Sukey's Favorite

Plainsong
By Kent Haruf
HarperAudio, $32.95
9.5 hours
ISBN 0694522880

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I'm a big fan of novelist Kent Haruf, and I wasn't sure that his latest book, a National Book Award nominee, would be as affecting when listened to as it is when read. But Plainsong, read in its entirety by Tom Stechschulte, is a strong, sure audio -- one that plainly sings in its spare narrative voice. Though the voice is as spare as the landscape of the High Plains east of Denver where Haruf sets his story, his characters -- a high school teacher and his two young sons, a pregnant teenager, elderly bachelor brothers -- are fully drawn and involving as they confront changes they never expected and deal with an often harsh reality. A wonderfully honest, wonderfully crafted novel -- for ears and eyes.

It makes the world go 'round

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Anita Shreve revels in the elegance of 19th-century language, and its fullness is amplified in this fine audio presentation of her latest novel, Fortune's Rocks, read by Blair Brown. Olympia, the novel's young heroine, a beautiful, wealthy Bostonian, is only 15 in 1899 when she meets and falls passionately, devastatingly in love with a married man, more than twice her age. Wise beyond her years, aware of the dangers of such a liaison, she rushes to embrace a situation that would be difficult today, but unspeakable at the turn of the last century. Olympia is memorable, her courage and faith in love, moving.


Love is where you find it

Can you ever say, "there, that's the moment that changed my life"? Bob Hampton, the charming star of Carolyn See's charming new novel, The Handyman, read by Gil Bellows, would probably answer in the affirmative. Twenty-eight, a painter whose prodigious talent is simmering and about to boil over, Bob spends a summer as a handyman in L.A. His ad says that he can fix faucets, prune, paint, plaster, and clean up household disasters, but what he really finds himself doing is cleaning up lives, patching up psyches, and giving people the support they haven't been able to find. But, luckily, amidst all this human debris, Bob finds love and his vision as an artist -- and the listener will find an offbeat tale that warms the heart.


Romantic love

All the elements of a classic romance are whipped up to a heady froth in Fern Michaels's Yesterday -- a pretty, spoiled young woman who thinks that the world is her oyster, a handsome, hardworking young man who has made sure, since they were children, that her oyster never lacks for pearls, friendship mistaken for love, love mistaken for friendship, shocking truths about family origins hidden and revealed. Then tragedy strikes and events of the past and present are thrown into sharp focus, true character comes to the fore, and the lucky ones discover that though you can long for yesterday, you can only live for today.


Another world

One of the wonders of good fiction is its power to let us into other people's lives, to experience other times, places, and cultures. In River, Cross My Heart, Breena Clarke takes us to Georgetown in the mid-1920s and into the life of a 12-year-old African-American girl and her family. Ms. Clarke does this so convincingly that you can feel the sidewalks under your feet, see the clapboard houses, smell the "down-home" cooking, and feel the growing pains, anguish, and joy of this young, bright, determined woman. Segregation was an iron-clad part of life, but yearning for equality, for the chance to break out of an oppressive system, was just as strong.


Quitters

Stephen King's latest, Blood and Smoke, three longish short stories, are not only read by their esteemed author, they're available only as an audiobook production. All three star men who have given up the weed, yet cigarettes play a crucial part in each beguilingly inventive tale. King, that consummate conjurer of terror-crazed fear, has put most of the maniacal tricks aside here. The evil faced and fought in the first and last stories is wholly human, out-of-control in one, and all-too controlled in the other. The man in the middle faces a more familiar King-creation, a truly menacing presence that haunts a New York hotel room and threatens to undo -- and do in -- a cynical perpetrator of "true" ghost stories. King is in super-fine form and audio-only suits him to a terrifying "T."


The cassette scene meets the silver screen

If you haven't had time to see some of the first-class flicks that have been playing -- or if you want to revisit the originals -- there's an ample array of first-class audios to tie-in to.

The beloved little mouse and eponymous hero of E.B. White's Stuart Little is now a movie star. But even though he's getting Hollywood huzzahs, nothing can beat listening to Julie Harris read the tale of Stuart's big adventures in the Big Apple.


David Guterson's haunting, beautifully written Snow Falling on Cedars is read by B.D. Wong. It's also available in unabridged format read by Peter Marinker.


All 14 hours of Steven King's serial novel, The Green Mile are narrated by the legendary epic-audio reader Frank Muller.


Anna and the King, based on the screen adaptation of Elizabeth Hand's now classic novel, performed by Fiona Hutchinson, will tug at your heart once again.


In Lost in the Fun House: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman, Bill Zehme looks closely at this comic genius who inspired Milos Forman's recent film, Man on the Moon.


Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.

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