AUDIOBOOKS: YA Sync 2015

All of these books were excellent!


X - Ilyasah Shabazz (audiobook)

Really good 'memoir', written by Malcom X's daughter. It is classified as fiction, but I felt like I learned a lot about his early life. I listened to this around the time/just after the (multiple) incidents with police and African-American deaths, and it was so sad. How have things not changed at all?

I should watch one of the movies about Malcom X.

Dodger - Terry Pratchett (audiobook)

Pratchett does not disappoint - see Good Omens for reference. Funny, educational (the guy who cleaned up the London sewers appears) and meta - what more could a person want? A young tosher named Dodger gets mixed up with a different class of people (Charles Dickens, Disraeli, Angela Burdett-Coutts) after rescuing a young lady. Much happens, including a run in with Sweeney Todd and maybe love. It's not Dodger from the Dickens book, but maybe how Dodger developed? I love that this was paired with Great Expectations.

Must watch the Sweeney Todd musical movie.
Must listen to Great Expectations, and then watch the movie.

Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices - Walter Dean Myers (audiobook)

This was certainly different, but might be a better way to 'read' poems. Sort of a Canterbury Tales, each poem is a biography of a person from Harlem, read by different readers. Each is short, and unique, and wonderful. I tried to just listen to one or two at a time, and then come back. I definitely felt the 'feel' of Harlem.

A Corner of White - Jaclyn Moriarty (audiobook)

While it took a while for me to get into this one, I persevered having read and enjoyed Moriarty books before. There are two worlds, which have to be developed and set up with characters and back stories which was took a while. One in London and the other the kingdom of Cello. Once the two worlds connected however, I was hooked. I loved the references to Newton and science a lot, and the characters of Madeline and Elliot, although young adult, where very real, and facing tough decisions.

I was a tad disappointed to discover it's part of a trilogy and that I couldn't get the second, The Cracks in the Kingdom on audiobook. However, I would read the next one definitely as the last chapter or two had a lot of new information, and makes the reader want to find out what happens!

The Explorers Club - Nell Benjamin (audiobook)

A little play acted out by the Los Angeles Theatre Works  which had a Important of Being Ernest vibe to it. (The LATW will show up again with a wonderful version of In the Heat of the Night). Set in the late 1800s, focusing on explorers and anthropologists in London and a feisty woman trying to gain entrance in the Explorer's Club. There are misunderstandings, word play, and plenty of 'there, there, deary' misogyny/British Empire dismissals. Silly boys.