I am headed out today with the family for a long weekend with some friends at the beach. It should be fun and possibly even relaxing! (Much needed these days.) I am planning to finish Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, by Ayelet Waldman, and am bringing a book that has been getting a bit of attention of late: You Lost Me There, by Rosecrans Baldwin. Here's what it's about:
Months after his wife, Sara, is killed in a car accident, Dr. Victor Aaron is still in the throes of mourning, although he has rather peculiar ways of showing it. By day, Aaron functions as a dedicated lab rat, heading groundbreaking research and trolling for corporate grants. By night, he conducts a sexually intense but ultimately unsatisfying affair with a considerably younger graduate student named Regina, whom he pursues to the point of stalking. Further complicating his recovery are his weekly command-performance dinners with his wife's elderly aunt Betsy and the sudden appearance of his goddaughter, Cornelia, who moves in with him while interning at a local restaurant. Amid the chaos, Aaron spends his insomnia-fueled nights combing through Sara's belongings until the discovery of a series of disturbing notes, in which she chronicled the tumultuous years of their marriage, sends him into further despair. Baldwin's manic debut novel delivers a capricious, poignant, yet oddly perceptive account of the quixotic nature of relationships and the fallacies of memory.
Meanwhile, I am still making my way through the audiobook of Middlesex, 15 minutes at a time. I have been tempted to just pick up the book and finish it off by reading it, but I have become so familiar with the narrator that I feel as though I would be betraying him, and the first 350 pages, by shifting to reading. This is the first book I have ever listened to on audio, and it has been a good experience (albeit a long one – I think I started it in mid-June!). I am definitely finding the experience of listening to a book to be pretty different from reading it. With a book like Middlesex, the tone of the narrator is so important, and I keep thinking about how different my experience would be with a different person reading it. I'd also love to know what the reader did to prepare – did he talk to Jeffrey Eugenides, like a lead actor would with the screenplay writer?
I'd love to know – do you listen to audiobooks? If so, when, and why? Are there any that you strongly recommend?