Yesterday I accidentally signed up for a rather good deal from Audible. I’ve been an Audible subscriber for a few years now; I pay $21.95 (formerly $19.99) for two book downloads a month. It’s pretty pricey but it’s the best deal around for audiobooks if, like me, you are too impatient for libraries.

For the last six months or so, they have been trying to get me to change to a prepayment plan, where I pay for all my books for a year up front, and then immediately get all 24 book credits. It’s a good deal — you pay $229.50 instead of the $263.40 you’d pay in monthly installments, which amounts to about one month free, plus you also get 30 percent off of any books you purchase outside of the plan. I tend to only use my credits on books that cost at least $25, and I do purchase a fair number of books outside of the plan, so this is a good deal for me. But I kept not signing up, because I never had $229.50 lying around that I wanted to immediately commit to audiobooks.

But yesterday they sweetened the deal, throwing in a free two gig iPod Nano along with all the rest of it. Those are still selling for $199, so at that price it’s hard to say no. So I said yes. I don’t need a Nano; I have a third generation 20-gig iPod that still works fine, and I use a Shuffle for audiobooks, and the Nano won’t work with my iPod speakers, anyway. But my husband has no Nano. Now I am the best wife in the world.

Why am I posting this, though? Because I didn’t really mean to say yes. I clicked on the “choose this option” button, thinking that it would take me to a page to review the deal and the benefits, but instead it took me to a page that said, “Thank you. Your credit card has been charged $242.45.” (That would include shipping for the Nano.) So don’t do that unless you actually want to buy.

I don’t think the free Nano deal is available to new subscribers, but the annual plan is, minus the free device. But I also had options for lower end plans — a six month, six credit plan, or a twelve month, twelve credit plan — that came with free iPod Shuffles. It’s a good deal any way you look at it.

(Am I back to posting here? Maybe. I still haven’t been able to work out the huge amounts of comment spam this site gets, so comments will be closed for now. Not that that helps any.)

The Fourth Hand. No review this time, just a cry in the wilderness. What is the point of this ridiculous book? Has John Irving ever met an actual woman? Why do I want this love story to work out? Where did whatsername get her obvious premonitions, did she go to India and take that drug, too? Were you high when you wrote this, John? GAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.

This was a very bad book.

I was an early Lemony Snicket adopter, but then I got bogged down in The Miserable Mill and gave up on the series. I recently went back, this time with audiobooks, and I am a fan again.

The Miserable Mill
The Austere Academy
The Ersatz Elevator
The Vile Village
The Hostile Hospital
The Carnivorous Carnival
The Slippery Slope
The Grim Grotto
The Penultimate Peril

I am not going to discuss these individually because there is not that much to say. I love that series has gotten more complex as it has progressed, although I half believe that the author has nothing up his sleeve and that it is all going to end in a big mess, or another thirteen books. I also half believe that Count Olaf is the Baudelaires’ uncle, or Lemony Snicket himself, or something. I am not sure and I am not sure that the author is sure, either, if you know what I mean. Tim Curry is a better reader than the author but they are both pretty good, and these books are well-suited for audio.

A Mind to Murder. I am over Ruth Rendell, but I still like P.D. James. She is similarly prim and her plots occasionally border on the ridiculous, but there is less literary pretention to James, and her early works in particular are still perfectly acceptable guilty pleasures. I have not enjoyed any of her recent work, but fortunately her plots are so intricate that I forget them after a few years, so I can just keep rereading the old ones until senility takes me away.

I am going to lump all of these in together. I listened to them all on audio, and I more or less hated all of them. I was a big Ruth Rendell fan about ten years ago but I think it is safe to say that I am over her. I had forgotten most of these by the time I started the next one.

A New Lease of Death (aka Sins of the Fathers). This one was a reread but I did not really remember it. The plot’s dependence on coincidence annoyed the fuck out of me.

Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter. Also a reread, and this one I remembered. One of my favorites by Rendell, probably worth checking out if you are a mystery fan. If you aren’t a fan, this won’t change your mind.

One Across, Two Down. I really don’t like the novels that aren’t about Inspector Wexford, because they tend to go on and on, and they aren’t anywhere near as deep as they pretend to be. In this case, Rendell threw together a couple of quirky personality traits that didn’t really fit together, I guess in the hope that this would lead to a more complex characterization. It didn’t — it just led to a lot of contrived nonsense about crossword puzzles. This novel also went on long past the point where it should have ended.

Put On By Cunning (aka Death Notes). Hands down, the dumbest mystery novel I have ever read. It does not work as a police procedural because the procedure is outlandish. It does not work as a character study because there aren’t any characters, just figurines stuck into a stupid plot. It does not work as suspense because it is impossible to care.

Shake Hands Forever. A reread. I guessed the plot twist the first time I read it and this time it just seemed ludicrously obvious, but I think most mystery fans like this one okay.

The Babes in the Woods. Her latest, and yet another in a long line of Rendell books that rely on ridiculous examples of perversity. She occasionally betrays a very provincial sort of morality that really bugs me.

The Face of Trespass. This might have been a decent novel if she had ended it about three chapters sooner. (I listened to it so I don’t actually know if there even were chapters. I am estimating.) The laborious explanations at the end were silly and destroyed any tension she’d managed to create. Until she takes you by the hand and walks you through the obviousness before eventually making everything better with a pointless happy ending, it is a surprisingly tense novel, considering how little the reader cares about this dumb guy and his dumb problems.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This book is the real reason I have not been posting, because I read it back in August and I did not care very much but I felt like I should really say something about it. At this point I can’t even remember if I liked it — I think I did, but I have not felt any urge to reread it, and I am not especially on the edge of my seat waiting for the next sequel.

I posted about it a little bit over at the Usual Suspects, and this is what I said, more or less. Don’t read any further if you have somehow managed to stay unspoiled all this time:

The only thing I find interesting is how many people are clinging to the “Snape is good” theory. (Or in some cases, the “Snape is hot” theory.) I am wondering if this is more of an issue of “Alan Rickman is hot.” Because I just reread the whole series, and Snape? Not so much a good guy. I don’t mean “not good” in the sense of “playing for Voldemort’s team;” I mean he’s a dick. There is not one single thing about Snape that is noble, or particularly brave, or kind, or empathetic, or admirable. He is a small-minded spiteful prat who plays favorites, carries petty grudges, gets off on pathetic power trips, and basically has not one single likeable, redeeming, or vaguely sexy trait. He is a gross bully.

Which always seemed until now like Rowling’s misdirection, where we’d find out that Snape had done some big heroic thing. And maybe he did, but I don’t think it matters. I don’t think Snape is a good guy, at all. I don’t think there is the vaguest glimmer of good in him.

But I also don’t think he’s really a committed Death Eater. Because just as there is not one glimmer of basic goodness about Snape, there is also not one glimmer of the sort of cringing humility that Voldemort’s true followers have to display. Even Bellatrix — who is probably the most evil of the bunch — fawns all over the Dark Lord. Snape doesn’t.

My theory? Snape is the real baddie here. He never had any loyalty to Dumbledore or Voldemort; he wants to be the new big bad and he’s been playing both sides of the fence for his own reasons. He is, in some ways, a definite counterpart to both Voldemort and Harry in terms of origins and talents. But in temperament, he is closer to Voldemort than he is to Harry.

Snape is a free agent, and very much a bad guy. That is my prediction. I think he and Dumbledore may well have been working together at the end, but I don’t think Snape has a decent bone in his body.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Still my favorite, at least in its audio version. Up to this point I could have walked away from the series and not cared how it ended, but Goblet hooked me. I like the structure of this one, as well; I enjoyed the tournament and I really loved the Moody (or “Moody”) character.

I am still really bothered by the house elf storyline and I don’t think Rowling has resolved it satisfactorily. I am not sure how this subplot reads from a Brit perspective, but it is very problematic for an American. I would be really uncomfortable reading this to a child, because some of the good people in these books have really squicky attitudes about slavery, servitude, and a perceived natural order.

But whatever. You don’t care if I liked this book; everyone now is just hunting through the old books for clues about what is coming next. And this one, I think, has very important clues, at least as important as the prophecy in Order of the Phoenix. So let’s run them down. Please note that I have been thoroughly spoiled about the Half-Blood Prince but I haven’t actually finished it yet, so I don’t know if any of these are resolved or explained. If you haven’t read the latest book and have not yet been spoiled, you might want to stop reading now.

• Chapter 36, as Harry tells Dumbledore about the scene in the graveyard when Voldemort returns:
  

  “He said my blood would make him stronger than if he’d used someone else’s,” Harry told Dumbledore. “He said the protection my — my mother left in me — he’d have it too. And he was right — he could touch me without hurting myself, he touched my face.”

  For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes.

  Then the look fades and Dumbledore says, oh well, that protection is gone, blah blah blah, but I think that triumphant look has to be significant. Something happened here, something about Voldemort getting Harry’s blood is significant.

  This better not come down to killing him with the power of love, that’s all I can say. Because I will throw up.

• Later in the same chapter, when Dumbledore is assigning tasks to what will be the newly reformed Order of the Phoenix, he speaks to Snape:
  

  “Severus,” said Dumbledore, turning to Snape, “you know what I must ask you to do. If you are ready … if you are prepared …”

  “I am,” said Snape.

  He looked slightly paler than usual, and his cold, black eyes glittered strangely.

  That one is not so significant because we know that Dumbledore asked him to do something at this point, but it is worth noting that it appears to have scared him.

• Chapter 30, when Harry looks into the pensieve in Dumbledore’s office: there is something here about Harry’s face changing into Snape’s, and something more about a secret reason that Dumbledore trusts Snape. It can’t be just that Snape was a double agent, because Harry already knows that, right?

I swear there was one more thing about Snape I wanted to note, but I can’t find it. It might have been in Azkaban now that I think about it. My point in noting it, though, is that if it has not yet been revealed exactly why Dumbledore trusted Snape — and I don’t mean the spying, or Dumbledore’s general faith in the goodness of people — then I don’t think we can say yet that the trust was misplaced. Maybe that secret is revealed in Half-Blood Prince and it’s just been left out of the spoilers, but right now, I think something else is going on.

(Although I am not prepared to subscribe to the “Snape is really a good guy” theorizing going on; I have two thoughts, which I will share after I finish the damn book.)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I forgot that I hadn’t yet posted this; I actually finished it over a week ago. I have read Azkaban twice before, both times the old fashioned way. I realize that this is everyone’s favorite, and I agree that it is the most tightly plotted and satisfying of the series, but I still think it has major problems. This was my first time with the audio version of this book, and for once the audio didn’t completely fix Rowling’s crappy writing — this is the worst audio version of any of the books, with some bad pacing, a few mispronunciations, and some rough edges in the characters’ voices.

I can tell you exactly why Jim Dale’s audio versions are better than Rowling’s printed versions: he ignores her as he sees fit. Rowling is always having a character shout or bellow or scream when a shout is too much for the moment. Dale reads the word “shouted,” but his characters don’t shout unless shouting is appropriate. His characters also don’t speak in capital letters or trail off into ellipses. And yet none of the meaning is lost.

In other words, Dale does with vocalization what Rowling ought to be doing with language. She has the laziest editors in the world, because these books are almost really good. Almost.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. You don’t care what I think of this book, either, but I am going to tell you anyway. When the Harry Potter series started, I tried and failed to read the first one; I finally made it through the book a couple of years later but I didn’t really like it. Then this one came out and I gave up. It’s been a few years since I finally made my way through it, which I only did because several people told me that Azkaban was worthwhile but that I’d have to read this one first. I remember skimming a lot, and being irritated by the CAPITAL LETTERS and ellipses and all that nonsense. I’ve always thought that the plot was weak, the characters starting to annoy, and the writing the worst of the series.

But this time I listened to it on audio and I liked it just fine. In fact, I liked it quite a lot. Maybe the Tom Riddle storyline is better when you know what happens later. Maybe Jim Dale is just talented enough to smooth out Rowling’s most awkward sentences and liven up her dullest characters, and even out the pacing in order to make this a good story. I think I have to give Dale all the credit, because both Jeremy and I hated the film version of this novel, and Jeremy (who has less patience than I do for bad writing and awkward pacing) loved this book right from the beginning, and he has only listened to these books, never read them. (Apparently Harry Potter on audio is perfect for being drugged out in bed after major knee surgery.)

So thank you, Jim Dale, and I hope Rowling’s people are paying you well.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. You don’t really care what I think about this book, right? I’m just killing time until the new one shows up. That said, I will note that I hated this book the first time I tried to read it, but I’ve liked it better on every subsequent rereading. This time was the first time I listened to it on audio, and read aloud I think it is a perfectly fine children’s book. In print, it is full of Rowling’s annoying textual shortcuts.

The Last Battle. I know many people hate this because it is the most overtly Christian of the Narnian Chronicles (although I would say The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew are certainly contenders as well), but The Last Battle has always been one of my favorites. I think there are two reasons for that: first, I love Jill. I loved her in The Silver Chair, and I love her even more in this novel. She is Lewis’s best female hero in this series, much more compelling than insipid Lucy or snotty Susan, less off-putting than Aravis (who is pretty cool, as well). And her best moments are all in this book. Lewis allows her to be brave, tender-hearted, resourceful, skilled, and rebellious in a noble way. I love Jill.

The other reason I love this book is the same reason that everyone loves the part in Christianity where you get to die and go to heaven. I mean, who doesn’t love the idea that even if the whole world goes to shit and you die a horrible death, you don’t even have time to feel any pain before you wake up in a whole new and perfect and more beautiful version of the world you just left, where every single thing you loved is better than before, and everything you did not love is just done away with? It’s enough to make a girl go out and get some religion.

This book has one very major flaw, however, and it is one that I did not really notice as a child. The anti-Arab sentiments in this book and The Horse and His Boy have been noted before so I won’t dwell on them, but I will note one thing that really struck me in this reading: the equation of “Narnia” with the entire Narnian world. At some points “Narnia” is just a country, and at others it seems to represent the whole planet (or whatever the hell Narnia is, since we know it’s flat). Lewis occasionally does the exact same thing when speaking of “our” world — he says “England” to encompass the entire planet/world/universe.

It’s a very colonial way of looking at things, and while Lewis’s on-the-sleeve Christianity does not bother me at all, this business of Narnia being equal to the entire world (with other countries like Calormen being subordinate to Narnia, aberrations from the Narnian norm) really bugged me this time.

And since I have finished the series on audio, I should say a word about the readers. Some of them did not make much of an impression on me — I cannot even tell you, for instance, who read The Horse and His Boy, which probably means that whoever it was did a fine job. Two of the readers irritated me a lot, though. Michael York’s reading of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was sort of twee and sentimental; I would not have made it through a much longer book. And Patrick Stewart’s reading of The Last Battle was almost laughably bad. He does terrible voices, mispronounced a couple of words at the end (it’s Tumnus, not Turnus), and overinflected throughout.

Lynn Redgrave (Prince Caspian) was the best reader overall, possibly the best reader I’ve encountered with any audiobook. (I just noticed that she did an unabridged version of Through the Looking Glass, as well.) Kenneth Branaugh (The Magician’s Nephew) was also very good and probably does the best character voices. Any of these readings would be excellent to play for children, I think. All are available from Audible.

The Magician’s Nephew. When I first read this novel as a child, I did not really like it. I hated the old-fashionedness of the characters as compared to the other books, the ones set around World War II. I also hated Uncle Andrew and Jadis and the name “Digory.”

It was not until I went to college and read Paradise Lost that I learned to like this book, because I was really excited when I read the creation story in Milton and realized that Lewis had borrowed it for Narnia. The stags rise out of the ground in exactly the same way in both stories. I had always known that the Narnia stories had Christian overtones, but after that Milton class I reread the series with new respect for what Lewis was doing. I still don’t see them as hamfisted prosletyzing so much as a more playful attempt to write a Christian myth in the mold of Milton.

I should probably confess here that even though I am the biggest atheist on the block, I love Milton. Between the two of them, Milton and Lewis allowed me to reconfigure my childhood devotion into a more basic appreciation of Judeo-Christian mythology as mythology, the same way I love Homer and Ovid.

Plus I like the part where the elephant comes out of the ground and makes a little earthquake. That’s just cool.

The Horse and His Boy. Still my favorite after nearly thirty years, even though as an adult I’m a little bugged by the anti-Arab imagery. It’s still a great story and will always be my favorite of the Narnia books.

The Silver Chair. I am running out of things to say about the Narnia books. I think I liked this one better this time through than I’ve liked it in the past. When I was a kid, I could not get past the creepiness of Puddleglum; now he is one of my favorite characters in the series. But I am with Jill: I just don’t care for giants, not even in stories.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I believe this was either the last or the second to last of the Narnia books that I read the first time around, when I was ten and reading them out of order from the town library. It explained a lot — I had never really understood who Eustace was (I think I had him confused with Edmund) or how he was related to the other kids. I think it might be my least favorite, either because I read it last or just because Eustace is so unbearable.