Harry Potter and the Cat Who Rescues Books

I only made it a week before doing a short-round! 

First up, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, full cast audio edition.  I loved the full-cast audio edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and while I’d intended to spread out my credits in this series, I couldn’t.  I love the early books so much and this performance of the stories was so wonderful I felt compelled to continue. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was the first audiobook I ever listened to in the tenure of this blog, but this full cast audio edition is a much richer animal than even Jim Dale’s charming performance. The same strengths from the first audio drama apply:   a full cast, of course,  with almost no weak points save for a Snape who just sounds like a bored and bitter bureaucrat. The sound design is atmospheric, so we hear footsteps and characters reacting in the background, that sort of thing.  Chamber of Secrets adds the wonderful talent of Kit Harington to voice Gilderoy Lockhart.  He’s perfect for it, though I’ll confess my mental image is still Kenneth Branagh.   Aragon, the giant spider, is appropriately disturbing.  

And next, a little Japanese magical realism: The Cat Who Rescues Books. We open on Rintaro,  young man who practically grew up in his grandfather’s bookshop and who has inherited it in the wake of his death, but since the funeral has reduced himself to a ‘hikikomori’, a recluse. One of his his classmates keeps coming by to check on him, but it’s not until a talking cat appears and orders him to help rescue some books that he is forced to start dealing with his grief. The cat and Rintaro go on a series of missions that are effectively criticisms of some aspects of book culture and book publishing.  Two of the missions chide readers whose entire approach to reading books is maximizing book counts: one man reads books but locks them away afterwards and doesn’t revisit or reflect on them, and another is obsessed with reducing books to a paragraph or so so that readers can ‘read’ more books. It’s like blinkist for novels,  I suppose. As Rintaro struggles to argue with these people and how them how they’re missing the point of literature, he not only begins to rediscover purpose, but to rethink his decision to sell his grandfather’s unique bookstore. This is a strange novel at times – the dialogue in the ‘missions’ is stilted, set as they are in quasi-magical realism scenarios – but sweet all the same.