Shh!

The Squad: Killer Spirit, by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. I think the first one gripped me a tad more, although there certainly isn't anything wrong with this one. We get more of the relationship between Toby and Jack, and between Toby and the rest of the squad, but those things are intertwined with the rest of the story really well: it doesn't feel like this is an adventure story plus relationship elements, it feels like a well-constructed story.

What Would MacGyver Do?: True Stories of Improvised Genius in Everyday Life (Audiobook), by Brendan Vaughan; read by Patrick Lawlor and Shelly Frasier. I certainly like the idea of this book, and, while many of the stories are very good, some don't seem to fit. Many are not terribly well-written, although most of the selections are by people who are writers in other fields. The readings were quite good: Lawlor put on accents a few times, and I mostly found those annoying, but the volume was consistent, the pronunciation clear, the readers pleasant to listen to for 4 hours in the car.

Northern Lights (Audiobook), by Nora Roberts; read by Gary Littman. This doesn't count against my running total, since I didn't make it even halfway through the first disk. As silly as many things from a romance novel sound when I read them, they sound even sillier when they are being read to me. Granted, I don't have much experience listening to audiobooks, but I certainly didn't enjoy how this one was done. I think I could have sucked it up had it just been a silly romance novel, but the reading is what killed it for me. The narrator used a different voice for every character, and all of them grated on my nerves. The voices were charicatures of accents, and they swung wildly between different volume levels. I can't imagine how anyone could actually listen to this.

9,417 to go (+ 1 picture book)