Posted by irisia in mom, reading.
Tags: joyce bean narrator, lisa jackson author, lisa jackson shiver, new words, SAT words, vocabulary
I’m listening to an audiobook on the way to work. It’s by Lisa Jackson, called Shiver. My drive is about 35 minutes each way so having an audiobook is a savior to keep my mind off annoying drivers and the monotony of the drive. I found several authors I really liked and listened to many of their audiobooks for years. So, in looking for a new author, I went with finding my favorite narrator and then seeing if I liked the books. I LOVE Joyce Bean. Her voice does a great job of pulling you into the story. Her timing is excellent and her range is amazing. I especially like southern characters and from her perfect english recitation comes a perfect authentic southern accent on queue.
So I found Lisa Jackson’s audio book narrated by Joyce Bean and it has 4 stars on Amazon. Then, the audio book comes and it has 12 CD’s!!!! This ought to keep me entertained on drives to and from work for weeks! But, I am not sure how it achieved that rating because it is the slowest book I think I’ve ever read. Finally at about CD 9 it started to get interested. It was SO obvious when she was throwing in plot queue’s – probably because she seems to do little else to build that characters that isn’t a plot queue. The story is either about the main character’s pets or we’re being fed some plot queues – VERY slowly.
But, I always love to learn a new word. It would be easy to learn a new word every day if they were presented but having to go out and hunt for new words sort of takes the fun. Also, while the dictionary can have a context sentence, it’s better to heard the new word used in everyday conversation to ensure it’s not an SAT word, everyday speach wannabe.
So, in the book I heard this word that sounded like fray zon (with a hard o). I rewinded it a couple times and listened to the word being pronounced and the context but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to spell it. It sounded like french so I was thinking fraisson. I forgot about the word until it was used again in the book. I went home and typed in various possible spellings and finally found the word:
fris⋅son – a sudden, passing sensation of excitement; a shudder of emotion; thrill: The movie offers the viewer the occasional frisson of seeing a character in mortal danger.Here is the link to the word on reference.com. The derivation is French or latin – frictiō -shiver.
Posted by irisia in reading.
Tags: jeannette walls, the glass castle
I’m reading The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. So many people have read the book – especially people I know in book clubs. The book is incredibly sad as the author tells of this terrible life she had growing up poor with “odd” parents. I’m about 100 pages into the book and I can’t help but feel sadness more because of the societal constraints that thwart creativity and imagination, letting go and having fun, and bravely going where others don’t go. The parents in the story are made out to be these terrible “mad” sort of people who drink and don’t hold jobs, cannot manage money, don’t set appropriate boundaries for their children, and move their kids to new towns in the middle of the night when they get over their heads with debts. But, the father is highly intelligent and the mother is an artist. Society would say these people wasted away their talents by not channeling them to run into the course of everyday life and the pursuit of earning a good living for their family. But the children are learning, they’re unencumbered and often they laugh and have great fun. Of course the father’s carousing and the mother’s lack of good common sense are the sobering points in the story. But where do you draw the line? One of my favorite lines so far is “the civilians are revolting”. The father said this when they went to the zoo, climbed over the chain and stuck their hands in a cougar’s cage. He did it after carefully studying the animal, maintaining eye contact and feeling that the Cougar was friendly. He did it carefully and the cougar nudged the side of it’s face up against the side of the father’s hand. The crowd of onlookers became enraged which was the pretext to his comment. So where is the line between eccentricity and madness? Are we all so constrained by modern society that we sacrifice fun and freedom, free thinking and abandon?
Followup: my opinions changed quite a bit after finishing the book. Read my followup here.
