I just discovered two new authors via audio and enjoyment of their work led me to spend the past month having an audio binge!

I listened to two CDs by Jodi Picoult. In each there was great writing and social commentary without preaching, but the stories are completely different. Second Glance (Recorded Books, $34.99, unabridged, 10 cassettes) opens in a small town filled with bizarre occurrences when developers destroy a home where Indian bones are buried. Rose petals fall freely, it's freezing cold in summer and all things seem possible as we meet a seemingly unrelated cast of characters. At the center of the novel is a ghost who haunts the present, unhappy at how her husband has sterilized women and Native Americans...one of whom turns out to be her father. Her story reveals connects characters, past and present, who have been searching for happiness. Mystery, occult, romance, issue-based conflicts make for a fast-paced story! George Guidall's reading is dramatic, factual, and clearly told so that we get a strong sense of all characters, both past or present.

Picolt's My Sister's Keeper (Recorded Books, $34.99, unabridged, eight cassettes, 13.75 hours) is read by five narrators. The central character in this book is thirteen year-old Anna who has been conceived to act as donor for her sister Kate, who has leukemia. After years of aiding her sister, Anna fights for medical emancipation, knowing her decision will mean her sister's death. We hear the story also from Anna's attorney, ad litum advocate and family members, each viewpoint just as moving and convincing as Anna's. The five excellent narrators enhance the story's innate power.

I'd long heard about Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors (Audio Renaissance, $32.00, unabridged, seven CDs, nine hours), but was unprepared for the mix of humor and intensity. Burroughs reads his childhood memoir with a buoyant voice that denies that horrors of his angry, alcoholic father and narcissistic delusional mother, adoption by his mother's bizarre psychiatrist who lives in a squalor-ridden home. Here Augusten avoids school, searches for food on a Christmas tree that's been up for five months and falls into relationship with a thirty-three year old man who lives on the property. Burroughs' powers of description make this a difficult audio to hear, but his superb writing and eye for detail chronicle an amazingly sane path through the mad world of his child. The graphic nature of his writing may upset listeners just as much as it entertains them.

Burrough also reads his second book, Dry: A Memoir (AudioRenaissance, $32.00, unabridged, seven CDs, nine hours). Grown Augusten lives in Manhattan, making pots of money as an overpaid ad agency writer, his apartment awash in liquor. When he finally enters detox, he expects compassionate healers and celebrities and gets cafeteria food and group therapy where he becomes adept at recovery psychobabble. But how can he stay sober when one best friend is dying of AIDS, he's attracted to a crack addict, and a thieving liar at work is out to frame him? Burroughs' vivid, fresh, free-wheeling fantastical imaginings and humor shed light in the darkness and his wit makes sense of the absurdities of alcoholism and search for sobriety.

Burrough's third memoir, Magical Thinking ($29.95, unabridged, seven cds, nine hours) is a collection of unconnected short stories-about his hiring a small housecleaner who has a large stranglehold on his pocketbook, his attempt to buy a log cabin to escape the hurried Manhattan life style, about his lover, Dennis, and his comic brushs with writing fame. These stories don't the heart-wrenching quality of the previous memoirs, but it's not as if Burroughs' new stories lack emotional quality, they're just a lighter look at his life, kind of you're drinking with an old friend (his drink of course is not alcoholic) and catching up on the joys of life!