Tristram Shandy
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Narrated by:
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Anton Lesser
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By:
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Laurence Sterne
About this listen
Laurence Sterne’s most famous novel is a biting satire of literary conventions and contemporary 18th-century values. Renowned for its parody of established narrative techniques, Tristram Shandy is commonly regarded as the forerunner of avant-garde fiction. Tristram’s characteristic digressions on a whole range of unlikely subjects (including battle strategy and noses!) are endlessly surprising and make this one of Britain’s greatest comic achievements. A cast of strange characters populate this strangest of novels: gentle Uncle Toby, sarcastic Walter, and of course, the pompous, garrulous Tristram himself. This edition is read by Anton Lesser in a tour de force performance.
Please note: In print, Tristram Shandy is filled with visual, typographical, and compositing jokes - pages that are completely blank, pages that are completely black, misplaced chapters or chapters consisting only of their title, squiggly lines to indicate waving a stick, and much more besides. This audiobook tries in a variety of ways to match Sterne's invention with aural equivalents.
Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2009 Naxos AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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By: R. D. Blackmore
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Candide (AudioGO Edition)
- By: Voltaire
- Narrated by: Jack Davenport
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When first published in 1759, Candide became an instant best seller and is now regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. Voltaire’s preoccupations with evil and with various kinds of human folly and intolerance found a perfect vehicle in this philosophical tale. A master storyteller, he combined often wildly entertaining action with profoundly serious sense, parodying the traditional chivalric and oriental tales with which his public was more familiar.
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Guaranteed to keep you smiling if not LOL
- By Robert on 08-09-12
By: Voltaire
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The Confidence-Man
- His Masquerade
- By: Herman Melville
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle can be found all manner of con men, from those selling stock in failing companies and herbal cure-all "medicines" to those who are raising money for supposed charitable organizations and those who simply ask for money outright.
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Trust and the confidence man
- By Nelson on 01-24-22
By: Herman Melville
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Felix Holt, The Radical
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Relinquishing thoughts of a materially rewarding life, the respectably educated Felix Holt returns to his native village in North Loamshire and becomes an artisan. He is a forceful young man of honor, integrity, and idealism, burning to participate in political life so that he may improve the lot of his fellow artisans.
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four and a half stars
- By connie on 01-02-08
By: George Eliot
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Barry Lyndon
- By: William Makepeace Thackeray
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Like Tom Jones before him, Barry Lyndon is one of the most lively and roguish characters in English literature. He may now be best known through the colorful Stanley Kubrick film released in 1975, but it is Thackeray who, in true 19th-century style, shows him best.
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A masterful reading
- By BB on 06-14-14
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The Way of All Flesh
- By: Samuel Butler
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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This brilliant satirical novel, tracing the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex, has continued in popularity since its original publication in 1903. Every generation finds in The Way of All Flesh a reaffirmation of youth's rightful struggle against the tyranny of harsh parents and its admirable will for freedom of personal expression.
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classic satire- would make Jon Stewart laugh
- By Connie on 06-04-08
By: Samuel Butler
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Middlemarch
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 35 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored: the world of politics, social change, and reforms, as well as betrayal, greed, blackmail, ambition, and disappointment.
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Best Audible book ever
- By Molly-o on 12-25-11
By: George Eliot
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Waverley
- By: Sir Walter Scott
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Waverley by Sir Walter Scott is an enthralling tale of love, war and divided loyalties. Taking place during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the novel tells the story of proud English officer Edward Waverley. After being posted to Dundee, Edward eventually befriends chieftain of the Highland Clan Mac-Ivor and falls in love with his beautiful sister Flora. He then renounces his former loyalties in order actively to support Scotland in open rebellion against the Union with England. The book depicts stunning, romantic panoramas of the Highlands.
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Loved it
- By Tad Davis on 04-12-18
By: Sir Walter Scott
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North and South
- By: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 18 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion that poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature. When Margaret Hale's father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience she is forced to leave her comfortable home in the tranquil countryside of Hampshire....
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Delightful
- By Sally on 01-04-10
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Mark Twain - The Complete Novels
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Lee Howard
- Length: 58 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Starts at Chapter 1, 2. The Prince and the Pauper Starts at Chapter 37, 3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Starts at Chapter 70, 4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Starts at Chapter 113, 5. The American Claimant Starts at Chapter 158, 6. Tom Sawyer Abroad Starts at Chapter 184, 7. Pudd'nhead Wilson Starts at Chapter 197, 8. Tom Sawyer, Detective Starts at Chapter 219, 9. A Horse's Tale Starts at Chapter 230, 10. The Mysterious Stranger Starts at Chapter 245.
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Content; GREAT! Performance.. .not so much😁
- By brian deis on 01-09-20
By: Mark Twain
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Laurence Sterne's beloved comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is the "biography" of Tristram Shandy - a wonderfully humorous and eccentric narrator who guides the listener from his conception to his birth and on to his life as an adult. The twists and turns of Tristram's life expose him to such memorable characters as Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Dr. Slop, and the Widow Wadman - whose own stories enrich the central narrative of Tristram's life.
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A classic and a hoot
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The king of all the narrators
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Glad I Listened, But…
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terrific story BUT
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Glad I Listened, But…
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The Decameron is one of the greatest literary works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio's answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante's Divine Comedy.
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Not Up to the Usual Naxos Standard
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Tristram Shandy is an example of classic literature that has withstood the test of time. A sensation in England when first released in a series of nine volumes, this amusing novel is widely considered to be a masterpiece in satire fiction.
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Poor performance
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Dead Souls
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Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'dead souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov.
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In 1572, Montaigne - nobleman, humanist, and thoroughly Renaissance man - retired to the seclusion of his estate in the Dordogne and started to write. From his pen poured a stream of "essays" - attempts to capture the observations that came to him on an idiosyncratic range of subjects, from ancient customs, cannibals, and books to thumbs, war-horses, and the wearing of clothes. He made the study of himself the starting point for investigations into how to live, and wrote with a startlingly modern candor about love, grief, friendship, sex, and death.
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In the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young cavalry officer is invited to a dance at the home of a rich landowner. There - with a small act of attempted charity - he commits a simple faux pas. But from this seemingly insignificant blunder comes a tale of catastrophe arising from kindness and of honour poisoned by self-regard. Beware of Pity has all the intensity and the formidable sense of torment and of character of the very best of Zweig's work. Definitive translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
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One of my favorite authors
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“A faithful translation is rare; a translation which preserves intact the original text is very rare; a perfect translation of Montaigne appears impossible. Yet Donald Frame has realized this feat. One does not seem to be reading a translation, so smooth and easy is the style; at each moment, one seems to be listening to Montaigne himself - the freshness of his ideas, the unexpected choice of words. Frame has kept everything.” (Andre Maurois, The New York Times Book Review)
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Stands next to the Bible and M.A.'s Meditations
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Verging on death, a starving, destitute writer navigates the cold and indifferent city of Kristiania in search of his next meal. Frenzied and fevered, he chews on stale bread, devours scraps of wood, and bites his own finger, sleeping under the stars in old, pungent blankets, until one day he is able to sell an article and buy some food - only for the cycle then to repeat itself....
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Great book great narrator
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The Classic Hundred Poems
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Adopting the methodology of the music charts, The Classic Hundred Poems presents the "top 100" poems of all time. The selections are illuminated by the informative notes of editor William Harmon and read by an ensemble of contemporary poets including Alfred Corn and Rita Dove.
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A great selection of poetry
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Swann's Way
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Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.
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Not a book one reads but inhabits & floats through
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In Search of Lost Time
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Waking in the small hours, Marcel Proust embarks on a retrospective journey, endeavouring to capture the elusive moments that shaped his life. A sip of tea and the taste of a madeleine prompt further recollections, and the floodgates of memory open, pouring forth a torrent of vivid reminiscences.
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Before reading the longest novel every written
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Alison Larkin Presents: Moby Dick and Two Poems by Herman Melville
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- Unabridged
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Melville’s epic tale of one man versus a great white whale will delight Melville devotees as well as those who have yet to sail on this adventure in this mesmerizing new recording read by Jonathan Epstein. The mountain whose whale-like shape first gave Melville the idea of writing Moby Dick rests in the Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts, a short drive away from The Alison Larkin Presents recording studio. At the end of the recording, Larkin interviews Jonathan Epstein and recording engineer Galen Wade about the experience recording the great novel.
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Absolutely outstanding
- By Mary Katherine Worth on 03-05-21
By: Herman Melville
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Tristram Shandy
- A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: Laurence Sterne
- Narrated by: full cast, Julia Ford, Paul Ritter, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins
- Original Recording
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A full-cast dramatisation of this comic tale about an 18th-century gentleman who tries to tell his life story but continually finds that he must digress.... Featuring some of the best known and most well-loved characters in English literature, including Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Dr Slop and the Widow Wadman. Beginning (or attempting to begin) at the moment of his own conception, Tristram Shandy recounts his progress through the world and utterly fails to stick to the point.
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Fabulous
- By Linda on 10-14-23
By: Laurence Sterne
What listeners say about Tristram Shandy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Chad Owens
- 01-05-17
Wonderful narrator and sound effects
The best narrator I have ever heard. Also, great sound effects for places in the book where there are no words.
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- Darwin8u
- 01-02-14
Like discovering Frank Zappa in 250 years
A POEM IN WHICH IS A CELEBRATION BY NEGATION
or, a repartee on jeopardy.
If on a friend’s bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain.
― Alexander Theroux*
I was (of course) destined to love this book. Just look at my love for/on Montaigne, Cervantes & Burton. J'adore big books full of absurdity and digressions and allusions. This is the ... THE ... grand-pappa of the modern novel; the paterfamilis of all things Shandy.
Looking into the black night after emerging with a book from my mother's womb, I dreamt of THIS book among the stars. Sterne's Tristram existed for me before I read it. It was like a song whose tune you hum in your head for years, before identifying the tune with an actual song. Tristram Shandy was playing in the background as I read Joyce, Nabokov, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Murakami, Pynchon, DFW, Rushdie, Woolf, etc. Hell, even Karl Marx loved this book.
But now, I find myself debating on whether I will be content with my Modern Library (Fokenflik intro and notes) version or if I need to go buy the Visual Edition or the Florida Edition. BTW, the NAXOS/Lesser audio version is amazing AMAZING, but you still want the text in front of you because part of Sterne's genius is SEEN not just heard.
IF this seems like an odd obsession after reading/finishing/listening to Tristram Shandy, perhaps (I am guessing) you haven't READ it. 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' just isn't one of those books you really escape from. I keep digressing back into the novel because you keep recognizing the novel in other novels and movies and people. I look at Mandelbrot sets and think THIS is Tristram Shandy with its digressions, repetitions, and spawn. I look at the endnotes of DFW and think, this IS a Shandian experiment. I look at Vonnegut's picture of an * a$$hole (pg 81) in 'BreakFast of Champions' and think: this is a Shandian experiment.
Sterne was postModern before postModern was cool. Reading Tristram Shandy is like discovering that someone in the 18th century had already built a working computer, but that all (all is not to minimize it, simply to localize ti) it did was spit out a long sequence of digressions (All your base are belong to us). Anyway, my wife informed me that she loved just watching me read/listen (so this is now a voyeur review) Sterne because I would spit, giggle, choke, and squirm every page. I would wiggle and twist as Sterne would allude to the classics and twist the logic and satirize everyone from Robert Burton to Jonathan Swift to William Warburton. I can't say this novel isn't appreciated. Those who have read it get it, but it isn't appreciated enough. I imagine it will be like discovering Frank Zappa in 250 years. A future me will be looking at old YouTube videos and will think GOD why didn't more people appreciate him?
* from 'The Lollipop Trollops and Other Poems'
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40 people found this helpful
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- Nicole Tompos
- 04-10-19
A Great Help for a Great Story
This book was assigned to me for a class at my college. With the limited time to actually read and understand it, this audiobook was an unbelievably great help not just for getting all the reading done but to enhance my enjoyment of it. Lesser does a fantastic job of reading and hits on the humor just right. However, this isn't a book you can just listen too, you need the physical thing in front of you as well to fully understand and appreciate what Stern was doing. Reading Tristram Shandy is marathon, not a sprint, so be ready to be in it for the long haul. It is truly a good time though, so have fun with it.
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- John
- 12-30-20
Great
Really lovely reading of an amazing and classic novel. Truly fist rate in all aspects.
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- andrew
- 07-14-12
Much better than the first time
I originally tried reading this in high school, and the whole thing seemed like an insane mess to me, not funny at all. It was somewhat over my head, let's say. Same thing happened with Gulliver's Travels for me. I hated the book for a long time because I read it too early. This is a brilliant book really, and alternates from being mildly funny, to annoying, to hilarious. The whole gag is that the author keeps procrastinating and never getting anywhere, and its similar in style of humor to anything that is funny at first, and becomes funny again if you keep the joke up. I started to giggle at times as I realized just how long nothing had happened! I wondered how anyone could keep up the delays and marvelled at the originality. However, this won't be for everyone, and the joke is a bit subtle for some maybe, who will just wonder, why on earth does anyone read this when there is no story and nothing happens?
Its very British. So if you do not like British humor, then avoid this. Not that all British humor is the same, but its not straight at you, wink and stamp the foot while the joke is told American style humor. So some will miss it. The narration is wonderful, and helps immensely from my experience trying to read this myself. He emphasizes often and has unique voices for each of the characters which helps quite a bit to prevent boredom and keep things straight and only towards the end did I begin to sigh and want it to wrap up. This might be one that is better paired with another book so you can alternate between them. I was listening at a typing job and always try to have several books going depending on mood, so I can flip flop. I now understand just why the book is considered a classic and in that regard am very happy to have purchased and tried it again. One of those books better as an audio. Funny.
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29 people found this helpful
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- fol
- 01-27-21
Spectacular!
I wouldn't have thought that this intensely *literary* novel, with its zigzags, lists, fragments of other genres, borrowings, typographical play and all would adapt well to performance. But Anton "Qyburn" Lesser does a spectacular job capturing its many moods, velocities and voices. Get this one--dive in head first.
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- redmeatkelley
- 09-04-21
Outstanding narration
One of the very best narrations! Full command and fantastic. I highly recommend this version!
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- Rebecca
- 11-16-13
Glorious digressions
What a glorious ramble and rollicking good time. Tristram spends half of the book finally getting to the complications of his birth and name. Along the way, he gets diverted into stories of his Uncle Toby's war wound, Corporal Trim's brother, and the beliefs of his father, Doctor Slop and more. Another book that I wonder if the audiobook performance is what made the difference. Anton Lesser and the producers of this book made it come to life and put the humor in it.
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- blake rose
- 03-25-21
wonderful!
I gave it a one on story because that is what the author would have wanted.
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- bibliophilelinda
- 03-22-16
Excellent narration!
Any additional comments?
Aside from the fact that this book is outrageous and amusing, the real gem is the narration. Anton is a master narrator, enhancing the hilarity and making this book a must read (listen). I think even the stuffiest literary critic would be pleased by his performance of this work of art. Oh, the the story is great, too.
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