(Audio book performed by cast including: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, Carrie Brownstein, Don Cheadle, Lena Dunham, Bill Hader, Kirby Heyborne, Keegan-Michael Key, Julianne Moore, Megan Mullally, Susan Sarandon, Ben Stiller, Various)
If you are going to read this book, read this audible version with a cast of different voices, each playing the various characters, most of whom are a kind of ghost. Those who die and end up in this Washington, DC cemetery (well, Georgetown) have a choice. They can move on and take whatever afterlife is due them or stay put, talking to one another and repeating their last day of life, believing they have a chance to be alive again. One of the dead who decides to stay is Willie Lincoln, who famously died while his father was president. Abe comes to the graveyard and holds his son in his arms, weeping. This raises a lot of philosophical conversation among the higher class inhabitants and drifts into the “other side of the tracks” where Black people and low class white people turn out to be buried. Lots of perspectives on race in this Civil War era novel.
The structure of Lincoln in the Bardo is so original it’s almost indescribable. Saunders gives us the history of this period by interweaving facts/interviews/sentences from both real and imagined sources between the stories and voices of his ghosts and a few people who are alive. It could feel disjointed and hard to read but listening to the audible it all fell together because the actual different voices helped keep things straight. I do plan to read the print copy someday but wow! Just Wow.
They Called me Bookworm 