Audiobook logging
Mar. 22nd, 2019 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAngleberger, Tom. Fake Mustache - Audiobook read by Jonathan Todd Ross and Jessica Almasy. This one was very odd. The protagonist's best friend buys a fake mustache and becomes a criminal mastermind. The protagonist is the only person to make the connection and ends up on the run. There's mind control involved. The book's short (about 3 CDs) and skews more toward the silly than than the suspenseful.
Angleberger, Tom. The QwikPick Papers: Poop Fountain! - Audiobook read by Mark Turetsky. This ran less than two hours, and the plot was very slight. Three kids set out together to try to find and sneak inside a sewage treatment plant. It read reasonably well, but it didn't feel like it had a story arc. Also, I really wanted the female character to go and spend time with other people who weren't crushing on her-- The story was first person from the POV of one of the guys, and he kept remarking on points he and his friend scored in their competition for the girl's affection.
Boston, L.M. The Children of Green Knowe - Audiobook read by Simon Vance. It's been decades since I last reread this, so I'd forgotten a lot of details. I kind of want to take notes on the series now so that I can work out the metaphysics of the ghosts and of who becomes a ghost. I seem to recall that it's more time slipping than lingering after death, but that might be a retcon that's only in The Stones of Green Knowe. This book certainly seems more of a died young and remained after.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Penric’s Demon - Audiobook read by Grover Gardner. I'd gotten about halfway through a paper copy of this one and then put it down and lost track of it. Seeing the book on Overdrive gave me the push I needed to finish it. I like the protagonist. He wants very much to help people and extends his definition of 'people' as he encounters things outside of his previous experience.
Carriger, Gail. Etiquette & Espionage - Audiobook read by Moira Quirk. I haven't read any of Carriger's books in quite a while because the second Parasol Protectorate book made me want to strangle most of the characters for complete failure to comprehend cause and effect. I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would which was rather a low bar. I think that I was helped by the fact that the POV character was 14 and by the quality of the reading. There are a number of ??! plot points that I just decided I wasn't going to fuss over. Possibly those logical conflicts will be explained in later books. Possibly I'm just not supposed to notice.
Clark, Henry. What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World - Audiobook read by Bryan Kennedy. This was very middle grade. There's a great deal of "Wait-- What?" in the world building, and I got echoes of Pinkwater in terms of that without it being stylistically the same. As far as I can tell, I haven't listened to any other books read by Kennedy, but his voice sounds very familiar. The plot involves middle school students thwarting a covert alien invasion with mind control and general weirdness. Okay if you like this sort of thing. I liked it well enough.
Clements, Andrew. The Whites of Their Eyes - Audiobook read by Keith Nobbs. Part 3 of Keepers of the School. The duo of the previous two books starts to integrate the third member of their conspiracy. They find more secrets of their school and have more adventures. Their school still isn't safe as there are at least two more books.
Collins, Suzanne. Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane - Audiobook read by Paul Boehmer. Book 2 in the series. I feel like there's a fundamental conversation missing from this in terms of Gregor acting pretty much like a boy his age who has a lot of family responsibilities and who gives them priority while the people in the Underworld keep expecting him to understand and share their priorities without them having talked to him about those priorities. Gregor is pretty bad about not asking questions, but it seems to be a coping mechanism that lets him pretend that none of this is going to be his business long term.
Gaiman, Neil. Fortunately, the Milk - Audiobook read by the author. This ran less than an hour and was just generally ridiculous. I mainly finished it because I needed something that required no thought.
Gaiman, Neil. The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection - Some short stories read by the author. These reminded me a lot of Joan Aiken's work. I didn't listen very carefully, though, and I mostly got this because it was available immediately and under an hour long. I needed something in the background while I did other things.
Gaiman, Neil. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Audiobook read by the author. This just kind of annoyed me. It ran about an hour and a half. There's music in the background through the whole narration. It's a creepy and very emotionally distant story that didn't work for me, generally, but the music tipped me over into active irritation. I'm not sure why I finished it give that I wasn't engaged by the characters or the plot. Probably just because it was short.
Heartfield, Kate. Alice Payne Arrives - Audiobook read by Jennywren Walker. This ran about 3.5 hours and is more first book in series than a standalone story. There's a lot of world building around the way that time travel works and why there's a time war. I kind of wanted more space for these characters, particularly for Alice and Jane. Then again, more space for Alice just might give her more scope for impulsiveness (that is more in the nature of a response to having already lost a great deal without taking effective action to prevent it).
Leckie, Ann. Provenance - Audiobook read by Adjao Andoh. I liked this better than I did the Ancillary series. I liked the cultural details and how they fit together. Leckie is good at understanding that no culture is perfect for every single person within it, even if the culture is mostly functional, and that people will find ways to play the rules of their culture for advantage against less ruthless people. I didn't find all of the pronouns clear enough here for me to track them. I'm not sure if that's my hearing or the reader's enunciation or accent.
Lin, Grace. When the Sea Turned to Silver - Audiobook read by Kim Mai Guest. A girl sets out on a quest to rescue her grandmother. The narratives intercut stories told by the girl as she travels and told by her grandmother while she's imprisoned. Some bits of the backstory connect to one of the author's previous books, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.
Nix, Garth. Frogkisser - Audiobook read by read by Marisa Calin. This book seems to be aimed at middle grade readers. The main character is a younger princess who starts on a quest to find a way to undo a transformation on a prince who is decidedly not her true love. The quest, naturally, gets bigger as it goes along. I like the fact that the quest ends up centering on trying to restore rule of law in the face of ongoing royal and sorcerous autocracy. I quite liked this but suspect that I wouldn't have managed it in print.
Reiss, Tom. The Black Count - Audiobooks read by Paul Michael. This is a biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of the author of The Three Musketeers and grandfather of the author of The Lady of the Camellias. He was born in Saint-Domingue, the son of a French nobleman and of that nobleman's slave, and his father took him to France. There are some lacks in the book due to gaps in surviving sources; at those points, the author pulls back to talk about general conditions in French society and about events that are documented that would have impacted the life of anyone French. Scott couldn't listen to this, even though he was interested, because he found the vocal performance too soporific.
Schmidt, Gary D. What Came from the Stars - Audiobook read by Graham Winton. This is a children's book that intertwines a family trying to deal with the death of the children's mother with a very odd alien artifact. The reading is very precise and consistent about pronouncing the alien names, but those sections of the book feel flat and detached, more or less as if the reader can't find reality for the terms, names, and events. The interface between the human world and the alien world feels more fantasy than SF and more horror than fantasy. The alien world and its history sound very much like it's trying to be Tolkien. All of this, taken together, ends up feeling very weird and like the different parts have kind of have crashed together and don't belong in the same story.
Tacitus. The Annals - Audiobook read by George K. Wilson. I can't tell which translation the audiobook used and am not interested in searching different paper and online copies to figure it out. It's not in the library's record, and it wasn't on the cover of the box or printed on the CDs. The library record says that this is 'selections' rather than the entire text.
Wodehouse, P.G. Love Among the Chickens - Audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil. This was very silly. I kept stopping for long periods due to vicarious embarrassment, but it was overall fluffy and fun.
Started but not finished:
Angleberger, Tom. The Mighty Chewbacca in the Forest of Fear - Audiobook read by a cast. This was flat in performance by the primary reader. I liked the performances of a couple of the readers doing specific characters. The book is short. It's a bit breakneck but also very predictable. Angleberger manages a good bit of humor in the character interactions, but the story as a whole felt strangled and not very interesting.
Cole, Alyssa. A Princess in Theory - Audiobook read by Karen Chilton. I wasn't able to leap my fundamental disbelief about how the hero's ultra-competent assistant tried to communicate with and locate the heroine at the beginning of the book. The characters might well have been okay and have had an interesting dynamic. I just kept feeling cranky about how the set up for them to meet was structured, so I only made it about an hour and a half in before I returned it.
Ginns, Russell. Samantha Spinner and the Spectacular Specs - Audiobook read by Kathleen McInerney. This is a kind of frenetically ridiculous middle grade book. I'm pretty sure it's the second in a series, but that wasn't why I stopped. I stopped because the level of convoluted and over-the-top characterization and such irritated me. Sometimes stories like that work for me, but this one didn't.
Green, Sally. The Smoke Thieves - Audiobook with multiple readers, one for each POV. I stopped after an hour (3 different readers) and realized that I had other OverDrive audiobooks that I was more interested in finishing. The reading was excellent, and I could see the story being very compelling for not-me readers. I liked the first character and was very frustrated by the second and actively angry at the third. I think I was meant to have sympathy for the second and respect for the third, but...
Hooper, Kay. Illegal Possession - Audiobook read by Deanna Hurst. I remember liking some of Hooper's books quite a long time ago and thought I'd try this because it was only 5.5 hours long and immediately available. I got an hour in and just kind of wanted to punch all of the characters. They didn't feel like people, and a rather vast number of romance characterization and interaction tropes that I dislike were there.
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.
O'Malley, Daniel. The Rook - Audiobook read by Susan Duerden. This audiobook is a bit more than 17 hours long. I got an hour and a half in and realized that I was having a fairly visceral DNW response to some of the underlying worldbuilding. I wasn't wondering how the protagonist would survive; I wanted everything to burn to the ground so that she-- or someone else-- could salt the earth. Since this is the first in a series, I'm pretty sure that that's not going to happen any time soon.
Rossner, Rena. Sisters of the Winter Wood - Audiobook read by Ana Clements. I don't know that I recommend this book in audio version. There's a fundamental problem with it in this version that made following it difficult. It's structured in short chapters with alternating first person POV. I couldn't reliably track which POV each particular bit was in because the narrator in no way altered the delivery. The characterization was clear enough. The story has a very clear sense of place and character. The POV characters are sisters and Jews in a fantasy Eastern Europe. I got almost 30% through this before I gave up. The sisters are both teenagers who're unhappy, just in very different ways. Neither one is actually wanting something entirely realistic, but also neither wants anything particularly weird. I could see fairly clearly how they would hurt each other and themselves and just didn't want to read it.
Turton, Stuart. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Audiobook read by James Cameron Stewart. The reading performance was fine. This just wasn't a good match for me as a book. I listened to 3.5 hours (out of 17) and still felt completely indifferent to the character. The situation/puzzle was mildly intriguing, enough that, if I'd been reading in paper, I'd probably have skimmed a few bits toward the end to see what structural choices the author made, but this isn't the sort of story that I find enticing or absorbing. I've got other Overdrive audiobooks waiting for me.
Angleberger, Tom. The QwikPick Papers: Poop Fountain! - Audiobook read by Mark Turetsky. This ran less than two hours, and the plot was very slight. Three kids set out together to try to find and sneak inside a sewage treatment plant. It read reasonably well, but it didn't feel like it had a story arc. Also, I really wanted the female character to go and spend time with other people who weren't crushing on her-- The story was first person from the POV of one of the guys, and he kept remarking on points he and his friend scored in their competition for the girl's affection.
Boston, L.M. The Children of Green Knowe - Audiobook read by Simon Vance. It's been decades since I last reread this, so I'd forgotten a lot of details. I kind of want to take notes on the series now so that I can work out the metaphysics of the ghosts and of who becomes a ghost. I seem to recall that it's more time slipping than lingering after death, but that might be a retcon that's only in The Stones of Green Knowe. This book certainly seems more of a died young and remained after.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Penric’s Demon - Audiobook read by Grover Gardner. I'd gotten about halfway through a paper copy of this one and then put it down and lost track of it. Seeing the book on Overdrive gave me the push I needed to finish it. I like the protagonist. He wants very much to help people and extends his definition of 'people' as he encounters things outside of his previous experience.
Carriger, Gail. Etiquette & Espionage - Audiobook read by Moira Quirk. I haven't read any of Carriger's books in quite a while because the second Parasol Protectorate book made me want to strangle most of the characters for complete failure to comprehend cause and effect. I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would which was rather a low bar. I think that I was helped by the fact that the POV character was 14 and by the quality of the reading. There are a number of ??! plot points that I just decided I wasn't going to fuss over. Possibly those logical conflicts will be explained in later books. Possibly I'm just not supposed to notice.
Clark, Henry. What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World - Audiobook read by Bryan Kennedy. This was very middle grade. There's a great deal of "Wait-- What?" in the world building, and I got echoes of Pinkwater in terms of that without it being stylistically the same. As far as I can tell, I haven't listened to any other books read by Kennedy, but his voice sounds very familiar. The plot involves middle school students thwarting a covert alien invasion with mind control and general weirdness. Okay if you like this sort of thing. I liked it well enough.
Clements, Andrew. The Whites of Their Eyes - Audiobook read by Keith Nobbs. Part 3 of Keepers of the School. The duo of the previous two books starts to integrate the third member of their conspiracy. They find more secrets of their school and have more adventures. Their school still isn't safe as there are at least two more books.
Collins, Suzanne. Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane - Audiobook read by Paul Boehmer. Book 2 in the series. I feel like there's a fundamental conversation missing from this in terms of Gregor acting pretty much like a boy his age who has a lot of family responsibilities and who gives them priority while the people in the Underworld keep expecting him to understand and share their priorities without them having talked to him about those priorities. Gregor is pretty bad about not asking questions, but it seems to be a coping mechanism that lets him pretend that none of this is going to be his business long term.
Gaiman, Neil. Fortunately, the Milk - Audiobook read by the author. This ran less than an hour and was just generally ridiculous. I mainly finished it because I needed something that required no thought.
Gaiman, Neil. The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection - Some short stories read by the author. These reminded me a lot of Joan Aiken's work. I didn't listen very carefully, though, and I mostly got this because it was available immediately and under an hour long. I needed something in the background while I did other things.
Gaiman, Neil. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Audiobook read by the author. This just kind of annoyed me. It ran about an hour and a half. There's music in the background through the whole narration. It's a creepy and very emotionally distant story that didn't work for me, generally, but the music tipped me over into active irritation. I'm not sure why I finished it give that I wasn't engaged by the characters or the plot. Probably just because it was short.
Heartfield, Kate. Alice Payne Arrives - Audiobook read by Jennywren Walker. This ran about 3.5 hours and is more first book in series than a standalone story. There's a lot of world building around the way that time travel works and why there's a time war. I kind of wanted more space for these characters, particularly for Alice and Jane. Then again, more space for Alice just might give her more scope for impulsiveness (that is more in the nature of a response to having already lost a great deal without taking effective action to prevent it).
Leckie, Ann. Provenance - Audiobook read by Adjao Andoh. I liked this better than I did the Ancillary series. I liked the cultural details and how they fit together. Leckie is good at understanding that no culture is perfect for every single person within it, even if the culture is mostly functional, and that people will find ways to play the rules of their culture for advantage against less ruthless people. I didn't find all of the pronouns clear enough here for me to track them. I'm not sure if that's my hearing or the reader's enunciation or accent.
Lin, Grace. When the Sea Turned to Silver - Audiobook read by Kim Mai Guest. A girl sets out on a quest to rescue her grandmother. The narratives intercut stories told by the girl as she travels and told by her grandmother while she's imprisoned. Some bits of the backstory connect to one of the author's previous books, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.
Nix, Garth. Frogkisser - Audiobook read by read by Marisa Calin. This book seems to be aimed at middle grade readers. The main character is a younger princess who starts on a quest to find a way to undo a transformation on a prince who is decidedly not her true love. The quest, naturally, gets bigger as it goes along. I like the fact that the quest ends up centering on trying to restore rule of law in the face of ongoing royal and sorcerous autocracy. I quite liked this but suspect that I wouldn't have managed it in print.
Reiss, Tom. The Black Count - Audiobooks read by Paul Michael. This is a biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of the author of The Three Musketeers and grandfather of the author of The Lady of the Camellias. He was born in Saint-Domingue, the son of a French nobleman and of that nobleman's slave, and his father took him to France. There are some lacks in the book due to gaps in surviving sources; at those points, the author pulls back to talk about general conditions in French society and about events that are documented that would have impacted the life of anyone French. Scott couldn't listen to this, even though he was interested, because he found the vocal performance too soporific.
Schmidt, Gary D. What Came from the Stars - Audiobook read by Graham Winton. This is a children's book that intertwines a family trying to deal with the death of the children's mother with a very odd alien artifact. The reading is very precise and consistent about pronouncing the alien names, but those sections of the book feel flat and detached, more or less as if the reader can't find reality for the terms, names, and events. The interface between the human world and the alien world feels more fantasy than SF and more horror than fantasy. The alien world and its history sound very much like it's trying to be Tolkien. All of this, taken together, ends up feeling very weird and like the different parts have kind of have crashed together and don't belong in the same story.
Tacitus. The Annals - Audiobook read by George K. Wilson. I can't tell which translation the audiobook used and am not interested in searching different paper and online copies to figure it out. It's not in the library's record, and it wasn't on the cover of the box or printed on the CDs. The library record says that this is 'selections' rather than the entire text.
Wodehouse, P.G. Love Among the Chickens - Audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil. This was very silly. I kept stopping for long periods due to vicarious embarrassment, but it was overall fluffy and fun.
Started but not finished:
Angleberger, Tom. The Mighty Chewbacca in the Forest of Fear - Audiobook read by a cast. This was flat in performance by the primary reader. I liked the performances of a couple of the readers doing specific characters. The book is short. It's a bit breakneck but also very predictable. Angleberger manages a good bit of humor in the character interactions, but the story as a whole felt strangled and not very interesting.
Cole, Alyssa. A Princess in Theory - Audiobook read by Karen Chilton. I wasn't able to leap my fundamental disbelief about how the hero's ultra-competent assistant tried to communicate with and locate the heroine at the beginning of the book. The characters might well have been okay and have had an interesting dynamic. I just kept feeling cranky about how the set up for them to meet was structured, so I only made it about an hour and a half in before I returned it.
Ginns, Russell. Samantha Spinner and the Spectacular Specs - Audiobook read by Kathleen McInerney. This is a kind of frenetically ridiculous middle grade book. I'm pretty sure it's the second in a series, but that wasn't why I stopped. I stopped because the level of convoluted and over-the-top characterization and such irritated me. Sometimes stories like that work for me, but this one didn't.
Green, Sally. The Smoke Thieves - Audiobook with multiple readers, one for each POV. I stopped after an hour (3 different readers) and realized that I had other OverDrive audiobooks that I was more interested in finishing. The reading was excellent, and I could see the story being very compelling for not-me readers. I liked the first character and was very frustrated by the second and actively angry at the third. I think I was meant to have sympathy for the second and respect for the third, but...
Hooper, Kay. Illegal Possession - Audiobook read by Deanna Hurst. I remember liking some of Hooper's books quite a long time ago and thought I'd try this because it was only 5.5 hours long and immediately available. I got an hour in and just kind of wanted to punch all of the characters. They didn't feel like people, and a rather vast number of romance characterization and interaction tropes that I dislike were there.
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.
O'Malley, Daniel. The Rook - Audiobook read by Susan Duerden. This audiobook is a bit more than 17 hours long. I got an hour and a half in and realized that I was having a fairly visceral DNW response to some of the underlying worldbuilding. I wasn't wondering how the protagonist would survive; I wanted everything to burn to the ground so that she-- or someone else-- could salt the earth. Since this is the first in a series, I'm pretty sure that that's not going to happen any time soon.
Rossner, Rena. Sisters of the Winter Wood - Audiobook read by Ana Clements. I don't know that I recommend this book in audio version. There's a fundamental problem with it in this version that made following it difficult. It's structured in short chapters with alternating first person POV. I couldn't reliably track which POV each particular bit was in because the narrator in no way altered the delivery. The characterization was clear enough. The story has a very clear sense of place and character. The POV characters are sisters and Jews in a fantasy Eastern Europe. I got almost 30% through this before I gave up. The sisters are both teenagers who're unhappy, just in very different ways. Neither one is actually wanting something entirely realistic, but also neither wants anything particularly weird. I could see fairly clearly how they would hurt each other and themselves and just didn't want to read it.
Turton, Stuart. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Audiobook read by James Cameron Stewart. The reading performance was fine. This just wasn't a good match for me as a book. I listened to 3.5 hours (out of 17) and still felt completely indifferent to the character. The situation/puzzle was mildly intriguing, enough that, if I'd been reading in paper, I'd probably have skimmed a few bits toward the end to see what structural choices the author made, but this isn't the sort of story that I find enticing or absorbing. I've got other Overdrive audiobooks waiting for me.
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Date: 2019-03-28 09:54 pm (UTC)