Audio books and I have a love-hate relationship. If the narrator is good, it’s a wonderful experience. But it does have a downside: listening to an audio book takes way longer than simply reading it. I started listening to The Swerve three weeks ago. The listening time is 9.7 hours. Little by little, I chipped away at it, a half hour here, a half hour there. But, before I could finish The Swerve, it won the National Book Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. The Swerve tells the story of book hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, who 600 years ago found a rare copy of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), composed by the first century BC Roman writer Lucretius. Lucretius wrote that the world was composed of atoms, that we should live to pursue pleasure, that there were no gods. As you can guess, On the Nature of Things became the object of banning by the Catholic Church. Greenblatt shows how this single book, lost for hundreds of years, had a profound effect on scientists and thinkers in the 15th Century. If you’re a fan of intellectual history, you’ll love The Swerve. GRADE: A

Tonight, PBS is broadcasting Part One of a two-part documentary on Woody Allen (check your local listings for time and day). The Friday review by Mike Hale in the New York Times complained that Part One focuses Woody Allen’s first 10 films, leaving Part Two (Monday night) to cover the rest: 31 films. Clearly, director Robert Weide feels that the early Allen is superior to the later Allen. Hale also lists his favorite Woody Allen films: “Take the Money and Run,” “Bananas,” “Sleeper,” “Annie Hall,” “Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Midnight in Paris.” I’d say Hale’s list is pretty close to my own.

Lord Macaulay once said, “The character of Socrates does not rise upon me. The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.” Paul Johnson, popular historian, seeks to rescue Socrates from Macaulay’s view by insisting that the Socrates we know is really a puppet of Plato. The “real” Socrates didn’t possess all the annoying quirks that irked Macaulay and others. Given that the real Socrates never wrote a word, Johnson has to rely on secondary sources to make his case. I found Socrates: A Man for Our Times mildly entertaining. GRADE: B

Philip Jose Farmer loved to write pastiches of other writers’ work. In Hadon of Ancient Opar, Farmer recreates the ancient city in the jungles of Africa, Opar. Tarzan had adventures in Opar and Farmer’s hero, Hadon, builds on those adventures. Farmer obviously loved Opar because he wrote two more books about it: Flight to Opar and the never before published The Song of Kwasin. All three of these books are being published in one grand omnibus volume by Subterranean Press next year with the title Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa. Pre-order it now! I did!
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Blame me. I’ve tried reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Retrieval Artist” series and abandoned it. Now, I slogged my way through Rusch’s Diving Into the Wreck and I’m not going to be reading any more books in this series either. Something about Rusch’s style just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s characters with the names Squishy and Turtle. Maybe it’s the love-hate relationship between the narrator and her father. Maybe I wasn’t convinced by Rusch’s descriptions of diving into space wrecks. When I was a kid, I remember loving a Frank Crisp adventure novel called The Java Wreckmen about divers finding treasure in sunken ships. Very memorable after 50 years! But nothing much about Diving Into the Wreck is going to stay with me. For a different take, check out Bill Crider’s review of Diving Into the Wreck here. GRADE: C

After reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about the death of her husband and its aftermath, I was hesitant to take on Blue Nights, the story of the death of Didion’s daughter. How much grief can one reader bear? But I’ve been reading Joan Didion since Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion captures the essence of her daughter, Quintana Roo, and manages to celebrate her life. The death of a child is terrible to experience in Didion detail. Didion’s health nose-dives in the wake of these deaths so she shares her own physical problems with the reader. The fact that she gathered the courage to write about them, despite the pain and despair, moved me. I’ve included Joan Didion’s revealing interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air below. GRADE: A-

When PBS first broadcast Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 1979, I was floored. Alec Guinness plays a British intelligence agent who investigates “The Circus” for a possible mole. Twists and turns abound in this carefully crafted Cold War spy drama. Finally, this DVD set (but no Blu-ray) is available in the U.S. I also ordered the sequel, Smiley’s People, so I’m just yearning for some free time to watch Alec Guinness work his magic again. If you haven’t seen these classic BBC dramas, you’re missing some of the best suspense ever shown on television. The trailer to the new movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (release date is December 9) is available to you below. I can’t wait to see it! GRADE: A

I’m Feeling Lucky is the most detailed case study of how GOOGLE got started that I’ve seen. Douglas Edwards leaves his newspaper job and takes a chance with a new start-up company, GOOGLE, in 1999. Edwards has plenty of stories about the quirky founders of GOOGLE, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He also provides a sharp picture of GOOGLE in its early days when it was just one of many search engines. But this amount of detail is also the book’s fatal flaw. How many readers are going to last for 400 pages of tales of GOOGLE’s war against spam or the perils of Gmail? The infighting between marketing and engineering gets stale after the first dozen stories. Edwards leaves GOOGLE in 2005 so we don’t get any insights into GOOGLE’s dealings with China or the increasing concern about the privacy of users. I enjoyed I’m Feeling Lucky, but I’m not sure most readers are going to feel as lucky reading this detailed book. GRADE: B

I’m a big fan of David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding’s Eat This, Not That series. This is the latest volume, full of suggestions to help you eat smart. The authors compare the food at a variety of restaurants and make suggestions about which is the lower calorie, lower fat yet tasty food. This 2012 Edition contains over 400 color photographs and plenty of detail on how to make your food choices count! GRADE: A

While rooting around in a Goodwill Thrift store, I found a copy of Full Moon and the Shrine, a Keiko Matsu CD from 1998. I had several Keiko Matsui CDs, but not this one. I bought it for a buck and for the next hour listened to the wonderful music. If you haven’t heard Keiko Matsui, you’re missing a lot. If you’re a fan of THE WEATHER CHANNEL, you may have heard her music playing in the background of some of their weather forecasts. Sometimes Keiko Matsui is labeled as a Smooth Jazz artist, sometimes as a New Age pianist. No matter. Her music is great! Check it out below. GRADE: A