mainon 's review for:

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
4.0

The things that I liked most about this book are fairly superficial: one of the main characters is named Mishkin (one of my cats is named Myshkin), and he also happens to be a lawyer (I am a lawyer, and therefore predisposed to like books wherein lawyers are reasonably well-portrayed). It begins in a used bookstore, and ultimately is a book about books, or, more precisely, a book about old books, with ancient manuscripts in secretary hand concealed in their covers, with heavy doses of cryptography and suspected forgery and the life-threatening adventures that necessarily follow.

I enjoyed this as an audiobook; the reader was skilled at voicing different characters and had a pleasant speaking style. The one drawback is that the Bracegirdle letters, written as they are in archaic style, became somewhat tedious to listen to. I suspect they might have been more palatable in written form.

Also -- 15 CDs! I appreciate that this was unabridged but that many CDs was a lot to keep track of, and took me almost 3 months to get through on my daily commute.