Packing My Library

Argentine-Canadian journalist Alberto Manguel has always lived a peripatetic and literary-saturated life which, of course, has required considerable attention given to shifting his personal book collection from home to home and country to country. His story about the time that library went astray in the hauling is studded with digressions into his affection for public libraries, the oddities in his personal collection, and his delight in discovering various authors from childhood on, among others. Regrettably, James Cameron Stewart's narration enervates both text and listener. His upper-crust British accent and lugubrious pacing intrude upon the content and force the listener into a moodiness that pervades every passage. The transformation of a companionable read for bibliophiles into a plodding listen points up the need to ensure that a narrator must fit the author's temperament for a successful audiobook. F.M.R.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine