The inside scoop: a few of my favorite Hamlets

The Grammys are not all about music.  There is a spoken word category as well.  Past winners include Barack Obama, Jon Stewart, and Bill Clinton.  This year, nominated alongside Betty White and Tina Fey, is the cast of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2010 production of Hamlet.  While I have a strong feeling that either Ms. White or Ms. Fey will be taking home the award on Sunday, I will still be cheering for OSF’s full-cast recording.  I got to see this production on my last trip to Ashland and immediately after leaving the theater I wanted to turn around and go right back in and see it again—which is saying quite a bit for a Shakespearean tragedy.  Before, I had always considered the character of Hamlet to be a bit of an angsty whiner who just lucked into getting all the good lines.  But Dan Donohue makes Hamlet charismatic in his madness, very human in his troubles.  So, unable to move to Ashland and just go to the theater every day, I became a Hamlet junkie, watching every movie adaptation I could find.  It’s been adapted many times; so here’s the short list of my favorites:

Known by some as the “Doctor Who Hamlet,” the 2010 David Tennant version easily makes my top 3.  This is a filmed restaging of the Royal Shakespeare Company stage production, and the medium benefits from having two TV veterans in lead roles.  David Tennant knows how to make one close-up do a year of storytelling, and Patrick Stewart’s voice was made for Shakespeare. 

If David Tennant’s was the Doctor Who Hamlet, the 2000 version starring Ethan Hawke could be called the Generation X Hamlet.  Hawke’s Hamlet delivers his soliloquies as a video diary and wanders the halls of The Denmark Corporation with his art school Ophelia (Julia Stiles).  If I were casting a production of Hamlet fantasy- football- style, I’d draft a lot of the cast from this movie.  Kyle MacLachlan makes Claudius both menacing and weirdly likeable, Bill Murray is a magnificent Polonius; there’s also Liev Schreiber as Laertes and Sam Shepard as the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, play by Tom Stoppard, film starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.  Stoppard created his own modern classic around the wanderings of Hamlet’s two arbitrarily doomed school friends.  The play mixes life and death, storytelling and theater, comedy and philosophy, and a brilliant game of Questions.  Roth and Oldman add their own quirky style and chemistry in the film, which Stoppard directed. 

Side note: The OSF Hamlet audiobook was produced by Blackstone Audiobooks , a company based in Ashland, OR.  They have another full-cast production up for a Grammy this year in the same category: The Mark of Zorro, starring Val Kilmer.

 –Amy

   

Blurbs from the Branch: A Natural Storyteller

Resident BBC Naturalist, David Attenborough, has had an amazing career. His latest TV series, Frozen Planets, is set to be released stateside early next year. It features the 84 year old Attenborough, as he travels to Antartica and the North Pole. The footage looks amazing, but until then there’s Life Stories, a collection of  BBC Radio 4 episodes, about nature’s oddities. Attenborough is so knowledgeable and excited to have the opportunity to explain what so few people have a chance to observe, that you don’t even miss the visuals that usually go with this type of programming. If you’re one to appreciate random fun facts or enjoy hearing the backstory of failed technology, harsh weather and breaking through language barriers, you’ll enjoy Life Stories. I think it would be great for a longer car ride with older kids interested in animals, science or travelling.

Straight out of the box: New mystery series added to Adult Books on CD

Books on CD aren’t just for long car trips.  You can listen while you knit.  You can listen while you cook.  Painting, working on the car, finally sorting through that file box of Important Financial Documents from 2003-  like Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar, if you add audiobooks to more tedious tasks then, “Snap!  The job’s a game!” 

New additions to the audiobook collections at Cedar Mill and Bethany are easy to spot- look for the white tape just above the spine label.   Rita, the library’s audiobook selector, recommends the newly acquired Dr. Siri Paiboun mysteries by Colin Cotterill, set in Laos in the 1970′s.  The description on the audiobook case for Anarchy and Old Dogs, the first book in the series, gives some background:

“Laos, 1975. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Dr. Siri Paiboun, a seventy-two-year-old Paris-trained doctor, is appointed national coroner. Although he has no training for the job, there is no one else: the rest of the educated class have fled. He is expected to come up with the answers the party wants, but crafty and charming, Dr. Siri is immune to bureaucratic pressure. At his age, he reasons, what can they do to him? And he knows he cannot fail the dead who come into his care without risk of incurring their boundless displeasure. Eternity could be a long time to have the spirits mad at you.”  

Follow the adventures of Dr. Siri in the following titles: The Coroner’s Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, Curse of the Pogo Stick, The Merry Misogynist, Love Songs from a Shallow Grave, and the newly released Slash and Burn.  If you are already familiary with the Dr. Siri books, Coterill has a new series starting with Killed at the Whim of a Hat. You can find these titles in the catalog under the author Colin Cotterill, or series Dr. Siri investigations. Available in book or book on CD. – Rita

Blurbs from the Branch – Award-Winning Audio Books

It probably comes as no surprise to our regular readers that we here at Bethany really love our audiobooks.  Recently in search of some recommendations, a couple of us here stumbled across The Audies at http://www.theaudies.com/, the audio book awards for good books with good readers.  Whether you’re already an audio book lover or you’re looking to get started with something good, this is a great website! It lists the current year’s award winners and nominees in different categories, such as “Narrated by Author or Authors” or  ”Thriller/Suspense”.  We have many of this year’s winners and nominees for checkout here at Bethany.  Here are a few: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (winner: Children’s 8-12),  The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (winner: Thriller/Suspense), and The Reversal (winner: Mystery and Suspense).

The website, http://www.theaudies.com/ lists only the current year winners, but you can find lists of winners and nominees from previous years at the Audio Publisher’s Association website at: http://www.audiopub.org/audies-gala.asp Here are  a few examples of the previous year winners we have for checkout at Bethany: Odd and the Frost Giants (2010 winner: Narration by Author or Authors), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2008 winner: Biography Memoir), and Duma Key (2009 winner: Fiction).

What are your favorite audiobooks? Does anyone have a great book narrator to recommend or are there any authors or series that are particularly good on audio?

-Jeannine

Blurbs from the Branch – Playaways

LOVE AUDIOBOOKS?  TRY A PLAYAWAY!

One of the newest formats to hit our shelves at Bethany is the Playaway, an All-in-One Audiobook. Playaways are small portable audiobook units that provide the convenience of listening to an audiobook without needing a separate CD or cassette  player.  These units are small enough to fit in a pocket and carry around or use while working out at the gym. 

Playaways are located in our audiobook section and check out for three weeks.  All you need to provide is a set of headphones or earbuds and one AAA battery.  The Bethany Branch currently has 73 different titles available on Playaway featuring bestselling authors Maeve Binchy, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson and more.  Search the library catalog for a full listing of available titles and start placing your holds! 

- Marianne