Love in the Ruins
The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Walker Percy
About this listen
The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. But first, he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen - and discover why so many living people are actually dead.
Attempting to save the world from completely destroying itself, Tom ultimately begins to understand the quality and caprices of life and the uncontrollable vagaries of time and chance.
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Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.
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A Genuine 5-Stars
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He's a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He's also a knight errant who's wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is simple: he'll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half.
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For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
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Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”
Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.
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A best-selling author of books for adults and children, Mark Childress pens his most outrageous work yet with Georgia Bottoms. The titular heroine is the epitome of the church-going Southern belle, except for one teeny-tiny aspect of her life. Georgia’s family inheritance has long since evaporated, and to maintain her genteel lifestyle, Miss Bottoms has taken six affluent lovers—the fly in the ointment being that one is a married preacher who’s about to reveal their infidelity to the whole congregation.
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Fun Listen
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Sometimes a Great Notion
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Why we think it’s a great listen: Never before has an author’s narration of his fiction been so important to fully grasping the book’s impact and global implications. Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them.
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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What listeners say about Love in the Ruins
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- rpenner
- 09-20-21
good audiobook, some technical issues
good story, good performance. beginning of some words cut off. CD change instructions left in.
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- Timothy Griffiths
- 09-18-17
Bad Imitation of Catcher In The Rye
Hard to follow at most times and made little sense. Though it's parallels to today's world are eerily similar.
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- Bas49
- 02-21-21
Great Book Ruined by Reader
Walker Percy was a masterful writer whose stories are as much philosophy as literature. Love in the Ruins was prophetic! Unfortunately, the reader ruined it. Not only did he mispronounce words unique to Louisiana, but also common English words. Lazy!
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- Topolino21
- 03-08-19
A telling novel for our times
An excellent book for so many reasons, mostly Percy's genius in demonstrating vast cultural concepts through very human and relatable characters, genius even more for the accuracy in which he foretold the current situation of our society.
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- Alicia Olivares
- 05-26-21
Crazy
alot of details..I couldnt figure out the story for a few chapters..but then it was pretty good and funny too
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- Andrew Hogan
- 11-29-18
great performance, good story.
the story is very interesting and it keeps you wondering what is going to happen.
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- Karen
- 04-04-17
a book for the trump era!
While we work we also watch and listen and wait. Let's put out fires today.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Greg Flakus
- 02-10-21
A crazy world and an irritating character
This novel has more of a story arc than others by Percy I have read, but nothing moves smoothly. It’s like a dream where one is planning to do something but can’t move forward. It seems that Tom More describes the same people and the same location several times in the course of this book and he never gets anywhere. It reflects the time in which it was written, 1970-71. There are hippies, a strange invention, revolutionaries, old bigots and racists, and lithe young girls from Texas. Tom has a pretty good set up except for the sniper who keeps trying to shoot him. The writing is entertaining and the dialogue is much like that found in his other books. No one seems quite right. Everyone is just a little off. I had to go at it in fits and starts, re-reading some parts just to make sure I got it. Probably wasn’t necessary, though, because it didn’t make all that much sense anyway. With Percy, you just go with the flow and have fun.
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- Darwin8u
- 05-31-15
A course thread of God
Every time I read Walker Percy I fall in love. I seduce myself into thinking I'm actually just a bad Catholic and promise myself that next time I get a chance I will lose myself in the desert, the woods, or anywhere I can see the cold stars and the burning sand and live forever somewhere in between.
Reading another Percy novel is like discovering an unopened can of cashews in the cupboard. The amount of joy and delight I get from reading and laughing at Percy's absurd view of religion, life, love, the modern era, etc., is really only approached by a handful of lightly salted cashews and sex. 'Love in the Ruins' is messy and weird and probably could have been edited a bit, but it ALL still works perfectly for me. I laughed through every paragraph and each mark of punctuation. Percy's bad, crazy genius, almost polygamist, Catholic protagonists speak to me in ways that most philosophers (old and new), preachers (godly and godless), and politicians (left or right) fail to. He seems to occupy the ground of the fellow traveler who is just as lost and mistaken as you, but possesses a bit more whit and some extra whiskey.
So where does this novel stack up? It was like a friendly dystopian novel. It was like McCarthy decided to write a comic novel. The vines of his morality slide and creep through every page and his humor dances like a purple martin at dusk. The book might only be objectively a four star novel, but this is my review dammit and I own and carry my biases and I love Walker Percy because he makes me want to both believe AND misbehave.
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39 people found this helpful
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- Aaron AuBuchon
- 07-11-20
Remarkable
It's a rare book that can be simultaneously light amd airy and also packed with philosophical observations and questions, and this one does it. This is a book for our times as it poke a wry finger into the eye of our current hyper partisan ugliness and makes it feel like there is much to laugh about there.
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1 person found this helpful