The audiobook for the fourth novel in Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series will be read by Castle actress Molly Quinn and Gossip Girl actor Ed Westwick. Here’s a quick look at the two of them recording City of Fallen Angels, as well as a clip of Westwick reading the first chapter. Check it out below, and remember to sign up for the sweepstakes hosted by Simon & Schuster: A box set of audio CDs signed by Quinn and Westwick is among the prizes.
Image Credit: Christine Kokot/DPA/LandovJune is National Audiobook Month. It’s also National Safety Month, which makes sense considering it’s much safer to drive while listening to an audiobook than to try to hold and read a physical book. The sixth month additionally claims the titles of National Flag Month, National Seafood Month and National Dairy Month. With all of these designations, it appears that June is also National “National Month” Month.
But it’s audiobooks that we at Shelf Life are interested in, and the same goes for David Sedaris. The puckish satirist, and author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and Barrel Fever, has recorded a few promos in support of NAM for the “Get Caught Listening” campaign, extolling the virtues of audiobooks, actor and narrator Dylan Baker, and Sam Lipsyte’s trenchantly hilarious novel, The Ask. Listen to the exclusive clips below, and tell us: What will you be doing to celebrate National Audiobook Month once it starts next week?
Image Credit: Donna Ward/PR PhotosThere are only a couple of weeks left now until the release of Sex and the City 2, but in the meantime you can make do with hearing Miranda read aloud. EW has an exclusive clip of Cynthia Nixon reading the first two chapters of Emily Giffin’s latest novel, Heart of the Matter, for its official audiobook.
Like Giffin’s previous books (Something Borrowed, Love the One You’re With), Heart of the Matter is a story about love, relationships, and infidelity, with a decidedly Sex and the City tone, so I think Nixon is a natural pick to orate it. (Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, and Kate Hudson are set to star in director Luke Greenfield’s upcoming film version of Giffin’s first novel, Something Borrowed.) Both the new book and the audiobook are set to hit store shelves tomorrow, but take a sneak-listen below, Shelf-Lifers, and see if you agree with me about Nixon’s narration.
Image Credit: Bill Davila/Startraksphoto.com; Andy Fossum/StartrWho said poetry readings had to be stuffy, unglamorous affairs? Scores of celebrities, including Sex and the City‘s Cynthia Nixon (pictured, far left) and Catherine Zeta-Jones, are creating their own verse-case scenarios. On April 2, GPR Records will release Poetic License, a three-CD set that features 100 poems performed by 100 famous names. (The disc will be available on Amazon and iTunes.) Each star picked a favorite poem to read on the spoken-word compilation, which is arriving just in time for National Poetry Month. Selections include Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (Jason Alexander), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Day Is Done” (Florence Henderson), Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (Kate Mulgrew), and Edward Field’s “New Yorkers” (veteran TLC host Paige Davis).
EW is pleased to share two advance tracks from Poetic License. First, it’s Cynthia Nixon reading A.A. Milne’s “Vespers,” the first work the author wrote featuring his son, Christopher Robin. (Milne went on to write a book of children’s poetry, When We Were Very Young, that included a verse about a then-unnamed teddy bear who “however hard he tries grows tubby without exercise.”) You can easily imagine Nixon reading “Vespers” at bed-side to her own children.
Cynthia Nixon reading “Vespers”
In our second audio clip from Poetic License, Catherine Zeta-Jones reads William Wordsworth’s springtime classic “Daffodils.” She intones the poem in classic fashion, with more of a trained stage voice (the actress is now appearing on Broadway, after all, in A Little Night Music) than the Welsh lilt of her childhood.
Catherine Zeta-Jones reading “Daffodils”
I’m not usually the biggest audiobook fan, except for when I’m driving ever since that terrible time I tried to balance The Stand on my steering column, but even I know that much of the effectiveness of cassette-tape oration is dependent on who’s doing the reading. Jeremy Irons, for example, could read a bound collection of Chinese takeout menus and I would find it engrossing. Sylvester Stallone narrating Jane Eyre, or Fran Drescher narrating anything, not so much. And it’s probably a plus that Stephen Hawking didn’t do his own Brief History of Time.
The good people over at the website Whose Voice Is That? have put together a helpful list of the best and worst matches of celebrity lector to material. For example: “Not Scary Enough: Joe Mantegna reads Stephen King’s Thinner”, “Too Scary: Willem Dafoe reads Stephen King’s The Langoliers.”
I think an audiobook’s success also depends on the listener’s own situation. Harlan Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman read, or more likely frantically yelled in 324 voices, by Robin Williams is probably not good if you’re trying to relax. Conversely, listening to James Earl Jones read the Bible while operating heavy machinery would be dangerous both to yourself and those around you. And while Christopher Walken may be a good fit for something like this, something like this doesn’t work as well. Oftentimes the best person for the job isn’t a celebrity, per se. Jim Dale has done a fantastic job with the Harry Potter series, while Brad Pitt only detracted from Cormac McCarthy’s beautiful All the Pretty Horses by pronouncing “jefe” like it was a brand of peanut butter. What do you think? Are there any celebrity/book match-ups you think are just crying out to be made a reality? Any that should never, ever, under any circumstances, come to fruition?
Humorist David Sedaris is famous for his reading tours, where he likes to test and hone his pieces, and engage in banter and back-and-forth with his audiences. EW has learned that Hachette Audio will release a new Sedaris audiobook on Nov. 24. Live for Your Listening Pleasure—consisting of recordings culled from his recent American tour—will have no hardcover or paperback counterpart.”This was planned as an audio initiative,” says a Hachette spokeswoman. “It’s patterned after Live At Carnegie Hall”—a popular 2002 recording—”and though we first thought it would be a single event, he preferred to cobble together highlights form the entire tour.” You can hear an exclusive clip here:
We already know that 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan is a bit like his on-screen persona, Tracy Jordan: unpredictable, hysterical, and just a little nuts. So why shouldn’t his memoir — I Am the New Black, which goes on sale Oct. 20 — be anything but unhinged?
Morgan is predictably honest about his upbringing and extracurricular activities in his book, even admitting that he once took his uncomfortable 30 Rock castmates to an illegal strip joint in New York City. But he’s also surprisingly candid about his professional life — not to mention his attitudes toward former co-workers. When discussing his 10-year stint on Saturday Night Live, Morgan writes that he was disrespected by fellow cast members Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri, and quickly turns the tables on the comics. (“Where’s Chris Kattan now? Where’s Cheri Oteri now? That bitch can’t even get arrested.”)
But the feud doesn’t end there. Apparently, Morgan’s anger is so deep-seated, he went off-script while recording his audiobook (A tip of the hat to Gawker.com for finding this clip.): “They never going to host Saturday Night Live. And I don’t mean — that’s not even me, but that’s what happened to me over there. They never treated me well. There were people that treated me beautifully, like Will Ferrell and Colin Quinn and Molly Shannon — I love them. But Cheri Oteri and Chris Kattan — I never cared for them either. F— ‘em.”
Loopy as he may be, I never thought of Morgan as a trash-talker. But the whole excerpt does make me curious about what went down behind the scenes. Even though we don’t know the circumstances, are you Team Tracy, or Team Cheri and Chris? And what are the best Saturday Night Live feuds in history? (Jay Mohr v. Lorne Michaels, anyone?)
2 B, or not 2 B, that is the question. LOL!
If only the Bard were lucky enough to have had a Twitter account. Since he didn’t, we’ll just have to rely on BBC Audiobooks and fantasy writer Neil Gaiman to bring us the latest development in Twitterature. Tomorrow at noon, the Coraline author will tweet the first sentence in an interactive storytelling experiment, with the hope that fellow Twitterers (Twits?) will pick up the thread and spin the rest of the story 140 characters at a time. The final product will eventually be compiled into a short story, recorded as an audiobook, and made available on iTunes for free. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to add to the story here.
It’ll be interesting to see if average Twitterzens will be able to maintain a functioning narrative in this mass game of exquisite corpse, or if it will inevitably devolve into “And then a comet hit the planet and everybody died!” or “A giant poo-monster came out of nowhere and swallowed dear Esmeralda whole,” as mine always did. Some hope can be gleaned from the recent success in London of the Royal Opera House’s first tweet-based opera, Twitterdammerung, which actually got some decent reviews. We lose Miley, but gain Wagner. Seems like a fair trade.
Tweets probably won’t be replacing conventional book-writing anytime soon, but it is an interesting glimpse into the possibility of open-source literary collaboration. Will BBC be able to separate the tweets from the chaff, or will we perhaps realize that all that Twitters is not gold?
Photo credit: Eric Fougere/VIP Images/Corbis
Shortly before his tragic Sept. 14 death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 57, actor Patrick Swayze completed work on what would be his final performance: the abridged audiobook version of The Time of My Life, the memoir he wrote with his wife, Lisa Niemi, which was published Sept. 29. (According to Jennifer Smith at Simon & Schuster Audioworks, the three-time Golden Globe nominee completed his work in the recording studio on Aug. 23.) Thanks to the good folks at Simon & Schuster Audioworks, we’re able to share three short clips of the late actor reading from his sadly now-posthumous work.
In the first audio clip from The Time of My Life, Swayze talks about shooting the memorable love scene in 1990′s Ghost with costar Demi Moore. “The best love scenes don’t require what I call ‘humpage,’” he notes.
In the second clip, the actor discusses recovering from the death of a loved one, and finding “a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world, by keeping it alive in yourself.”
In the third clip, he shares how he responded to his pancreatic cancer diagnosis in January 2008. “Show me where the enemy is and I’ll fight ‘em,” he recalls telling his doctor. “Facing your own mortality is the quickest way possible to find out what you’re made of.”
Photo Credit: Andy Bradshaw/Photoshot/Landov
