4 audiobooks that span the globe

This month we travel to Africa, France, Massachusetts, and Mars.  All titles are available to download from www.audible.com.

4. 'Blueprints,' by Barbara Delinsky

 (Read by Amy Rubinate; Macmillan Audio; 11 CDs; 13.5 hours)

The best thing going for this tale of a mother and daughter at odds with each other is Rubinate, who is an engaging narrator.  Her manner is warm and she has an array of speech patterns that give the story character and help it to resonate with feeling.  However, there just isn’t much happening in the novel. There is a lot of family tension, some of which does not feel believable, and a tragedy that changes the lives of several characters.  Because we are not fully engaged in their lives, and because the pace is so plodding, we can’t much care.   

Grade: C

 

4 of 4

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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