I forgot to mention that while I was driving across Wisconsin on holiday I listened to an awesome book on tape. Book on CD to be accurate. My Life as a Fake was a perfect book to listen to while driving across long stretches of Wisconsin farmland. Especially if you're a librarian/English lit fan.

It's a book about a literary hoax in Australia, and apparently is actually based on fact. It's a very convoluted story, full of one person saying this and another person saying that. But best of all, the narrator could do multiple accents. She had a beautiful voice, capable of pulling off both male and female characters with British and Australian accents. I would almost like to reread the book, but I'm not sure that it would have been the same.

Anyway, the story is of Sarah Wode-Douglas, the editor of a literary magazine, and her travels to Kuala Lampur with an old family friend and poet, John Slater. Once in Kuala Lampur, she meets, quite accidentally, Christopher Chubb. Chubb had perpetrated a literary fraud upon Australia to deflate the ego of a friend. He had create works of poetry and poet to go with them. Normally, this would not be a problem, but the publisher of the poetry was sued for libel. And then the phantom Bob McCorkle shows up in real life and begins stalking Chubb.

It's a very fascinating novel about what Sarah will go through in order to get a perfect piece of poetry. Trying to follow the convoluted narration provided by the characters is another challenge, but definitely worthwhile at the end.