Roger Ebert is a film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times and hosts a syndicated movie review show with Richard Roeper.
A great audio-book reader enhances the work with voices, accents, drama. These are my six favorite performances.
Perfume (Random House, out of print) by Patrick Suskind. The grotesque story of a medieval dwarf with a hideously advanced sense of smell-and no body odor of his own. Sean Barrett’s reading evokes smell through diabolical snufflings and exhalations, and is profoundly creepy.
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys (HighBridge Company, $24) by Samuel Pepys. Kenneth Branagh doesn’t read so much as confide. You can almost sense Pepys, the genial busybody about town, leaning closer as he confides his sins. Stark portraits of the Black Plague and the Great Fire.
The God of Small Things (Harper Audio, $25) by Arundhati Roy. Read by Sarita Choudhury in an accent that adds a pinch of masala to the story, evoking the characters with the richness of their voices, not neglecting the humor in the midst of sadness.
Porterhouse Blue (Atlantic Inc., $29.95) by Tom Sharpe. The gatekeeper of a shabby Cambridge college broods and plots and nurses resentment. Bawdy, outrageous; the gas-filled condoms alone are worth the price of admission. Griff Rhys Jones’ accents are venomously hilarious.
A Dance to the Music of Time (Books on Tape Inc., $88) by Anthony Powell. Everyone means to read Anthony Powell’s 12-volume masterwork, but how many do? Simon Callow does an inspired job of providing voices to Powell’s enormous gallery of characters, in a work spanning decades; his voice for Widmerpool nails the man’s shameless yet pathetic buffoonery. Abridged, yes, but nevertheless occupying 24 cassettes.
Hearts in Atlantis (Simon & Schuster, $48) by Stephen King. Not my favorite writer in print, but King reveals a powerful narrative strength on audio books. He reads a lot of his own work, including the second part here, but the first part is the one to listen to, for William Hurt’s way of massaging each ominous word before letting it insinuate its way into the story.
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