So, I think I've I mentioned that I've been rewatching season 1 of Bones. I saw all of these episodes when they were first on, but I liked watching them again. I remember that when the show started a lot of people (i.e., every other poster on the boards at TWoP) hated Brennan's "I don't know what that means" in response to any pop culture reference. They also liked to nitpick the timeline: How can she be thirty and have all of this professional experience? I prefer to bask in the hotness of David Boreanaz and laugh at the jokes. Like how they try to make the Jeffersonian sound like the Smithsonian in the episode about the man in the bear. (The cute shipping guy natters on about seeing Archie Bunker's chair at the Jeffersonian while Brennan fills out the shipping label for a box of bear scat or something.)
The TV show about Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who writes novels about a forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs, is loosely based on the life of Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist who writes novels about a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. (Say that five times fast.) I'd always meant to get some of her books, since I like mysteries in general. I finally got around to it in the last month or so. I liked the two that I read (Fatal Voyage, Grave Secrets) but hated the one I listened to on tape.
I can't decide if it was the style of the source material, the topic of the source material, or the fact that I was listening to it instead of reading it that turned me off. The book (Cross Bones) is . . . well, it's complicated, but a lot of it seems to be about determining through forensic analysis whether or not some skeletal remains found in a cave in Israel could have been the family of Jesus, and perhaps even include the bones of Jesus himself. Meh.
The style is what annoyed me about halfway through. It devolved into one character describing a piece of evidence or sharing a theory and then the other character in the scene saying something like, "So what you're thinking is . . . ," and then repeating whatever the first character said. Ugh! I hate that "what you're saying is" because a certain person at work does that, except she always repeats it back wrong and you have to start the process all over again. With the advanced cut-and-paste technology at Reichs's disposal, these characters had no such problem, so I'm driving along and yelling at the CD player: Duh!! I just heard that! Let's move on!
Now, I don't remember the use of this parroting device in the other two books I read and enjoyed, but maybe I only noticed it in this one because I was forced to move at the pace of the performer instead of skimming ahead on my own. I only got the book on CD because I knew I was going to be in the car a lot the last few weeks, driving to Cincinnati and then back and forth to Akron a few times. I can only listen to my patently awesome Now That's What Amy Calls Music! mix CDs so many times, and I have an ever-growing list of things I want to read, so I thought, Why not get a few audiobooks and start killing some birds, right? Wrong!
Oh, and I haven't even told you the worst part. I suffer through 9.75 CDs of this "So what you're saying is . . . " nonsense and then when it gets down to the nitty-gritty in the final few chapters, the CD starts skipping. Boo!!! I was so ticked. I skipped ahead to the next chapter and managed to hear enough to find out who killed the importer/exporter linked to the maybe-Jesus bones, but I didn't get any closure on the schmoopy love story part about Brennan and Ryan. Sigh. Maybe this "reading" thing is overrated. Only 6 weeks until the season 2 DVDs come out! I should move them up in my queue.
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