4 extremely funny audiobooks

With mud, rain, taxes, and chilly nights, the spring can sometimes be quite cruel. So let’s have a laugh. All titles were downloaded from www.audible.com.

2. "Dancing Aztecs," by Donald E. Westlake

Dancing Aztecs, by Donald E. Westlake
(Read by Brian Holsopple; HighBridge Audio; 13 hours and 11 minutes)

Reminding one of a madcap comedy from the 1940s (only with stronger language) this early Westlake novel is an entertaining aural romp.  A crazy dash around New York City ensues when 16 golden statues of a dancing priest are shipped to a NYC museum.  One, it turns out, is the real thing, and a crazy cast of characters each wants it for himself. 

The complicated plot shimmers with humor and intelligence; it has been meticulously worked out so that nary a plot thread is left dangling. Narrator Holsopple instils a realistic, down-to-earth quality to his narration that fits these mostly blue-collar schemers, but his regional accents miss the mark.    

Grade: A Minus

2 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.”

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