia was practically raised by her Grammy and Pop-Pop for her first three years when both of us worked in DC. In addition she now has a four-year-old cousin to play with. And I have to admit that the backyard pool is not bad, especially since it was ROASTING HOT on the East Coast. A visit to the National Zoo was almost more than we could manage--even the two little ones wilted after a couple of hours. Tanya wanted to see the Vermeers at the National Gallery, which she did while Alicia and I played a nifty little treasure hunt game that they print up for kids. The we slogged through the ROASTING HEAT to the Museum of Natural History, which is only a block away but it felt like ten miles in the ROASTING HEAT. Once you get used to the lovely dry heat here in Southern Oregon, the humidity back east is pretty draining.

Anyway, we headed up to Maine for the AudioFile Lobsterbake the following Wednesday, stopping overnight to visit our EVIL COMPETITOR friends Kevin and Laura Colebank of Tantor Media. We had a lovely overnight stay there in Connecticut and I won't tell you what we gossiped about but it might well have been YOU!

Then on to Boothbay Harbor, ME and a cabin we rent every year in the Sprucewold community on the hill above town. To our surprise and delight the owners had added a new kitchen which made all the difference in the world. It was "cozy" before but now it was really comfortable.

Friday night the gang met up at McSeagull's on the waterfront and typically I had too much to drink. But it was a great way to start the weekend. Saturday everyone wandered over to Robin Whitten's lovely cottage on the water in East Boothbay for the traditional afternoon of steamed lobster, clams, sweet potatoes, boiled eggs and Robin's fantastic salsa mixes. [Robin is editor of AudioFile magazine, the premier news and reviews magazine for the audiobook industry.]

Last year it was jammed. Not only did the Audio Publishers Association hold their board meeting in Boothbay, but a whole crop of new faces showed up from New York and other points. It was very festive, but the traditional round of evening readings got very long. This year Robin cracked the whip and held us to five minutes. I pleaded for TEN and suggested that everyone bring something they were currently working on or had recently completed. This invariably peaks listener interest. Well, it was an exemplary presentation this year. Every reading was riveting and pertinent. Too bad most of the publishers begged off this year! But I met some new faces and got a refreshing take on some older ones.

Sunday featured brunch at Robin's--leftover lobster salad and other concoctions, and a nice group of folks who were able to arrange their schedules as to be able to stick around for another day.

Monday we were finally able to get some time to ourselves and luckily the weather was beautiful. We spent some time at the beach and took a whale-watching cruise during which we actually saw some whales! During the cruise my cellphone rang, which was shocking because AT&T in those parts is awful. On a whim I decided to check the internet signal and got the best reception of the whole trip. Do not be too hard on me when I tell you that I spent a portion of the four-hour boat ride catching up on my email.

Thursday we reluctantly left but headed down to Portland for a pleasant two-day visit with narrators Tavia Gilbert and Bill Dufris. Tavia took us to one of the best restaurants I've ever experienced--and I've travelled all over the world. It was Thai/fusion and just spectacular. We ate there again the next night and it was even better than the first night. [It's Boda on Congress Street in downtown Portland if you're ever in the area.]

Finally we flew out from Boston on Saturday wishing we had another week. I'm usually glad to get back but this year I could have used a few more days at the beach. But kudos to United Airlines for a flawless round trip.

I drew shocked stares...

2010-07-16T12:27:00.001-07:00

...at a Blackstone meeting yesterday. We were scheduling upcoming releases, and one of our acquisitions people announced that she had acquired several series of--wait for it--Amish romances.

"Oh goody!" I exclaimed.

Now, between you and me, we audiobook folks can be a snobbish bunch. It's about great literature, timeless books in a timeless format, high art preserved for the ages by the great actors of our time, yaddah yaddah.

And, me being the gatekeeper of this great art form, I guess everyone expected me to groan and roll my eyes.

Nothing of the sort!

I love mass market fiction. It's fun, it's easy to cast, it's a breeze to record. Any narrator with a sense of humor and a little perspective is going to have a blast romping across the moors tossing bodices this way and that, or creeping through the sagebrush to ambush the gol-darn rustlers, or even clopping along the country roads of Ohio while the seasons turn and life's little lessons are played out against a backdrop of barns and bundling boards. You know there's an eager audience hanging on every syllable, breathlessly awaiting the next lusty (or wholesome) kiss and the inevitable meting out of just desserts.

One of the pleasantest times I ever spent behind the mic was recording a sunny little Christian teen romance novel. The characters were colorful and lent themselves to creative "mental casting" (a little Judy Garland here, a touch of Walter Brennan there, and some Barbara Stanwick thrown in for good measure); no violence or grueling slasher scenes; NO boudoir stuff (most narrators dread graphic sex--it's embarrassing); and everything turns out ducky in the end. What's not to like?

Even more fun is goading skeptical actors into treating this stuff like Tolstoy and breathing life into the cliches and recycled plots. "I dare you to make this sound great!" I tell them. It's the satisfaction of a B-movie director who, against the odds, turns out an engrossing little picture. I love bursting the bubble of low expectations.

So all you secret romance fans--you know who you are--get ready! Blackstone has a great cross-section of this ever-popular genre coming up this fall, and it's going to be fun to listen to. We've got your lusty Scottish earls with rippling abs, your winsome Amish lasses who yearn for that perfect fellow, your cozy quilting shops where small-town troubles get "ironed out" (pun intended). Stay tuned for specifics as the release dates approach.

I am Technology's...well, you know

2010-07-12T23:08:00.000-07:00

Can I say how much I love my new iPad? Sorry to boast, but this thing is a marvel. I mainly got it for reading manuscripts--I get tired of printing out stacks of paper and dragging them home and into bed with me.

[Did I say "home"? We had a colleague over for dinner a few weeks ago and caught her staring at the piles of manila folders on the dining room buffet. "Is that...work?" she gasped. Well, yes it is. When else is it going to get done?]

Anyway, now I can load a bunch of PDFs on the iPad, crawl into bed and skim to my heart's content.

But even more than that, I love narrating from my iPad. Yes, you read that right. I take it into the booth, punch up the wondrous GoodReader app, load the PDF, turn off the light, adjust the brightness, crop the pages a bit to enlarge the type, and off I go. I'm amazed at how much fumbling with page turns has slowed me down in the past. I'm generally distracted about a paragraph before, when I see it coming and start searching around for a place to stop while trying to concentrate on what I'm reading. Then the dang pages won't separate and I spend a few seconds grappling with them. And after the turn, it's a sentence or two before I get back into the swing.

Now I just flip my finger--quickly if it's a period, more slowly if the sentence continues onto the next page.

I'm still getting used to it and find myself reaching the bottom of the page and sitting there dumbly for a few seconds before realizing that I didn't have to stop.

Another thing is that there's no glare from a lamp in the corner of my eye, no annoying reflection off the paper, no blurry type from a bad print job. And best of all, I can see the whole page clearly! By that I mean, I wear progressive lenses, and with standard size pages there's always a struggle to get everything in focus. I would strain and crane, raise and lower the stand, move it closer then further away. Nothing really worked. I guess I could have invested in a pair of reading glasses--but now I don't have to! Everything is there, clear and bright on a compact screen. My whole upper body is more relaxed, my head position is stable and the whole fatigue factor is reduced by magnitudes. And I so far I'm not sensing any sort of eye strain from reading off the screen.

Oh, and did I mention the heat? It stays cooler now that I don't need a lamp.

How do you spell Mississippi?

2010-07-10T22:04:00.000-07:00

I doubt anyone will be surprised when I admit that, in the course of casting thirty to forty titles a month, I am unable to read them all cover to cover. Some books are fairly self-explanatory--a glance at the dust jacket pretty much says it all. Some are part of a series, which means it automatically goes to the narrator who read the previous book in the series. Sometimes I have to spend a bit more time, "skimming slowly" to suss out the nature of the story and the characters. There are even books that require a good bit of slogging before they give up their secrets. And of course there are many, many books that I wish I could read all the way through, but I know I can't spare the time.

And then, every so often, I pick up a manuscript, start skimming the first few pages--and realize after a few minutes that I'm not going to be able to put it down.

Discipline flies out the window. Interruptions are a nuisance, emails and phone calls go unanswered. At home, the family is neglected, dinner gets cold. Sleep? Who needs that?

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin is a riveting murder mystery set in modern-day rural Mississippi. (The title comes from an old children's spelling trick, " M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I...") The disappearance of a local girl causes two men, one black and one white, to revisit the painful circumstances that led to the disruption of their childhood friendship. The characters are richly drawn, the plot is full of surprising twists and turns and the writing is beautiful.

I think I know who's going to record it but I'm not going to reveal that yet. Suffice it to say I'm looking forward to seeing this one take shape in audio.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter pubs October 5. Keep your eye out for it, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Inspector Montalbano

2010-06-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

With the releases of The Paper Moon, August Heat and The Track of Sand coming up in August, September and October, respectively, I will have recorded twelve of Andrea Camilleri's charming Sicilian detective tales. Each is set in the fictional towns of Vigata and Montelusa, and each features the inimitable Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a moody, cynical middle-aged cop who, through a combination of plodding legwork, fumbling intuition and Javert-like persistence, always gets his man (or woman, as the case may be.)

The Voice of the Violin, the fourth in the series, won an Audie Award last year in the mystery category, which seems to have given the audio versions a long-overdue (in my opinion, anyway) bump. In Italy they are the basis for an enormously popular television series featuring actor Luca Zingaretti. Foreigners can sign up for an "Inspector Montalbano tour" that visits the actual locales depicted in the book (Porto Empedocle and Girgenti). Camilleri, a respected poet and novelist, freely admits that Montalbano has developed a life of his own, over which he no longer has much control, to the detriment of anything else he might try to write.

The English translations by Stephen Sartarelli are crisp and colorful, preserving as much as possible the comic energy, satirical edge and blunt violence that drive the originals. Montalbano comes across as a wonderfully complex character--alternately sensitive, bullying, manipulative and confused. Outwardly he rules his fiefdom with an iron fist, tempered by a malicious sense of humor and a fondness for practical jokes. Inwardly he quails at personal relationships and struggles with the eternally demoralizing nature of his job. He's not above acting as judge and jury, bringing a Sicilian sense of justice to cases that not only should never have happened, but perhaps should never be solved, given the moral complexities involved. He maintains an uneasy truce with the local Mafia, who, interestingly, rarely figure directly in the crimes at hand but instead operate at some level beyond Montalbano's (or anyone else's) grasp.

Then, of course, there's his unquenchable appetite. Unlike American cops and their donuts, Montalbano possesses a finicky palate which only the most exquisitely prepared dishes will satisfy. No Camilleri novel is complete without a dozen or more mouth-watering descriptions of the simple but elegant fare served up at a series of off-the-beaten-path, mom-and-pop-style trattorias--or prepared by Montalbano's doughty housekeeper and left in the fridge for his eventual enjoyment at the end of another maddening day.

The supporting cast are memorable as well, consisting of crafty stool-pigeons, loquacious witnesses, exasperating superiors, and endearing, alluring females (who almost always get the better of the men.) Montalbano's staff frequently lapse into a level of bumbling that brings the Keystone Cops to mind--Mimi, his womanizing assistant, disappears for days at a time; Gallo, who serves as Montalbano's chauffer, is a frightful driver who inevitably involves them in a wreck; Detective Fazio's obsession with administrative detail drives his boss to distraction; and the linguistically-challenged switchboard operator, Catarella, threatens to reduce each case to chaos with his garbled messages and crossed wires--but through native wit and loyalty to their beloved chief, they always manage to come through.

Some of the plots are stronger than others--The Snack Thief and The Terra Cotta Dog are particularly gratifying in this respect. Sometimes they are topical in nature (like the human trafficking in The Wings of the Sphinx), and occasionally they are simple frames for advancing the arc of the main character. Camilleri always manages to slip in some pungent political commentary (he's clearly no fan of Italy's current Prime Minister). Sicily's chronic woes permeate every book, and touches of discomfiting despair creep in whenever Montalbano rages inwardly against the hopelessness of politics and "the system." If you're looking for strenuous action, look elsewhere. But if you enjoy foreign police procedurals that are long on atmosphere, character and congenial wit, then these are for you.

Ross Macdonald

2010-06-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

AudioFile Magazine awarded an Earphones today to my recording of Ross Macdonald's The Wycherly Woman. That's great news for me, of course, but even better news for Ross Macdonald, whose reputation seems to have languished in recent years. This August will see the release of my sixteenth Lew Archer recording, The Ivory Grin. Few things have brought me greater pleasure over the years than to revisit, every so often, the voluble, eccentric characters who populate a typical Archer tale--from hare-brained beatniks to domineering, jewel-encrusted matriarchs.

Mystery aficionados have deemed Macdonald the heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. At a recent book club gathering here in Ashland, author Christopher Rice spoke of his indebtedness to Macdonald's mastery of character and psychological detail. And I get the occasional fan letter thanking me (and Blackstone) for devoting the time and effort to publishing his works in audio. But the general public seems to prefer racier fare these days--slashers and serial killers--to Macdonald's moody, sardonic forays into the human condition. Thus it's gratifying to see the audio versions garnering consistent praise in the audiobook press--not just for the performances, which is flattering, but for the quality of the writing. Black Money was even nominated for an Audie Award in the contemporary mystery category this year. Not bad for a fifty-year-old detective story...

Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, was a complicated man who lived a complicated life that is reflected in the shifting moral sands charted in his novels. His wife, Margaret Millar, achieved early fame as the author of a series of taut psychological crime dramas, and is generally considered to be the better writer of the two. Macdonald himself struggled to find his niche, but when he did, with the first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, in 1949, he settled into a groove that earned him a reputation that has outlasted that of his wife. Their only child, Linda, died at the age of 31 after struggling with alcohol and depression.

I think it could fairly be said that most mystery writers don't lead lives that warrant lengthy, in-depth examination. Tom Nolan's 1999 biography of Macdonald, however, is well worth reading, not only for his crisp analysis of Macdonald's work but for his even-handed, if often painful, exploration of the closely-guarded inner life of this brilliant and troubled man.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!

I'll conclude with what I hope will be viewed not as self-promotion, but rather as a personal tribute to one of my favorite authors--an audio excerpt from the final pages of The Moving Target. It's also a whopper of a spoiler, for which I apologize, but of the many wonderful examples of dialogue in Macdonald's novels, this one has always stood out in my mind. It's a classic confession scene, but with a twist: Archer and the killer, who is an acquaintance from law enforcement days and has just married the victim's daughter, have driven together to the dead man's mansion. As they sit parked in the driveway, Archer confronts his old friend with his suspicions. It's not the typical, lame "I'll-explain-everything-before-I-blow-your-head-off" device, but a bleak conversation about a necessary parting of ways. It's characteristic of the moral stickiness that pervades Macdonald's work. My favorite line is, "I shot Taggart in good faith!"

Occupied City

2010-06-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

Occupied City, by David Peace, is the second in a trilogy of disturbing crime novels set in occupied Japan immediately following World War II. (The first is Tokyo Year Zero and the third, to be published later this year, is currently titled Tokyo Regained.) To say that this a challenging, densely-textured book would be an understatement. The story is based on an actual event that took place in occupied Japan in 1948: A man posing as a health official entered a Tokyo bank shortly after closing, informed the employees that a customer with dysentery may have made a deposit that day, and suggested that as a precaution they all drink an antidote he had brought with him. What he served them was actually a deadly poison, and twelve people, including the custodian, his wife and two children, died agonizing deaths. Four people survived and were discovered crawling in the street outside the bank. The case set off something close to hysteria. The hunt for the killer was complicated by the fact that none of the survivors could agree on a description of the man. In addition, US authorities got involved to the extent that newspapers and police were manipulated and sidetracked for "security reasons." A middle-aged painter was eventually convicted of the crime on flimsy evidence. He maintained his innocence until the day he died, at the age of 95, in 1987. His family continues a campaign to have him exonerated. The "real" killer has ostensibly never been identified. An added twist was a possible link to Unit 731, the notorious facility wherein the Japanese performed biological, chemical and surgical experiments on live humans. The unit was discovered in the aftermath of the war, and US authorities hurried to cover up its existence, sensing that the "research," for all it's hideousness, was valuable and that it might fall into Russian hands.

If this sounds like it would make for a gruesomely thrilling tale--it does. But Peace couches it in unusual literary terms. He relates the story in Rashoman-like fashion, presenting conflicting points of view and resurrecting the ghosts of the dead along with the troubled spirits of the living. In Occupied City a terrified writer is haunted by twelve "voices": the twelve murdered victims, two police detectives, a survivor of the massacre, an American scientist, an amateur "occult" detective, a journalist, a gangster-turned-politician, a Soviet investigator, the convicted man, the relatives of the dead, and "the Killer"--whoever that may be.

As if this weren't complex enough, he employs numerous typographical devices to indicate, for example, a man documenting his own approaching madness in diary form (huge chunks of text are typed, then crossed out), or the three simultaneous thought processes of a young journalist riddled with jealousy when he suspects his wife is having an affair with an American soldier. To top it all off, a virtual encyclopedia of Japanese names and places is closely woven into the text.

Well.

As excited as I was at the prospect of recording something already considered to be a minor literary masterpiece, a first glance at the book had me scratching my head. A second, closer reading had me in despair. A third go-round found me ready to pick up the phone and tell the acquisitions department that they had wasted their money. Seriously. For the first time in a thirty-year audiobook career, I was pretty sure I had an unrecordable text on my hands.

Look, I'm not easily daunted. The Story of Civilization in eleven volumes? Been there, done that. Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones? Piece of cake. The novels of Roberto Bolano? Yeah, we pulled those off pretty well, if I do say so myself. But this?

Leave it to my wife and fellow Blackstonian Tanya Perez, herself a voracious consumer of audiobooks, to pick it up where it lay rudely discarded on the coffee table, read it in one day and declare, "We can do this."

"I can't," I said.

"Well, I will," she replied.

So, for the past two months she's been analyzing, organizing, collating and casting. I got the "easy" part--directing. Various sections were farmed out to various narrators with explicit instructions on how to handle certain aspects of the text, among them: Justine Eyre, an Audie Award-winning narrator who happens to speak fluent Japanese; audiobook veteran Stefan Rudnicki, who lucked into the role of the mad Russian investigator with the crossed-out passages; actor Bronson Pinchot, who voices the frustrated American official in charge of ferreting out the secrets of Unit 731; and Daisuke Tsuji, an actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The anchor of the project is Japanese-American storyteller Alton Chung, who brings a unique sense of dramatic characterization and poetry to various roles, including the Writer, the Convicted Man and the Killer.

The project has come together magnificently, though we still have another week of recording and a fierce editing job ahead of us. You probably won't see Tanya's name on the package, but she deserves the lion's share of the credit for rescuing this unforgettable book from the "unrecordable" bin and bringing it to life in audio.

Occupied City and the first book in the series, Tokyo Year Zero, will be available in audio from Blackstone on August 1st.

Paul Is Undead

2010-06-04T20:53:00.000-07:00

How can you resist a book that begins:

For some, the most indelible memory of their television-viewing lives was the moment Jack Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. For others, it was Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing. For today’s generation, it might have be fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the coverage of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.

I realized television was more than sitcoms and sporting events on December 8, 1980, the night Mark David Chapman tried to lop off John Lennon’s head with a silver scythe.

Alan Goldsher's illustrated novel is more than your typical mash-up. It's a wide-ranging cultural satire that makes fun of the rock-n-roll "oral history" genre. In his quest to ferret out the real story behind The Beatles zombie-tude, the "author" interviews historians, psychologists, Liverpudlian nightclub owners, John Lennon's mom, and of course The Fab Four themselves, who reminisce together about such hilarious events as the time Ringo's arm flew across the stage during a concert, or George Harrison's fingers dropped off during a key recording session.

I myself haven't indulged much in the mash-up genre, but this one was so sharp and entertaining that I found it hard to put down.

The question was, since the book travels back and forth across the Atlantic, which way to go with the casting? Should we have an American spoof the Brits, or a Brit spoof the Americans? In the end I figured the Fab Four themselves had to be the key, so I sent the title to British narrator Simon Vance. Simon is a self-professed rock-n-roll history buff, and he recently recorded When Giants Walked the Earth, a biography of Led Zeppelin, for Blackstone. I figured this would be the perfect follow-up. And by all reports he has had a gleeful time with it. He tells me that, in order to preserve the integrity of the voice characterizations in the four-way interviews, he recorded each Beatle's lines separately, then edited them all together. That's above and beyond the call!

Word is that the book has been optioned for a movie, which ought to be even more fun.

Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion pubs in book form and audio on June 22.

Blackstone Cover Art

2010-06-03T15:37:00.003-07:00

Sometimes we purchase cover art from the book publisher, or a film studio if it's a movie tie in. But for the most part we create all our own graphics here at Blackstone. Occasionally I pass through the graphics department and get hung up looking at the computer screens. It's fascinating to watch them build layers and manipulate images and fonts.

Unless you're a library customer, you probably haven't had a chance to see what these folks can really do, apart from the thumbnails on Audible or in our catalog. So today I thought I'd feature a few recent covers that caught my eye. (You can click on the photo for a larger version.)

This is Aaron Hoppe's cover for Tony Heald's recording of Elmer Gantry, which won an Audie Award in 2009:

The shabby marquee displaying the title is genius.

This is James Egan's design for The Man With the Golden Arm. We always think of the Sinatra film, but the book was written in the 40's and the cover reflects that:

Daniel Smith created this nice graphic for The Devil Knows How to Ride:

Andrew Farris's work for a gory murder-fest really pops:

Addie Black, who is also an accomplished painter, did this atmospheric work for the re-release of a stylish thriller:

And finally, a very cool design for Stephen King's IT. This was a co-publication with Penguin and we could have used their cover, but when Matthew Marley came up with this, it was too good not to use:

IT

2010-06-01T03:37:00.000-07:00

I've been noting with no small amount of gratification the positive comments on Audible for Steven Weber's reading of Stephen King's IT. We took a bit of a risk on this one--Weber only had two audiobooks to his credit (albeit very good ones), and our co-publishers at Penguin Audio were a bit skeptical, but it turned out to be a big win for everyone. Weber approached the thousand-page project with a gusto that was infectious throughout the entire process. Yuri Rasovsky, who directed the production, noted after the first session how impressed he was with Steven's preparation, commitment and sense of humor, which never flagged during the fifteen-day schedule. I'm told that after one particularly long and grueling day, Steven flung open the door of the booth and staggered into the control room, shouting, "Blood! I'm covered with...BLOOD!"

Weber's reading is an object-lesson in successful risk-taking. His depiction of the Denbrough family's collapse into silence and grief is heart-rending, particularly the scene in which young Bill tries to lighten the mood by telling a joke--an attempt that falls achingly flat. (Bill's pronounced stutter, which could become tedious in the hands of a lesser narrator, is marvelously rendered.) By contrast, the scenes with Pennywise in his various incarnations are ratcheted up to a level that has to be heard to be believed--and they work.

It's refreshing to encounter a narrator who doesn't seem aware of the "rules." It's not a tidy, pre-packaged read. It's a wild ride, full of unanticipated line readings and emotional about-faces. That's not to say it isn't faithful to the text--he is very observant of King's stage directions and character cues. But he never shies away from the larger-than-life (one is tempted to say, outlandish) quality of the whole enterprise. And while there's never any question that he grasps the size and scope of the story, Weber never gets ahead of himself. Every scene is given it's full value. Nothing is rushed or glossed over for the sake of efficiency. This "in-the-moment" quality, rather than slowing the book down, actually makes it feel shorter. Even King's notoriously digressive passages take on an absorbing quality in Weber's rendition. Everything about this performance--the vivid delineation of each and every character, the near-improvisational approach to the text, and above all, the drive and consistency he brings to this most unwieldy of King's novels--makes this a recording that every narrator could learn from. I know I have.

Memorial Day

2010-05-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

Saturday we drove 30 minutes north to Grant's Pass to visit the Grower's Market and buy some plants for the vegetable garden. I picked up some heirloom tomatos, celery, eggplant and basil. The garden got a head start two weeks ago with lettuce, snow peas, peppers and corn. (I think the birds got the carrot seeds so we'll have to try a different tack on that.) It didn't even occur to us that, being Memorial Day and all, we would run into an enormous parade that had most of the downtown area closed to traffic. After our visit to the market, we stopped and enjoyed the show for a while. The whole city seemed to be participating, to the extent that it's a wonder anyone was left to watch. There was a Volkswagon club comprising every sort of Beetle you can imagine, a huge children's string orchestra (the bass fiddles were on wheels and the cellos ran alongside carrying chairs), the local jet-boat organization, all sorts of floats and semi trailers, athletic groups, Boy Scout troops--it just went on and on. It lasted for about three hours, though after twenty minutes we felt overwhelmed and headed back to the car. Maybe people watch for a while then run back and join the parade, I don't know. At any rate, it was very festive.

Medford is about 75% retirees, most of them veterans of one sort or another, so the cemeteries are packed with visitors laden with flowers and American flags. The neighbors are playing horseshoes and barbecuing. The roads are crowded with campers, boats and every kind of recreational vehicle you can imagine. People head up to the mountain lakes, out to the rivers, or down to northern California. Spring was long, cold and wet this year (sleet in May!) so the abrupt change to clear skies and sunny warmth has propelled everyone outside to enjoy it.

We stayed home and cleaned. Not very exciting but relaxing all the same. The back yard needs a major overhaul, and the patio is stuffed with all the junk you throw out there during the winter and figure to deal with when it gets warm. Well, here we are.

On another Memorial Day note, I am overwhelmed by the response to Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes' superb novel about a troop of Marines trapped in an ambush during the Vietnam War. Just reading the comments on Audible, many of them from Vietnam vets, is a moving experience. Karl recently emailed our narrator, Bronson Pinchot, to let him know how much he liked the recording. Bronson is a talented, multi-faceted reader, and I've yet to find a book he can't pull off. But Matterhorn posed a unique challenge, with its huge cast of characters and authentic military tone. He spent a lot of time on the phone with Karl and they became very friendly. He even confessed to me that he had a bit of a breakdown at the end of the book. So it it meant a lot to him to get a nod from the author.

APAC and the Audies

2010-05-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

The Audio Publishers Association Conference was held Monday, May 24th in NYC. I decided to keep the trip short and left Medford Sunday afternoon, arriving at JFK around midnight. Got to the Hotel Belvedere near Times Square at 2 a.m. Had to be at APAC bright and early that morning and was looking forward to a few hours of deep, restful sleep. Well, forget it--I was stark, staring, wide awake. Finally passed out for an hour or two and staggered over to the Westin at 8 a.m. for the conference.

I was pretty much running on adrenaline all day, which was okay because there was a lot to go around. The conference was extremely well-organized this year and the narrator constituency was large and lively. I started at 9 a.m. with a training session explaining the concept of visualization, which is fundamental to good narration. At 9:30 I dashed over to the "Dos and Don'ts of Home Narration" panel moderated by Sean Runnette, and expounded for an hour along with home narrator Renee Raudman, Harper Audio's Michael Conroy and Sue Zizza of SueMedia.

At 11 a.m. I switched to the publisher track for another Home Narration panel geared toward publishers and producers, moderated by John Goodwin of Galaxy Press and featuring myself, Cory Verner of Christian Audio and Bob Deyan of Deyan Audio. Attendance looked to be scanty but shortly after we got started people began filtering in and it ended up fairly packed. I thought we all did a pretty good job of laying out the pros and cons of using home narrators. Basically, you have to have a support structure for research, quality control and fielding technical queries. In Blackstone's case, since we have studios in Ashland and LA, it's not so much a money-saving thing as it is a way to broaden our talent pool. For the big publishers, considering what they've traditionally paid for recording, it's a huge savings. Some of them are doing it and don't mind saying so, others are doing it and don't want to talk about it, and some are very leery of the idea. For many, it's still the "dirty little secret" of the audiobook industry. But the need to bring down costs has everyone looking at it one way or the other.

I took a break for a while and did some visiting, then geared back up for a live ProTools software demonstration in the afternoon. Disaster lurked in the wings when we realized we were missing a ProTools hardware interface, but a local producer kindly snagged one from his studio and we were able to proceed after some vamping on my part. The purpose was to demonstrate how easy ProTools is for home recording once you get over the hump of setting up a template recording session. I think the point was made very well. I put together a PDF version of the demonstration, complete with screenshots, which I'm told is available to member narrators at the APA web site.

Tuesday I breakfasted with narrator Simon Vance, lunched with some of my Blackstone colleagues, shared a cocktail with a dear friend from DC days, Carol Monda (now also in the audiobook biz), then got ready for the Audie Award ceremony that evening, held at the Museum of the City of New York. Tragedy had struck over the weekend in Medford when I realized that my trusty tuxedo was full of holes, courtesy the variegated wildlife of Oregon. A quick shopping trip turned up a white linen jacket, black trousers and bow tie. I looked very Ocean's Eleven if I do say so myself. I certainly stood out, since no one else dared to break the fashion code by wearing a dinner jacket before Memorial Day.

The trip uptown was very exciting because my cabby got into a running shouting match with a bus driver as we careened up Madison Avenue. This went on for about ten blocks. But I arrived in one piece and set about searching for our guests.

The ceremony was a huge success, with an outdoor cocktail party followed by a lightning-fast award ceremony and more partying and shmoozing into the wee hours. Blackstone netted four awards. I was so tired that I introduced Ed Herrmann to a group of Blackstone consultants twice in the space of ten minutes. Ed tweaked me mightily and made a show of taking my wine glass away.

Next morning I had breakfast with my old friends Jennifer Mendenhall and Michael Kramer (pictured above with me at the Audies, photo courtesy of Jennifer), then headed to the airport for my return flight.

A Feast for King Fans

2009-11-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

Blackstone, in cooperation with Penguin Audio, will be producing ten Stephen King titles which have never before appeared in audio format. The titles are:

IT
Cujo
Christine
Roadwork
Firestarter
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
The Running Man
The Long Walk
The Eyes of the Dragon

Five will be released in April, and another five in May of 2010. Blackstone will offer the library editions, and Penguin the retail and download versions. There will be some delightful surprises in the casting, which I'll announce as soon as we have everything in place. Stay tuned!

29 Gifts

2009-11-19T14:10:00.000-08:00

Blackstone Audio has just released the audio version of this season's inspirational hit: the true story of Cami Walker, a young woman stricken with multiple sclerosis who rises above her depression and disability by giving away a gift every day for twenty-nine days. Each gift takes on a life of its own and becomes a wonderful story in and of itself.

There is a web site, www.29gifts.org, devoted to promoting a global gift-giving campaign, where you can join forums, read Cami's blog and view some of her media appearances.

Tavia Gilbert narrated this for us and sent along a wonderful note about the experience:

Once in a while, I'm given a book to narrate that I think the Universe wants me to pay attention to. 29 Gifts is one of those books. My story has some unique parallels with Cami Walker's story, and I found myself immediately resistant to trying her prescription of giving a gift a day for 29 days. There's some comfort in being habitual about behavior and attitude, but when I finally opened to mindful gift-giving of my own, I immediately felt positive shifts in my own sense of abundance and opportunity. I appreciate Cami's strength and determination to live her life to the fullest, and to share her gifts with the world.

29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life is available now from Blackstone and will be showing up on Amazon and Audible next week.

The Wild Things

2009-09-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

October 1st is also the release date for Dave Eggers' much-anticipated novelization of the Maurice Sendak classic, Where the Wild Things Are. Blackstone is very excited to present the accompanying audio version. Dion Graham, who gave a magnificent rendering of What Is the What (currently the only other Eggers novel available in audio), narrates with a playful but ominous style that reflects the novel's exploration of pre-adolescent confusion and angst. The novel expands quite a bit on the Spike Jonze film version, digging deeper into the frustrated psyche of nine-year-old Max, whose yearning for untrammeled freedom takes him on an adventure to an uncharted island of giant, child-like creatures.

Twisted Tree

2009-09-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

Four years ago Kent Meyer's penned The Work of Wolves, a much-admired novel about the epic conflicts found in the tiny town of Twisted Tree, South Dakota. His new novel returns to that setting to explore the tragic effects of a serial killer's visit to this dusty, forlorn locale. The narrative is divided into a dozen or more unique voices and we have accomodated that by bringing an all-star group into our Ashland and LA studios. Ray Porter and Dion Graham happened to be visiting town during the sessions, so we were able to add their contributions to those of Traci Svensgaard, Tai Sammons, Paul Michael Garcia, Malcolm Hillgartner, Anthony Heald, G. Valmont Thomas and myself. Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Robertson Dean and Lorna Raver chimed in from LA. The writing is so compelling that every reader asked if he or she could record the whole thing! The release date is October 1st. If you love Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and Andre Dubus, don't fail to pick this up.

Republican Gomorrah

2009-09-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Max Blumenthal's wry skewering of the Religious Right has shot up to #48 on Amazon and hit the New York Times' Bestseller List. We've just acquired the rights and will attempt to set a production record in hustling this out for download, retail and library distribution. William Hughes just wrapped up Andrew Sorkin's monumental Too Big Too Fail (a co-pub with Penguin Audio) but he won't get much of a break, since he'll be heading into the studios tonight to do this one. Bill is a poli-sci professor here in Ashland with a real gift for narrating (and probably the most amazing ear for accents and mimicry I've ever come across). He picked up an AudioFile Earphones Award for The Next 100 Years and turned out a stunning rendition of Steve Lopez's The Soloist. Between Blumenthal's pithy, hyper-observant exposé and Bill's knack for dry wit, this will be a fun listen.

The Amityville Horror

2009-09-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

A whole generation of readers was kept up nights by this "true story" of a family's struggle against a ghastly series of hauntings in their "ideal" suburban home. (Remember Jody the Pig? Shudder!) Ray Porter, who brought a perfect blend of camp and creep to Richard Matheson's Hell House, will be narrating. We should be releasing this within a month or so on Audible, hard release to follow. Get ready to relive your nightmares!

A Happy Marriage

2009-08-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

At one point during the Audiofile Lobsterbake, Ben Cheever came over to me and handed me a book by his friend, novelist Rafael Yglesias. He was very excited about it, hinted that some very solid reviews were forthcoming, and wondered if Blackstone would be interested in pursuing the audio rights. Sure enough, the next day's New York Times Book Review contained a glowing full-page review, and the daily review which followed was equally strong.

To make a long story short, we pursued it and got the rights (not without some competition--the book was selling at #265 on Amazon within a few days!). It's a wonderful story--I'll quote from the Publisher's Weekly review:

As the novel opens in 1975, 21-year-old Enrique Sabas, a high school–dropout literary wunderkind, has just met Margaret Cohen, a vivacious, beautiful budding graphic designer who will become the love of his life. Enrique and Margaret's romantic and sexual misadventures during the first awkward weeks of their courtship are interspersed with scenes from the couple's three decades together before Margaret succumbs to cancer: raising children, losing a parent, the temptation of an easy affair. Margaret's physical decline and Enrique's acknowledgment of guilt, inadequacy and a selfish desire to postpone his loss are described in blunt, heart-wrenching detail, and Enrique's ongoing struggles to define the nature of masculinity, the significance of art and the value of marriage add a philosophical layer to the domestic snapshots.

We are currently consulting with the author about the choice of narrator. We've got some very good ones in mind, so we're confident it will be an engrossing listen.

Update 9/7/09: I've been chosen to narrate (no, I didn't try to skew the submissions--we had several excellent ones and I frankly felt like a runner-up!) so I'll be getting to this later in the month.

Rick Bragg reads for Blackstone

2009-07-31T21:19:00.000-07:00

My assistant and co-producer/director Andrew Barnes has just finished what had to have been an utterly enjoyable task--listening to Rick Bragg read his latest book, The Most They Ever Had. Rick is that rare animal, a masterful author-narrator who won an Audie Award for his 2004 performance of Ava's Man. The sessions, patched in from Mobile, Alabama, took all of two days and were a pleasure from start to finish. Those familiar with Rick's warm, spontaneous reading style and richly authentic sound will relish this tender, moving paean to the hard-working, hard-living residents of the Southern mill towns he grew up in. It's a heart-warming--and heart-breaking--experience. Blackstone is extremely proud of this "dual" acquisition--a great book and a great reader--and we're currently putting the finishing touches on the audio production in preparation for its October 1st release.

A Quiet Belief in Angels

2009-07-31T20:37:00.000-07:00

R. J. Ellory is a British writer with a very unusual background and an admiration for Southern Gothic writers. His latest novel, A Quiet Belief in Angels, is a masterpiece--beautifully written and tensely plotted. The year is 1939, and a town in rural Georgia is plagued by a series of vicious killings. As one child after another disappears and the law stands helplessly by, young Joseph Vaughan and his friends form a group called "The Guardians" in an effort to protect themselves and the other children from the dreadful plague. The plan backfires badly, and Joseph goes on to live a life haunted by the past. Decades later he must confront the nightmare that has overshadowed his entire life.

In the tradition of Harper Lee, Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy, this combination of coming-of-age memoir and hair-raising thriller is impossible to put down. I had to stop myself from reading it in one sitting. Mark Bramhall, one of my favorite narrators, will bring his warm, emotional approach to what I'm sure will be an unforgettable audio experience. We're pushing ahead on production and hope to get this out as close to the September 8th release date as possible.

Zombies and Vampires and Werewolves--Oh My!

2009-07-31T19:45:00.000-07:00

In an effort to meet the seemingly endless demand for werewolf and vampire fare, Blackstone has taken the plunge with a host of new books that should go a good way toward satisfying the appetites of fans of this popular fantasy/action genre. For starters, we've licensed the beginning of a new series of werewolf novels by S. A. Swann. The first installment, Wolfbreed, is set in the late Middle Ages and centers around a pack of "wolf children" who become pawns in the battle between the early Christian church and the pagan tribes of northern Europe. Yours truly will narrate this September simultaneous release.

David Wellington is well known for his highly entertaining zombie and vampire gore-fests. 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vampire Zero and 23 Hours all feature the indefatigable vampire-killer Laura Caxton. Frankly, I find these irresistible. Bernadette Dunne will have to stock up on garlic and crucifixes if she's going to make it through all four in one piece. With luck these will get to download before the end of the year.

Wellington will switch to werewolves in a new series, the first of which, Frostbite, premiers in October, followed by a second entry, Overwinter, early next year. I haven't seen a preview yet so I can't tell you which of our lucky narrators will be drenched in blood.

And then we have Nadya, a 1997 fantasy novel by Nebula Award-winner Pat Murphy that follows the adventures of its she-wolf heroine as she journeys from Poland to the American frontier of the 1860's. Kirsten Potter, who recently portrayed several old-time heroines for Blackstone (Gerald Koplan's Etta and Ann Parker's Leaden Skies) will take on this decidedly different twist on the legends of the Old West.

Hope these keep the demon-hunters happy for a while.

AudioFile Lobsterbake

2009-07-27T23:06:00.001-07:00

Every year Robin Whitten, editor of AudioFile magazine, throws a Lobsterbake for members of the audiobook industry at her summer home in East Boothbay, Maine. This year it was packed, with over 80 attendees. Among the new faces this year were a bevy of narrators from Recorded Books in New York and a strong contingent from the West Coast who were putting in appearances for the first time.

Lobsters, clams and corn on the cob are roasted over a wood fire heaped with seaweed at water's edge, and the day-long event is capped with live performances by some of the most well-known names in the business. This year's readers included myself, Ralph Cosham, Barbara Rosenblat, Barbara Caruso, Jeff Woodman, Nick Sullivan, Stefan Rudnicki, Wanda McCadden, Steve Crossley, L. J. Ganser, Jeremy Gage, Alan Sklar, Ben Cheever, Hillary Huber, William Dufris, Suzanne Toren, and a host of others--twenty-four in all. It made for a lively and entertaining evening.

Bill Dufris gestures below...

Hillary Huber and Alan Colebank of Tantor Media make a toast...

Steven Crossley and Ralph Cosham exchange stories...

Janet Benson of Audio Editions, Mary Beth Roche of Macmillan Audio, and Robin Whitten offer smiles...

Jeff Woodman looks happy to be there...

Maya Thomas of Hachette Audio and Michelle Cobb of BBC America lead the charge into the chilly waters of the inlet...

Alicia loves a boat ride...

...and a visit to the Antique Railway Village.

Tanya and Alicia enjoy breakfast in Boothbay Harbor...

And finally a view from Lobsterman's Wharf in East Boothbay.

Wallace Stegner

2009-06-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

Blackstone has acquired Wallace Stegner's major works:

Angle of Repose
Crossing to Safety (abridged only)
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
The Spectator Bird
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
A Shooting Star
All the Little Live Things
Remember Laughter

The only hitch, as you can see, is that Crossing to Safety was only available to us in abridged format. The unabridged recording will be done by somebody else. But it's still an exciting acquisition. Pity that a part of my job is having to read all these great books in order to assign them... Tough job, but somebody's got to do it! I'm looking forward to getting these produced, though the releases will have to be stretched out over time. I'll post when I hear what the schedule will be.

Waiting for Columbus Part 2

2009-06-25T08:25:00.001-07:00

Well, I didn't make it. At the critical moment I was pretty well overcome. I tried to go back and redo it, exercising a bit more control, but it just came off as phony. So we left it as is.

Anyway, a beautiful book. I hope the audio comes across as well as the book deserves.

Waiting for Columbus...

2009-06-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

...by Thomas Trofimuk. I am gaga about this book. Tanya, my SO, flagged it for Blackstone and we acquired it. I read the first page and knew I had to record it--for better or worse! The day I finished reading it at home Tanya found me on the patio sobbing. It's a beautifully written study of madness, loss, grief and the triumph of the mind.

A naked man is discovered drifting in the Strait of Gibraltar and is rescued by the Spanish coast guard. He claims to be Christopher Columbus and is sent to a mental institution in Seville. A nurse at the institute finds herself falling in love with "Columbus" and his weird tales of erotic adventure and frustrated genius. Behind his extraordinary ramblings lies a profound trauma, the nature of which must be unraveled if "Columbus" is ever to rejoin the modern world.

It's not often that a book brings me to a halt in the studio. I can recall a handful of occasions. Many years ago, while recording the final chapter of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, I had to stop at every other paragraph and go outside for air. Some time later I had the good fortune to record The Autiobiography of Mark Twain for the Library of Congress' "Talking Book" program. The chapter on the death of his wife, Livy, turned both myself and the engineer into snivelling messes. Certain passages of Alec Wilkinson's A Violent Act, recording in the wake of an ugly separation, rendered me incapable of proceeding. (Now there's a loss to audiobook-dom. This and Moonshine have been retired from the Books on Tape catalog. He is a wonderful writer.)

Waiting for Columbus may well enter that tiny pantheon of books that I couldn't get through without being enormously affected. We'll see next week when I get to the end.

2009 Audie Awards

2009-05-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

The "truncated" ceremony the APA came up with this year worked out pretty well, in spite of the reservations of not a few participants. The Awards presentation itself was streamlined to ninety minutes instead of a lengthy dinner. Individual winners were not invited up to accept their awards, with the exception of four major categories, but were asked to stand in the audience and be acknowledged. Tony Roberts was a congenial host and the presenters did a nice job. The new format needs a bit more polish and pizazz but overall it seemed satisfactory. On the plus side, the awards were bracketed by cocktails and hor d'ouevres before and champagne and dessert after, so there was actually more time to visit, and people actually stuck around for a while instead of dashing out after an exhausting evening like they did last year. Playaway, makers of the "disposable" audiobook that's growing in popularity with travellers and libraries, held a little "after" party. I stayed out way too late for a middle-aged narrator who had trouble squeezing into his tux this year, and I somehow ended up in a strangely-lit disco that felt more like a scene from Jacob's Ladder than a post-Audie celebration. At that point I decided it was time to go home!

Blackstone did extremely well this year, tying Macmillan Audio for the most awards.

John Lee won Solo Male Narration for our production of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Elmer Gantry, read by Anthony Heald, took the Literary Fiction category.

The Mystery award went to The Voice of the Violin, narrated by yours truly. (By the way, I consider this my first "personal" Audie. My only previous win was as part of a multi-cast production for Listen and Live.)

Bronson Pinchot's narration of Chip Kidd's The Learners grabbed the Humor award, beating out David Sedaris--no mean feat!

All in all we had 20 nominations, so we were exceptionally pleased with our showing this year.

The APAC conference seemed to go well, though I skipped some of the workshops to talk with other people. I had a productive meeting with AFTRA. I have no idea if, in the end, we'll reach an agreement, but we came up with a proposal that has more chance of going over with my bosses at Blackstone, on the one hand, and the AFTRA board on the other, than anything that's been discussed before. Over the next few months we'll kick around some hard numbers and see if anything takes.

I had a 7 a.m. flight home from Newark Airport this morning. A car service picked me up in mid-town at 5 a.m. We were less than four blocks from the hotel when the radio announced that the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel were both closed. The driver said he didn't think we'd get to Newark in time for the flight, so what did I want to do? We pulled over and I spent a ridiculous twenty minutes on my cell trying to reschedule my flight. Eventually the driver took pity on me and said, "Aw, what the hell, we can make it." With that he threw the car into gear, plowed up the East Side, flew across the George Washington Bridge and Hail-Mary'd back down through New Jersey to Newark in time for the flight. So I'm home. New Yorkers are great.

Off to New York...

2009-05-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

...for Book Expo America, the Audio Publishers Association conference and the Audie Awards. I have four nominations this year: one for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, one for Andrea Camilleri's The Voice of the Violin, and two for Abraham Lincoln: A Man of Faith and Courage.

Blackstone has 20 nominations altogether. Wish us luck. I'll post again as soon as I get back on Sunday.

Sunday at Lithia Park

2009-05-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Gorgeous day. Spent the afternoon at Lithia Park, where we met this fellow at the Duck Pond.

Visit to Yreka, CA

2009-05-23T21:54:00.000-07:00

Just an hour away, over the Siskiyou Pass and through the bone-dry mountains of Northern California. It was a bit of a ghost town, what with the holiday, I suppose. But we strolled around and saw what there was to see.

Among other things, there's a lovely 1888 church, and a wonderful little historical museum with an excellent collection of Indian and gold rush artifacts. Also a nice little bookstore and two antique shops.

I scored a nifty retro brass wall fixture at one...

...and a fantastic fiberglass planter at the other (perfect for our mid-century philodendron!).

The second shop also had two superb 50's atomic-style floor lamps, in beautiful condition, complete with gold-flecked parchment shades. Tanya wouldn't hear of it, though--they were a bit on the garish side, LOTS of chrome and black bakelite. But I was disappointed...

Then lunch at Brickhouse Pizza, which was excellent, and back home in time to do some gardening.

Ann Veronica and Moura Budberg

2009-05-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

Ann Veronica is H. G. Wells' feminist novel, published in 1909. The other day Michelle Black, wife of Blackstone owner Craig Black, asked if we could record this and make it available for Blackstone listeners. I contacted Carolyn Seymour, a wonderful British narrator who lives in LA. Carolyn may be one of the best narrators you haven't heard enough of yet. She's recorded a new version of Wuthering Heights for us which has yet to be released. She also narrated The Rose Labyrinth, which has been released and received a very nice review from AudioFile. She also participated in our multi-voiced recording of The Canterbury Tales. Anyway, Carolyn said she would love to do it, and that she had a special connection to the book. Check this out: Her grandmother was Moura Budberg, mistress of both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells. Astonishing. I look forward to a very special reading!