I  am an audiobook addict. This, I have gleefully and willingly confessed many times before. Sometimes, though, I listen to a book (while mowing or snowblowing or driving to the office or doing the dishes or…whatever) that is, from a traditional mucho-macho masculine standpoint…a little embarrassing. The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon is my embarrassing chick book series.

I mean, I’ve listened to a couple of breathy thrillers that were clearly written for a female audience that is a step above romance novels. Not terrible necessarily, but the cowboy-ish main male character and the incredibly strong female executive who somehow needs to fold into her cowboy with sobs at key points in the story…yeah, it is a formula. And not really my thing.

Admittedly, there are such characteristics in the Outlander books, but they are fairly well seated, along with the occasional gratuitous sex scene. The payoff for enduring such moments, however, is so much fantastic historical fiction about the Highlander rising in Scotland, the liquor importing business in France circa 1760, life in the Carolina colonies in the decade before the Revolutionary War. Seriously, very enjoyable. Piracy, planting, potatoes to whether famine, dimensional time travel through mystical stone circles, old world witchcraft and new world shamanism…and everyone is slim and struggling to survive. No need for strong diet pills here. And since each book read unabridged is around 40 hours, that’s a whole lot of dishes I can wash.