It's been a while since I last listened to an audio book. In fact I think the last time was when I was 17 and stood in the snow measuring ivy leaves on a biology field trip. Naturally I was hating the fact I stood in the snow measuring ivy but I did it with the company of a Torchwood audio book and smug in the knowledge I wasn't one of the poor sods, I mean fellow classmates, currently stood in a stream.



The trip had already been delayed by two days thanks to the snow and we ended up having to do four days worth of coursework in one. The trip ended with us stranded in the centre in Somerset with no electricity or way of getting home thanks to the coach company refusing to take their coach out in the weather. Heavy snow fall the night before we were due to leave had taken out the power lines and we were banned from going out and having a snowball fight for fear of being squashed by a tree. Thinking about it I think the centre just didn't want 3 school groups lobbing snowballs on their grounds and trampling the snow in.

In the end we escaped in a minibus convoy with the aid of a tractor that pulled us out of every snow drift we got stuck in and made it to the local train station where, miraculously, the trains were running. At the time we found it all very exciting but looking back now as someone who works in a school I can't help but feel for my poor teachers who had to Great Escape us out of there.

I've been really slacking on my reading lately and with a long train ride to Worcester a few weeks ago I downloaded the audible app in a bid to catch up. I've had my eye on Amy Poehler's Yes Please for a little while and had heard great things about it. Autobiographies are, in my opinion, where audio books get a chance to shine. Hearing someone read aloud their own book about their own life in their own voice seems so much more special than a normal novel. That's what the audio book of Yes Please did really well. With loads of guest readers, random conversations and a live recorded final chapter, parts of it felt more like a chat than a book and I loved that. The final chapter recorded in front of a live audience was probably my favourite part. It was funnier than the rest of the book and the energy from the audience helped leave the book on a high but to be honest overall I felt a little bit disappointed.

On a number of occasions Amy whines about how hard it is to write a book and it's noticeable in some of the chapters. Quite a bit of it feels like filler. I kept waiting for the book to get going and suddenly become awesome but it never quite got there. Stories would start and then never be told. Things I was most interested in, her rise to fame on SNL and the growth of UCB theatre, were glossed over. Yes there were chapters about them but I felt like there was so much more that could have been said. There were bits I enjoyed, the birth of her children, the day she ended up handcuffed to her friend at school for example, but they felt few and far between.

Maybe it had been too hyped up for me and I expected too much but Yes Please  just never felt like it really started.