Family classics

The James Herriot Collection
By James Herriot
Audio Renaissance, $89.95
40 hours unabridged, CD
ISBN 1427200262

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It's unusual for me to mention the packaging for an audio, but The James Herriot Collection is a knockout. Herriot's warm, joyous, three-volume series about life as a small-town veterinarian in Yorkshire in the 1930s—All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful—is boxed together as a gift set with fabulous full-color, wraparound photographs of stone hedgerows, green valleys and the very creatures, both great and small, on the slipcases and the discs themselves. Now digitally remastered, Christopher Timothy reads again in a voice that makes these beloved stories sing.

Wrap it up

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Voice your presents, excuse the pun, and consider spoken word recordings of entertaining books for everyone on your holiday hit list.

Lisey's Story is Stephen King's latest, and King-craft at its best—and this production with Mare Winningham is audio at its most affective. Autobiographical? King says no (see his October interview in BookPage for details), then waffles, so you can decide for yourself. Whether it is or isn't, it's a powerful portrait of love and marriage, of a bond that transcends death and of the eerie world some writers inhabit. Lisey's husband, Scott, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author with a huge following, has been dead for two years, but he's the major presence in her life, his voice always close, demons still swirling. Now, caring for her catatonic older sister and stalked by a maniacal fan, Lisey's world is coming unglued—to put it right, she must confront Scott's darkest specters through the twisted shafts of their combined memory.


Sports

Sports may be the only real meritocracy we have, and Michael Oher's rags-to-riches, real-life Cinderella saga (it would take a canoe-sized glass slipper to fit this foot) is as compelling an example as you'll find. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael "Moneyball" Lewis chronicles what happened when a huge, hugely talented, homeless, black, unschooled Memphis teenager was taken in by an incredibly generous, rich, white, Republican, sports-crazy family. In his inimitable fly-on-the-wall style, Lewis follows Oher as he morphs under their care into a high school football star sought after by every major college coach in the country. Along the way, Lewis analyzes how football and its strategy have changed. Grover Gardner reads this winner.


Crime fiction

If FDR had been a mystery maven, he might have said that "the only thing a bad guy has to fear is Fearless himself." And Fearless Jones makes an encore appearance in Walter Mosley's Fear of the Dark, wonderfully performed here by Michael Boatman. Paris Minton, Fearless' fearful buddy, still smart, well read and scared of his shadow, is back, too, narrating this tale of blackmail, murder, revenge and what it was like to be a black man in 1950s America. Mosley, as always, conjures up the atmosphere of the racial tension that was taken for granted in the Watts section of L.A., while spinning out another well-plotted crime caper.


Myth

Alexander McCall Smith has joined the ranks of well-known writers who take timeless, universal stories and retell them in their own unique way in the Canongate Myth series. Smith has chosen the totally charming, never harming, Angus, the Celtic god of dreams, youth and love. Dream Angus, read by Michael Page, whose mellifluous delivery would surely please the handsome young god, brings Angus' special magic to us in a mosaic of elusively connected vignettes—perhaps mythettes is more on the mark—set mostly in contemporary Scotland and leaves listeners feeling a bit more in touch with their own dreams and mysterious yearnings.


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