Mirkat Always Reading

My two-star rating for this is not so much a reflection on the writing as on the the narration and format. The stories, for the most part, are quite good (though some moreso than others, of course). Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for listening to this collection from the "Selected Shorts" series, but what happened was I kept finding myself annoyed when the live studio audience laughed at lines I didn't find funny, and after a while I'd think "ha ha ha" after every other line or so out of spite. I can't help thinking that there was an element missing for me, such as the actor's body language and the shared experience of being in a live audience, but the fact is that this was made into an audio recording. Another factor is that there were times when I felt as though some of the narrators were show-boating, trying to make the narration more about themselves than the story. I'm especially thinking of Rene Auberjonois, whose rendition of the TC Boyle story distracted me so much I could barely follow it.

Another disappointment was that my primary reason for downloading this collection from my library's website was because I saw that one of the authors was my beloved Haruki Murakami. But then it turned out that the story was one I'd already listened to in the audiobook version of his collection The Elephant Vanishes. My favorite story (both writing and performance) ended up being the first one--Andrew Tam's "The Palmist." I will definitely seek out more of his writing. Stephen Colbert doing "The Veldt" (Rad Bradbury) and John Lithgow doing "The Monkey's Paw" (Stephen King) were fine, but I felt I was a bit too familiar with both stories.