Nonfiction audiobooks: As You Wish, Elwes; The Disordered Mind, Kandel; What If?, Munroe

As You Wish I listened to very slowly (for relative "chewing through audiobooks at a prodigious rate" definitions) so that I could savor it; my strongest associations now are listening while gardening, which is a pretty great association. I ... like gardening? This is remarkable because I've always hated it, because I'm terrified of spiders & insects and also afraid of the sun, and don't like being hot. But as it turns out, when you have complete autonomy you can opt in to things and set yourself up for the best chances of success. And with long pants and long sleeves and gloves, at dawn or dusk, I can decide "I am going into spider land (there are so many spiders), and that's okay, this is their territory and I'll probably be too busy to get freaked out" ... and it works, and I love the tangible, satisyfing results gardening, especially since most of it is cutting back bushes/vines, and, like the painting, I feel such a sense of ownership of this land, this house, its state and appearance.

The others are from starting to paint Devon's bedroom Silverplate on most walls, which is recently finished! The last step is painting the window accent wall Anchors Aweigh.


Title: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride
Author: Cary Elwes, Joe Layden
Narrators: Cary Elwes, Christopher Guest, Carol Kane, Norman Lear, Rob Reiner, Wallace Shawn, Robin Wright, Billy Crystal
Published: Simon Schuster Audio, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 265
Total Page Count: 398,730
Text Number: 1506
Read Because: reviewed by rachelmanija, and I was just waiting to read it until I needed it most; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I like The Princess Bride a normal amount: read & watched it to death, sure, but also watched every special feature and read every anecdote; not much here was new to me. But the real pleasure is a first-person account, from Elwes but also from guest contributors, most of them read by the authors. It's cozy, it's loving; it has a wit, sardonic humor, and earnestness that is everything I adore in the film. The transition to audio isn't perfect—the (what I assume were) inset blurbs sit awkwardly within Elwes's narration. But that's just a nitpick in a lovely read. I treasured my time with this; good feels all around.


Title: The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us about Ourselves
Author: Eric R. Kandel
Narrator: David Stifel
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2018
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 80 of 305
Total Page Count: 400,955
Text Number: 1513
Read Because: more nonfiction while painting, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at 25%. If I could overlook the language, this could probably educate me about the relationship between the physiological and psychological elements of the brain. Unfortunately, the language is so bad that I'll never find out! It opens with a chapter on autism that's as awful as you might imagine (framed as a disorder, feat. an autism mom interview), and I have no reason to expect better from the rest.


Title: What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (What If? Book #1)
Author: Randall Munroe
Narrator: Wil Wheaton
Published: Blackstone Audio, 2014
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 402,400
Text Number: 1517
Read Because: fan of the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A charming potato chip read. Did I retain anything? Doubtful! But the approach to the questions, the wild escalations viewed through hard science, is conceptually informative, and very XKCD, and so plainly joyous. Wheaton is a fun pick as a reader.

True Crime &c Reviews: The Man from the Train, James; Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer; Blood Royal, Jager

The first two are from finishing up the landing; the last is from, bless, painting the very last wall in the living room, the one that required patching after the electrical work was done. We have a couch! being delivered tomorrow!! so the patch & paint job jumped from a background process to a sudden priority; our current couch is a loveseat but the new one is a hefty sectional, and moving it/painting around it would be a nightmare. The patches came out acceptable and the room looks so much better with that last and maybe most important (b/c it frames the couch) wall done!

I see more books about MKUltra in my future, but I am forever at the whim of "what does the library have, in audio, maybe with no waitlist" because that's how my nonfiction reading works.


Title: The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
Author: Bill James, Rachel McCarthy James
Narrator: John Bedford Lloyd
Published: Simon Schuster Audio, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 465
Total Page Count: 401,710
Text Number: 1515
Read Because: more true crime while painting, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I almost DNF'd an hour in but, surprisingly, not only did the conversational style grow on me, I even think it complements the content. This is an investigation into axe murders from early 20th century America what may have been the work of a single killer traveling by rail. Such very cold cases require a lot of conjecture and bargaining; explaining this directly to the reader, inviting doubt and making them participant in the reasoning, is an effective approach. It also makes for a lot of repetition and failed humor—the book's not-infrequently obnoxious! But it's also engaging. I like it alongside Hollandsworth's The Midnight Assassin: they share time period and IIRC some cases, and the different approaches to overlapping content gives a more complex picture than one book alone can provide.


Title: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
Author: Stephen Kinzer
Narrator: James Linkin
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2019
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 402,080
Text Number: 1516
Read Because: while reading Stranger Things fic that talked about MKUltra, I realized that I don't know much about MKUltra; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The audiobook reading is most sincerely awful (choppy sentence breaks! doing all the accents! I constantly felt like I was being yelled at!); nonetheless this is deeply compelling. It's competent both as an overview of MKUltra and as a biography of its director, Sidney Gottleib; and it's better for being both. People who are apparently likeable and even sympathetic can commit atrocities—indeed can orchestrate and institutionalize them, can believe them completely justified, can even feel bad about them. Simultaneously larger-than-life and a thorough, complex portrait of a single life, that framing contextualizes acts that without context are almost incomprehensible. Maybe read it in print, though.


Title: Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris
Author: Eric Jager
Narrator: René Auberjonois
Published: Hachette Audio, 2014
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 350
Total Page Count: 402,750
Text Number: 1518
Read Because: more true crime ("true crime") while painting, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The elevator pitch is "medieval true crime," but in reality this is just a history lesson, and that's okay. Centered on the assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orléans, tracing the event's antecedents and far-reaching consequences in French civil war, it's a grounded and catchy approach to an interesting political avalanche. The focus on the investigation works tolerably well, introducing a lot of repetition but also providing a remarkably detailed glimpse into a slice of history.

But, honestly, the real pleasure here is that René Auberjonois read a book to me.

(No, I cannot easily define what separates "true crime" from "history of a murder.")