When Julie Rose’s fresh translation of Les Misérables came out in 2008, I began checking and waiting for its audiobook. It finally came out last year, and it’s currently about 50% off from Audible.

Jenni and I have enjoyed listening to it. We’re about 12 hours in to this massive 60-hour book. (Warning: The opening part about the priest is s-l-o-w [and we used double-speed!], but it picks up after that.) Jenni read it several times in her teens, but this is my first time through the unabridged version.

The narrator is not bad. You can sample the audiobook here. [Read more…] about Audiobook Sale for Les Misérables (2008 Translation by Julie Rose)

This week Jenni and I finished re-listening to Jim Dale’s masterful reading of the Harry Potter series.

We enjoyed it so much the first time that we read the books again two years later, and the timing was just right. We loved it right out of the gate in book 1. We made so many more thematic connections the second time through that we missed the first time. (We initially focused on putting together the broad storyline.) What a pleasure.

We can relate to what Alan Jacobs writes about here—at least with reference to Harry Potter and Narnia—in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011):

Children often have this experience:

• the Harry Potter saga has wrapped up,
• the Anne of Green Gables tales are done. [Read more…] about Successful Rereading: Maintaining the Magic

This week I listened to the audiobook of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Nov. 2010). Wow. What a story.

One of the book’s motifs is that POWs craved dignity as much as they craved physical necessities like food and clothing:

Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose. On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. (p. 183, emphasis added)

What is “the only real foundation for human dignity and human rights”? Humans are created in the image of God.