This is the final one of my blogs recommending the best books that I have read this year and it’s specifically for audio books. I don’t listen to as many audio books as I used to and that’s an ongoing regret but I do get through about one each month.
Audio books need to have an excellent storyline and hold the interest, as all books do, but there is an additional dimension to them in that they are narrated. Often the choice of narrator can seriously affect my enjoyment of a book and the best ones enhance it. I mostly listen to non-fiction on audio but that’s not always the case, as you can see below.
This year I listened to many books by John Le Carre, rather than reading them. For most of them it was a reread and I am going to recommend three of them here as I thought that they were absolutely brilliant. The three books are what is often called the Karla Trilogy and feature a regular recurring character in George Smiley. These books are Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (see my review of the book here), The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People. These are books I know well and have read many times before, but this year was the first time that I had heard them on audio where they are narrated by Michael Jayston.
The three Le Carre titles are each individual stories but are about the same thing – the discovery of a Russian agent working in the secret services (a “mole”) and what Smiley and his associates find out when they start investigating the damage that the mole has done to the service. They are an insight into a world of illusion and secrecy where you cannot believe anything and where you sometimes have to do terrible things in the name of your country. The books are excellently plotted but where they excel is in the characterisation of Smiley and those who work with him as well as others who become drawn into the conflict. I thought that Michael Jayston did a fantastic job in his reading and he managed to bring the characters alive – if I ever reread these books in print I shall hear his voice in the narrative.
Two factual books also need to be highly recommended, although I haven’t yet got around to reviewing them – blogs will follow in the next few weeks.
The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees and narrated by John Sackville is an examination of the mentalities of the Nazis during WW2 and of those who committed dreadful crimes. The author tries to work out why particularly abhorrent views were held but also why others, who didn’t necessarily feel as strongly themselves, went along with things. It’s about how ideas are formed and how they are communicated and why we often follow the crowd. I thought it was eye opening and informative but also very worrying as you see some of these methods in use today. The narrator was excellent and didn’t get in the way of the information.
Come What May iswritten and narrated by Lucy Easthope and is a book about crisis and how we respond to it. The author is an emergency planner who has dealt with the aftermath of disasters in this country and across the world – she writes about this in a previous book which I review here. In this latest book she takes lessons from her work and applies them to all of us to give us some ideas about how we should prepare for and deal with crises in our lives. She talks about the recovery journey, taking stock of what has happened, bad help and building resilience. It’s excellent stuff and very applicable to ordinary life. I found it gripping and may need to purchase a paper copy of this book in order to refer to it in the future. The author appears on radio, TV and podcasts a lot and thus the narration is excellent.
Anne Is Reading 