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AUDIOBOOK EXCERPTS

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT Guilty Pleasures Unabridged CDs Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT The Laughing Corpse Unabridged CDs Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT Intervention Robin Cook (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT The Bride's Farewell Meg Rosoff (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT Even Money Dick Francis and Felix Francis (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT Guilty Pleasures Abridged CDs Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT The Laughing Corpse Abridged CDs Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT The Law of Nines Terry Goodkind (Penguin Audio)

AUDIOBOOK EXCERPT Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater Frank Bruni (Penguin Audio)

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Leonard Maltin is our guest blogger during the week of August 10th. If you have any questions for Leonard Maltin, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about Leonard Maltin's 2010 Movie Guide:

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[Editor's Note: Amanda Stern is the author of "Scout's Honor," which appears in Love Is a Four-Letter Word]

I was the type of teenager who, in a fairly successful bid, acted tough to thwart my deep-seated fear of - well, most everything.  Part of acting tough included big talk. As a big talking teenager, I exaggerated my experiences in less successful attempts to thwart participation in the very activities I claimed advanced expertise. To be clear: I was a bit of a liar.  In "I Never," the popular drinking game where one drinks only IF they're guilty of the dirty truism I was consistently drinking. According to past games, by the time I was 15 I'd: had sex on a gynecologist's table, done acid, made out with a girl, spent the night on a park bench in Washington Square Park, been chased down the street by a knife-wielding mugger and had sex with two brothers. I'd done none of those things, but pretending brought me an immense amount of street-cred with my naïve 9^th grade colleagues.