Book Logging: Audiobooks
Dec. 30th, 2018 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAddison, Katherine. The Goblin Emperor - Audiobook read by Kyle McCarley. I listened to most of this while we were at UCon. I had trouble tracking names/identities while listening, but I mostly followed the plot. I was exhausted, and the vocal performance was relaxing. I'm glad to have finally finished the book (I started reading a paper copy shortly after it came out but never finished), and I enjoyed the story.
Angleberger, Tom. Darth Paper Strikes Back - Audiobook read by 'various narrators.'
Angleberger, Tom. The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee - Audiobook read by a cast of readers.
Angleberger, Tom. The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppet - Audiobook read by an extended cast.
Angleberger, Tom. Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue - Audiobook read by an extended cast.
Angleberger, Tom. Emperor Pickletine Rides the Bus - Audiobook read by an extended cast.
I really enjoyed all of the books in this series. I feel sort of like the running conflict in terms of the school board and standardized testing got lost, but I'm not sure that there was a solution to the problem that would fit the scope of the characters' awareness. I think this series benefitted from having a cast of readers as opposed to a single reader. The stories are meant to be written accounts by several different people.
Clements, Andrew. Fear Itself - Audiobook read by Keith Nobbs. This is the second book in a series of (at least) five. The main story has been more or less continuous in the first two books. Some kids are trying to prevent their school being torn down. I intend to finish the series, but I keep forgetting to put a hold on book three.
Coward, Noel. Blithe Spirit - Recording of a performance of the play. I followed this better than I've followed some audio-only recordings of theatrical productions. I think that part of that was that the cast was small. This is a ghost story of sorts and rather more toward frothy comedy.
Dahl, Roald. The BFG - Audiobook read by David Walliams. I had not read this before. I was old enough when it came out that I turned up my nose at it (I also have not read Matilda). I found the story a bit thin, but I’m pretty sure I’d have liked it when I was eight.
Emrys, Ruthanna. Winter Tide - Audiobook read by Gabra Zackman. I listened to two thirds of this via Overdrive before my checkout expired and then had to wait a few months to get access again. I overall enjoyed the book, but I don’t think I’d have finished it if I’d been reading it as text. I’ve just gotten bad at that.
Ephron, Amy. The Castle in the Mist - Audiobook read by Laraine Newman. I listened to this during UCon. It was very short, and I think I wouldn't have finished it if it hadn't been. I kept thinking that surely there had to be more to the story than what I was hearing. There wasn't. This had slightly more substance than, say, a Rainbow Magic chapter book, but it was really thin.
Gaiman, Neil. Odd and the Frost Giants - Audiobook read by the author. This was very short as audiobooks go and relatively pleasant for background listening. I wasn’t particularly grabbed by the story, but I also didn’t lose focus and wander away.
Hercule Poirot and the Adventure of the Christmas Pudding - Radio play adaptation of Agatha Christie’s story. It was less than an hour long and not quite my sort of thing. I suspect I’d not have finished it if it had been longer. Poirot provided the voiceover to simulate first person narration, but I never got much sense of him as a person. A lot of the things he did, he concealed from the audience until a dramatic moment which is a technique that often doesn’t work for me.
Kay, Guy Gavriel. Ysabel - Audiobook read by Kate Reading. I enjoyed the story but was also kind of generally irritated by it. I wanted to know what was going on, and I liked the prose and the reader. I just found the idea that things were deep magic and inexplicable very irritating. It was like grit in the story. I'm pretty sure that the author considered that a feature rather than a bug.
Landy, Derek. Dark Days - Audiobook read by Rupert Degas. This is book 4 of the Skulduggery Pleasant series, a YA series, kind of on the line between Lovecraftian story and urban fantasy. I wasn’t sure if I’d read it before or not. At this point, I’m pretty sure that I had; I’d just forgotten 85% of what happened because there are too many characters that never quite popped as characters. Listening to the book made many of the characters more distinct. I was a little puzzled by some of the choices the reader made about accents but only if I let myself think about them. If I want to read more of the series, I’ll probably need to resort to interlibrary loan. The library has some books in the series but not all of them and not, I think, the next one. There’s an apocalypse coming, and I’m curious as to whether or not I’m guessing right about why/what/who.
Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Sword - Audiobook read by Adjao Andoh. The pronunciation of names in this audiobook differs quite a lot from that in Ancillary Justice. I found it weird that the ruler of the empire is referred to as ‘lord’ when everything else is gendered female. ‘Lord’ isn’t actually a gender neutral term, not on a deep level. I think that using something more on the order of ‘sovereign’ would work better. I liked this one better than I did Ancillary Justice. It’s still not quite my thing, but it is moreso than the first book. I was more interested in the interpersonal interactions and motivations than in the bigger moving pieces of the political plot. Which kind of fits with how I focus when I write things, so I guess it’s a predictable preference.
Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Mercy - Audiobook read by Adjao Andoh. And I liked book three better than I did book two. I’m curious about where this universe would be a few centuries later. This one, I might actually have finished even if it had been on paper. I had to get Ancillary Sword more than once before I finished it (Overdrive checkouts expire after fourteen days). This one, once I actually started listening, I finished in three days. I considered staying up last night to finish, but an audiobook would have kept everyone else awake.
Lin, Grace. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon - Audiobook read by Janet Song. I listened to this at UCon. I had read it before but remembered very little of the details. I mainly remembered the interstitial stories and the ending. I enjoyed the main plot more this time.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti: Home - Audiobook read by Robin Miles. I like that this second volume in the trilogy addressed the trauma that the main character had experienced in the first book. I didn't enjoy that aspect of the narrative, but I would have been upset by it not being there. I read the first book on paper, but when I got this one from the library on paper, I ended up returning it unread (couldn't renew it because of a long waitlist). I was glad to get a chance to go on with the series.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti: The Night Masquerade - Audiobook read by Robin Miles. I listened to this one right after I finished Binti: Home, and I think it worked much better that way. There's a certain amount of plot detail that escaped me because listening to a book leaves me a lot of room for mental wandering away without letting me keep my place. I think this trilogy of novels is worth reading, and I liked the vocal performance by the reader, but I didn't feel satisfied at the end, not like I'd had a complete story. I can't tell how much of that was the book and how much just me. I think that longer books may better support me tuning in and out at intervals and so missing details. Shorter ones have less redundancy, so when I miss things, I really miss things.
Potter, Ellen. Olivia Kidney - Audiobook read by Tara Sands. I had previously read this book on paper, but I had forgotten most of the details. There were a lot of just surreally weird bits in here. It's a short children's book which tilts toward fantasy or-- possibly-- some form of magical realism. That is, it would sit comfortably with some of Pinkwater's books. I'm pretty sure that whatever Pinkwater writes is all in some specific genre or another. Olivia Kidney goes there, too.
Stross, Charles. The Apocalypse Codex - Audiobook read by Gideon Emery. I enjoyed this more than I expected I would. I think that the performance by the reader contributed considerably to that because it emphasized a certain edge of dark humor-- Not so much that what was happening was funny because it wasn't but that life is absurd, generally, and doesn't get less so when one is dealing with cosmic horrors. It just becomes differently absurd.
Willig, Lauren. The Garden Intrigue - Audiobook read by Kate Reading. Judging by the present day sections of this one, it’s set immediately after The Orchid Affair. The sections set in the past focus on a different romantic pair than the one in The Orchid Affair. The heroine is an American at Napoleon's court, and the hero is an English spy.
Willig, Lauren. The Orchid Affair - Audiobook read by Kate Reading. This is a romance set in France under Napoleon (but before he crowned himself emperor). The heroine is a governess who is acting as a spy for the British government. The hero is the official in whose household she’s employed. There’s a secondary strand of story set in the present day that I didn’t quite see the purpose of. It focused on a woman who was researching the historical heroine’s life for (I think) a doctoral dissertation and watching her boyfriend deal with difficulties with his sister, mother, and stepfather.
Wodehouse, P.G. Quick Service - Audiobook read by Simon Vance. I ended up stopping halfway through this and then picking it up again after a gap of at least a year and quite likely more. That means that I finished it without being quite sure how the various characters were connected with each other. I expect that remembering that would have improved the experience, but I was still amused, so it was an overall good experience.
Started but didn’t finish:
Alexander, William. Goblin Secrets - Audiobook read by the author. I got about 25 minutes in and found myself getting irritated with the story and with the worldbuilding. The book is intended for kids, and that 25 minutes is about 10%. Secondary world fantasy. Part of me wants to know if anything ends up making sense in surprising ways, but I really don’t expect that to happen, so why fight through to find out?
Anders, Charlie Jane. All the Birds in the Sky - Audiobook read by Alyssa Bresnahan. I just wasn’t enjoying this. I got two and a half (out of ten) CDs into it and really didn’t want to keep going.
Cashore, Kristin. Jane Unlimited - Audiobook read by Rebecca Soler. I got a bit more than a third of the way through this and realized that I was looking at the screen and wishing desperately that the story would just end. Another 9.5 hours seemed kind of horrifying, so I stopped. I'm pretty sure this was simply a bad match for me. I didn't like or care about any of the characters.
Goodlett, Ellen. Rule - Audiobook read by Lisa Flanagan, Bahni Turpin, and Soneela Nankani. I bounced off of this hard. I'm pretty sure that it was a stylistic mismatch problem. I listened long enough to get a little from each narrator, but I couldn't stick it out.
Horwitz, Gregg. Orphan X - Audiobook read by Scott Brick. I listened to the first CD out of nine and found myself completely bored. The main character was a cipher, and the things he was doing weren’t, in themselves, all that interesting. He seemed to be some sort of vigilante assassin. Everything was in his point of view, and he just didn’t engage me as a person.
Mafi, Tahereh. Furthermore - Audiobook read by Bronson Pinchot. I gave up a bit more than an hour in. I was curious about the world building, but I wanted all of the characters to go away. This is a middle grade fantasy with really temptingly spectacular cover art.
Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven - Audiobook read by Kirsten Potter. I got about 40 minutes in just didn’t give a damn about what would happen next.
McIntosh, Will. Faller - Audiobook read by George Guidall. DNF. I got about 40 minutes in and was resenting every minute more than the last. It was more the story than the performance of it.
Ndibe, Okey. Never Look an American in the Eye - Audiobook by Peter Jay Fernandez. I listened to about 45 minutes of this and just wasn’t really hooked. I think that memoir is not really a genre I have patience, not as a general thing. Memoirs by people I already know something about are more likely to work. Memoirs with humor that matches mine are more likely to work. This one might well have been perfectly fine for me if I weren’t feeling like the world around me is on fire.
Segel, Jason and Kirsten Miller. Everything You Need to Know About NIGHTMARES! And How to Avoid Them - Audiobook read by Jason Segel. This is more an encyclopedia/set of shorts than anything else. Each section talks about a different kind of dream monster and what to do about each. Some of the dream monsters resemble things from popular culture, but there are enough differences and oddities to keep them from being boring. I only listened to about 25% of the book because I really wanted more narrative.
Angleberger, Tom. Darth Paper Strikes Back - Audiobook read by 'various narrators.'
Angleberger, Tom. The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee - Audiobook read by a cast of readers.
Angleberger, Tom. The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppet - Audiobook read by an extended cast.
Angleberger, Tom. Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue - Audiobook read by an extended cast.
Angleberger, Tom. Emperor Pickletine Rides the Bus - Audiobook read by an extended cast.
I really enjoyed all of the books in this series. I feel sort of like the running conflict in terms of the school board and standardized testing got lost, but I'm not sure that there was a solution to the problem that would fit the scope of the characters' awareness. I think this series benefitted from having a cast of readers as opposed to a single reader. The stories are meant to be written accounts by several different people.
Clements, Andrew. Fear Itself - Audiobook read by Keith Nobbs. This is the second book in a series of (at least) five. The main story has been more or less continuous in the first two books. Some kids are trying to prevent their school being torn down. I intend to finish the series, but I keep forgetting to put a hold on book three.
Coward, Noel. Blithe Spirit - Recording of a performance of the play. I followed this better than I've followed some audio-only recordings of theatrical productions. I think that part of that was that the cast was small. This is a ghost story of sorts and rather more toward frothy comedy.
Dahl, Roald. The BFG - Audiobook read by David Walliams. I had not read this before. I was old enough when it came out that I turned up my nose at it (I also have not read Matilda). I found the story a bit thin, but I’m pretty sure I’d have liked it when I was eight.
Emrys, Ruthanna. Winter Tide - Audiobook read by Gabra Zackman. I listened to two thirds of this via Overdrive before my checkout expired and then had to wait a few months to get access again. I overall enjoyed the book, but I don’t think I’d have finished it if I’d been reading it as text. I’ve just gotten bad at that.
Ephron, Amy. The Castle in the Mist - Audiobook read by Laraine Newman. I listened to this during UCon. It was very short, and I think I wouldn't have finished it if it hadn't been. I kept thinking that surely there had to be more to the story than what I was hearing. There wasn't. This had slightly more substance than, say, a Rainbow Magic chapter book, but it was really thin.
Gaiman, Neil. Odd and the Frost Giants - Audiobook read by the author. This was very short as audiobooks go and relatively pleasant for background listening. I wasn’t particularly grabbed by the story, but I also didn’t lose focus and wander away.
Hercule Poirot and the Adventure of the Christmas Pudding - Radio play adaptation of Agatha Christie’s story. It was less than an hour long and not quite my sort of thing. I suspect I’d not have finished it if it had been longer. Poirot provided the voiceover to simulate first person narration, but I never got much sense of him as a person. A lot of the things he did, he concealed from the audience until a dramatic moment which is a technique that often doesn’t work for me.
Kay, Guy Gavriel. Ysabel - Audiobook read by Kate Reading. I enjoyed the story but was also kind of generally irritated by it. I wanted to know what was going on, and I liked the prose and the reader. I just found the idea that things were deep magic and inexplicable very irritating. It was like grit in the story. I'm pretty sure that the author considered that a feature rather than a bug.
Landy, Derek. Dark Days - Audiobook read by Rupert Degas. This is book 4 of the Skulduggery Pleasant series, a YA series, kind of on the line between Lovecraftian story and urban fantasy. I wasn’t sure if I’d read it before or not. At this point, I’m pretty sure that I had; I’d just forgotten 85% of what happened because there are too many characters that never quite popped as characters. Listening to the book made many of the characters more distinct. I was a little puzzled by some of the choices the reader made about accents but only if I let myself think about them. If I want to read more of the series, I’ll probably need to resort to interlibrary loan. The library has some books in the series but not all of them and not, I think, the next one. There’s an apocalypse coming, and I’m curious as to whether or not I’m guessing right about why/what/who.
Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Sword - Audiobook read by Adjao Andoh. The pronunciation of names in this audiobook differs quite a lot from that in Ancillary Justice. I found it weird that the ruler of the empire is referred to as ‘lord’ when everything else is gendered female. ‘Lord’ isn’t actually a gender neutral term, not on a deep level. I think that using something more on the order of ‘sovereign’ would work better. I liked this one better than I did Ancillary Justice. It’s still not quite my thing, but it is moreso than the first book. I was more interested in the interpersonal interactions and motivations than in the bigger moving pieces of the political plot. Which kind of fits with how I focus when I write things, so I guess it’s a predictable preference.
Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Mercy - Audiobook read by Adjao Andoh. And I liked book three better than I did book two. I’m curious about where this universe would be a few centuries later. This one, I might actually have finished even if it had been on paper. I had to get Ancillary Sword more than once before I finished it (Overdrive checkouts expire after fourteen days). This one, once I actually started listening, I finished in three days. I considered staying up last night to finish, but an audiobook would have kept everyone else awake.
Lin, Grace. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon - Audiobook read by Janet Song. I listened to this at UCon. I had read it before but remembered very little of the details. I mainly remembered the interstitial stories and the ending. I enjoyed the main plot more this time.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti: Home - Audiobook read by Robin Miles. I like that this second volume in the trilogy addressed the trauma that the main character had experienced in the first book. I didn't enjoy that aspect of the narrative, but I would have been upset by it not being there. I read the first book on paper, but when I got this one from the library on paper, I ended up returning it unread (couldn't renew it because of a long waitlist). I was glad to get a chance to go on with the series.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti: The Night Masquerade - Audiobook read by Robin Miles. I listened to this one right after I finished Binti: Home, and I think it worked much better that way. There's a certain amount of plot detail that escaped me because listening to a book leaves me a lot of room for mental wandering away without letting me keep my place. I think this trilogy of novels is worth reading, and I liked the vocal performance by the reader, but I didn't feel satisfied at the end, not like I'd had a complete story. I can't tell how much of that was the book and how much just me. I think that longer books may better support me tuning in and out at intervals and so missing details. Shorter ones have less redundancy, so when I miss things, I really miss things.
Potter, Ellen. Olivia Kidney - Audiobook read by Tara Sands. I had previously read this book on paper, but I had forgotten most of the details. There were a lot of just surreally weird bits in here. It's a short children's book which tilts toward fantasy or-- possibly-- some form of magical realism. That is, it would sit comfortably with some of Pinkwater's books. I'm pretty sure that whatever Pinkwater writes is all in some specific genre or another. Olivia Kidney goes there, too.
Stross, Charles. The Apocalypse Codex - Audiobook read by Gideon Emery. I enjoyed this more than I expected I would. I think that the performance by the reader contributed considerably to that because it emphasized a certain edge of dark humor-- Not so much that what was happening was funny because it wasn't but that life is absurd, generally, and doesn't get less so when one is dealing with cosmic horrors. It just becomes differently absurd.
Willig, Lauren. The Garden Intrigue - Audiobook read by Kate Reading. Judging by the present day sections of this one, it’s set immediately after The Orchid Affair. The sections set in the past focus on a different romantic pair than the one in The Orchid Affair. The heroine is an American at Napoleon's court, and the hero is an English spy.
Willig, Lauren. The Orchid Affair - Audiobook read by Kate Reading. This is a romance set in France under Napoleon (but before he crowned himself emperor). The heroine is a governess who is acting as a spy for the British government. The hero is the official in whose household she’s employed. There’s a secondary strand of story set in the present day that I didn’t quite see the purpose of. It focused on a woman who was researching the historical heroine’s life for (I think) a doctoral dissertation and watching her boyfriend deal with difficulties with his sister, mother, and stepfather.
Wodehouse, P.G. Quick Service - Audiobook read by Simon Vance. I ended up stopping halfway through this and then picking it up again after a gap of at least a year and quite likely more. That means that I finished it without being quite sure how the various characters were connected with each other. I expect that remembering that would have improved the experience, but I was still amused, so it was an overall good experience.
Started but didn’t finish:
Alexander, William. Goblin Secrets - Audiobook read by the author. I got about 25 minutes in and found myself getting irritated with the story and with the worldbuilding. The book is intended for kids, and that 25 minutes is about 10%. Secondary world fantasy. Part of me wants to know if anything ends up making sense in surprising ways, but I really don’t expect that to happen, so why fight through to find out?
Anders, Charlie Jane. All the Birds in the Sky - Audiobook read by Alyssa Bresnahan. I just wasn’t enjoying this. I got two and a half (out of ten) CDs into it and really didn’t want to keep going.
Cashore, Kristin. Jane Unlimited - Audiobook read by Rebecca Soler. I got a bit more than a third of the way through this and realized that I was looking at the screen and wishing desperately that the story would just end. Another 9.5 hours seemed kind of horrifying, so I stopped. I'm pretty sure this was simply a bad match for me. I didn't like or care about any of the characters.
Goodlett, Ellen. Rule - Audiobook read by Lisa Flanagan, Bahni Turpin, and Soneela Nankani. I bounced off of this hard. I'm pretty sure that it was a stylistic mismatch problem. I listened long enough to get a little from each narrator, but I couldn't stick it out.
Horwitz, Gregg. Orphan X - Audiobook read by Scott Brick. I listened to the first CD out of nine and found myself completely bored. The main character was a cipher, and the things he was doing weren’t, in themselves, all that interesting. He seemed to be some sort of vigilante assassin. Everything was in his point of view, and he just didn’t engage me as a person.
Mafi, Tahereh. Furthermore - Audiobook read by Bronson Pinchot. I gave up a bit more than an hour in. I was curious about the world building, but I wanted all of the characters to go away. This is a middle grade fantasy with really temptingly spectacular cover art.
Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven - Audiobook read by Kirsten Potter. I got about 40 minutes in just didn’t give a damn about what would happen next.
McIntosh, Will. Faller - Audiobook read by George Guidall. DNF. I got about 40 minutes in and was resenting every minute more than the last. It was more the story than the performance of it.
Ndibe, Okey. Never Look an American in the Eye - Audiobook by Peter Jay Fernandez. I listened to about 45 minutes of this and just wasn’t really hooked. I think that memoir is not really a genre I have patience, not as a general thing. Memoirs by people I already know something about are more likely to work. Memoirs with humor that matches mine are more likely to work. This one might well have been perfectly fine for me if I weren’t feeling like the world around me is on fire.
Segel, Jason and Kirsten Miller. Everything You Need to Know About NIGHTMARES! And How to Avoid Them - Audiobook read by Jason Segel. This is more an encyclopedia/set of shorts than anything else. Each section talks about a different kind of dream monster and what to do about each. Some of the dream monsters resemble things from popular culture, but there are enough differences and oddities to keep them from being boring. I only listened to about 25% of the book because I really wanted more narrative.
