One thing about books on tape is that you can’t skim, and you can’t skip around. I find this excruciating. Some books stand up really well to being read aloud– especially those Hemingway-esque ones where every sentence is stripped down. You don’t have to worry about a writer trying to get fancy with a sentence and going awry. Other books suffer, and I along with them. Case in point: The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers, one of those Christian historical romance sagas. That genre is typically not my thing, but the whole series was sitting there on the library shelf, and I had hear more good things about her than most authors in that genre.

So. The plot was interesting, a few of the characters engaging, the latin prhases thrown in a nice diversion (apart from “peristile” which got old pretty quick). But. Way, way, way too long and repetitive. With these epic stories, I think the writers have to focus on keeping the plot moving forward, getting their characters in the right places at the right time, more than wordsmithing like they would for a shorter book or story. That’s fine, and that’s why we invented skimming. In this one, certain phrases were used dozens of times, and I heard every syllable of every one.

His mouth tipped
He said sardonically
He said huskily
A muscle twitched in his cheek/jaw
She went cold
Her hand trembled
Fear gripped her
He smiled ruefully

Yikes! Watch out for those adverbs, Ms. Rivers. Well, you can kind of get the gist of the story from them, excepting the happy ending.