9 reviews found
It was only three weeks into knitting my SEKRIT PROJECT that has left me high and dry for reading time that I remembered audiobooks are a thing … good job, Ben.
Santa Olivia is some dystopian SF from Jacqueline Carey, whom I better know from Kushiel’s Dart and its umpteen spin-offs, as well as the Agent of Hel urban fantasy series (damn, I still crave more of those). In this novel, Carey turns her hand…
I don’t remember how The Devil You Know ended up on my to-read list, except maybe that a lot of people compare it to The Dresden Files, one of my favourite fantasy series of all time. Yet it’s worth noting that I like The Dresden Files in spite of its noir elements, and I like Harry Dresden in spite of the streak of casual chauvinism that runs through him. The Devil You Know is…
One last book review from 2017! I almost forgot I read this, because I read it into a microphone. I recorded a bespoke audiobook of Stardust as a Christmas gift for a friend who hasn’t had a lot of time to read and is trying to get back into it with audiobooks. I chose Stardust for its length and because it has an upbeat ending, which is something my friend expressed more interest in after…
Wow, this one was rough. I had to borrow the audiobook version from my library/Hoopla because that was the only format available, and it is the abridged audio edition. I normally avoid abridged editions. What’s the point in missing out on a bunch of the book? In the case of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, however, I think I’ll make an exception. This is just a terrible, even actively harmful book,…
For the first time in a while, I actually regret sticking out this book instead of DNF-ing it. It was bad. Just as I was starting to lose all hope, there was a glimmer a couple of hours in that made me hang on a bit longer. And then I figured I might as well finish the whole thing just to learn why Jeff keeps replaying parts of his life. Because when you get right…
Do you have a brick wall handy? Because hitting your head against that would be a more productive and more enjoyable experience than listening to The Unincorporated Man as an audiobook. This was the only format in which it was available through my library. Audiobooks are not my preferred format for reading. They can definitely be great if you have good material and a good narrator. The narrator here, Todd McLaren, wasn’t bad—but even he…
NB: I reread and reviewed Jude the Obscure in 2018.
The flaw with Jude the Obscure is neither its theme nor its characters. The flaw is with the narrative, which, slowly-paced, is only lengthened by the vacillation of Hardy's characters.
At first, I empathized with young Jude Fawley. An intellectual at heart, even as a child, he dedicates himself to becoming an autodidact and strives to gain admittance to the university. His plans hit a…
In Areopagitica, John Milton delivers a finely-honed argument in opposition to the Licensing Order of 1643, which restored strict censorship laws to England. Milton relies primarily on classical references; indeed, the title is an allusion to the Areopagus, a hill in Athens and the name of a council who sat in judgement on that hill. In a single word, Milton links the crux of his argument to the zeitgeist of Hellenic antiquity, which…
I received this audio book as a gift from a coworker; she had acquired it for (she says) a quarter at a flea market. Whatever the monetary value, however, this book is a little piece of history to me. It is perhaps the most tangible connection I will ever have to the BBC radio series of h2g2.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as narrated by Stephen Moore is a wholly different experience than any…