4:02 pm Jul. 13, 2012
Over the next ten days, we'll be suggesting some of our favorite audiobooks for the summer, in a series of articles brought to you by our partner, Audible.com.
Audible.com is promoting a special offer to download one our selections or a selection of your own for free, plus a free 30-day trial membership.
Click the link at the bottom of this post for details. Previously: The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
Beloved (Unabridged)
By Toni Morrison
Narrated by Toni Morrison
In lots of cases, you don't want to hear an audiobook read by anyone but its author. Memoirs of very famous people, whose voices you know, sound a little weird when read by someone else in the first person.
Though Beloved isn't a memoir, it's somehow difficult to imagine wanting to hear anyone read it but Toni Morrison herself. It's not that Morrison is an actress, or even much of a "professional" reader. But the prose of Beloved is both beautiful and intimate. Like a few of my other favorite writers (Flannery O'Connor comes to mind) Morrison seems to write with the reading experience in mind, how the book sounds in the mind's ear of the reader. From the moment you hear Morrison's deep, smoky voice start to speak those first words—"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom"—you are as much in her grip as a listener as you would have been if you read Beloved in print.
