Book Review: Selected Shorts: Lots of Laughs! by Symphony Space

Author: Symphony Space
Title: Selected Shorts: Lots of Laughs!
Publication Info:  Symphony Space (2005), Edition: Unabridged, Audio CD
ISBN:  0971921822
Summary/Review:  This collection is something I downloaded randomly from Overdrive and it was suitably entertaining.  There are seven stories and they are all read – or performed – in front of a live audience reminiscent of the storytelling on the Moth Podcast.  Stories include:

 1. Subsoil by Nicholson Baker Read by Thomas Gibson

2. Farrell’s Caddie by John Updike Read by Charles Keating

3. Jamaica by David Schickler Read by Isaiah Sheffer

4. Chivalry by Neil Gaiman Read by Christina Pickles

5. Nachman from Los Angeles by Jhumpa Lahiri Read by David Rakoff

6. On the U.S.S. Fortitude by Ron Carlson Read by Laura Esterman

7. Fatso by Etgar Keret Read by John Guare

My favorites include “Jamaica” where a man gets his head stuck in the banister and has to sit in on his wife’s book club and “On the U.S.S. Fortitude” about a doting mother raising children on an aircraft carrier (Esterman’s reading of the story probably improves the story concept a hundredfold).

Recommended Books: Best of Modern Humor by Mordecai Richler and The John Cheever Audio Collection by John Cheever.
Rating:

Book Review: Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price

Author:  Reynolds Price
Title: Kate Vaiden
Publication Info:  Scribner (1986)
ISBN:  0689117876
Summary/Review:  This story set in rural North Carolina and later in Norfolk, Virginia is told from the perspective as a memoir titular character.  Kate’s parents die in a murder-suicide leaving Kate to be raised by relatives and to get involve in self-destructive sexual relationships at a young age.  The tone of the book is one of distance and indifference, perhaps appropriate to a narrator who has shut her self off from the world, but at the same time it is difficult to read a story that the narrator seems uninterested in telling.  What could be a good story of an interior struggle comes off as dull and unconvincing.

Recommended Books: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Rating:  *1/2