Look at Things and Try New Drinks

I love it when the audiobook companies release audio recordings of the classics. I have so little time to read print media these days and so very many "important" books left to read.

This spring, Simon & Schuster Audio is re-introducing several Ernest Hemingway novels and stories in audio form, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.

Ernest Hemingway the man, the adventurer, I find terribly dull - he's just another chauvanist hunter, like 90 percent of my male relatives.

But I'd like to read his books because his story "Hills Like White Elephants" is one of the few things I studied in college that burrowed down in my brain and clung there, even when the tide of years washed everything else away - especially quadratic equations.

Like so many writers before me, my highest goal is to achieve such powerful simplicity as Hemingway's writing in that story. The least I can do is listen to his books.

More Than Zero

I've never been a Bret Easton Ellis fan. In fact, until Lunar Park, I'd never even read one of his books. I'd barely heard of him. Maybe that makes me a hopeless yokel, but so be it.

This is what audiobooks should be. While it isn't the quiet, beautiful sort of book I've been praising lately, this is one of the rare kind that makes me anxiously await my commute. Part memoir (but which parts?), part family drama, part mystery, part horror. It's impossible to define this book and refreshing because of that. It is an exciting, action-packed read but full of emotion, too. It is surreal - there's an attack by a hairball with one eye - but full of reality, too - the struggle of a drug addict to reconcile his old hard-partying life with his new role as suburban dad.

I'm no James Van Der Beek fan either - he was the narrator - but I loved him here. I've heard complaints that his reading was too flat and monotone, but it was exactly the right tone for the character. In the author interview at the end of the last CD, Ellis confirms that he chose Van Der Beek (who starred in the movie adaption of Ellis' The Rules of Attraction) and that ex-Dawson was on the mark.

I may just convert to a fan of both Ellis and Van Der Beek.