Audiobook Logging
Feb. 23rd, 2023 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI've been working half-heartedly on book logging. Under the cut is the audiobooks I've managed to write up. I don't have detailed comments on all of them, but I have Opinions on at least a few. Eventually, I'll get more logging written up and ready to post; I just don't want to keep waiting with the idea that I should have everything done now.
Alexander, Lloyd. The Book of Three - Audiobook read by James Langton. This was a reread after a few decades. I had forgotten a lot of the details, but I thought it held up pretty well.
Anderson, John David. Stowaway - Audiobook read by Andrew Eiden. I found this compelling but also frustrating. The worldbuilding was kind of fascinating, and the setting had a kind of Cowboy Bebop (anime) texture, but it's a middle grade SF book. There are a lot of details the point of view character misunderstands or mentally elides as normal that indicate a very slow-rolling apocalypse. My main frustration was that I found the protagonist difficult to understand. The plot and setting timeline required him to be 13, but his decisions and interpretations and reactions all felt, at least to me, years younger. But not in a completely consistent way. The library doesn't own book two, and I'm annoyed by that because this one ends on a cliffhanger. I've requested that they acquire it.
Barnes, Jennifer Lynn. The Inheritance Games; The Hawthorne Legacy - Audiobook read by Christie Moreau. These books are both fun in a popcorn way and irritating in a this-makes-no-sense way. The teenage protagonist is named sole heir to the estate of a billionaire. Then she has to live with his children and grandchildren for a year or lose it all. Soap opera levels of complications, plus mysteries, plus the kitchen sink. My reaction to a lot of the plot twists and reveals was on the level of 'cool motive, still murder' but more 'well done plot twist, still ridiculously unbelievable.'
Bayron, Kalynn. This Poison Heart - Audiobook read by Jordan Cobb. This book is almost 100% set up for the next book. It follows the protagonist as she (with her mothers in tow) finds out about her birth mother and her own immunity to poisons and power over plant life. A lot of characters are introduced; a lot of things happen; nothing resolves. There's a villain reveal and a motivation for a quest at the very end. The protagonist is black as are her adoptive parents. The cover is really lovely. I'm looking forward to the sequel (I have a hold on it, but I'm about 6 months out).
Bradley, Fleur. Midnight at the Barclay Hotel - Audiobook read by January LaVoy. Middle grade mystery. This one will not satisfy on the mystery side as there are gaps in the logic/planning, but the characters are fun and enjoy themselves.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Assassins of Thasalon; Knot of Shadows - Audiobooks read by Grover Gardner. Neither of these is the place to start with the Penric series, but they're both solid books. I enjoyed them.
Chambers, Becky. The Galaxy and the Ground Within - Audiobook read by Rachel Dulude. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would when I started it. I liked the whole thing of people thrown together who wouldn't otherwise have interacted. Each character was reasonable within their own context, and they were all trying hard to have positive interactions in a difficult situation.
Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild Built - Audiobook read by Emmett Grosland. I don't entirely connect with this series, but they're relaxed narratives that don't rely on dramatic distress or conflict.
Chambers, Becky. Record of a Spaceborn Few - Audiobook read by Rachel Dulude. I bounced off this one the first time I tried it but managed to finish it the second time. I started off feeling really bad for the fish out of water character, and it was harder for me to follow through to the end than I'd expected.
Chee, Traci. A Thousand Steps into Night - Audiobook read by Grace Rolek. I over all enjoyed this book. The protagonist was engaging. The plot had the right sorts of twists, and the magic/mythos of the setting worked and felt lived-in. I generally had fun. The pebble in my shoe was the repeated statements about misogyny in the setting. It was definitely there and definitely a problem for the characters. I just felt like it came up too bluntly, too often. I was also dubious about how often the protagonist complained about being physically weak, due to restrictions on what girls are allowed to do, while having grown up helping her father run an inn in a low tech setting with no hired help, just the two of them. I could buy there being a lot of things she'd never had opportunity to do and therefore couldn't do well or at all, but I couldn't buy physical weakness as a general thing. Even without it being an inn, running a low tech household involves a lot of physical work.
Chokshi, Roshani. Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality - Audiobook read by Soneela Nankani. Final book in series. I really enjoyed the whole series, and the ending didn't disappoint. This was another road trip through Hindu legends, myths, etc. and with an impending deadline. The Pandava sisters have to regain the blessings of their godly parents (lost at the end of the previous book) and try to figure out a way to end a war where both sides have some extremely valid points.
Clark, Zack Loran. The Lock-Eater - Audiobook read by Ann Marie Lee. At several points while listening to this middle grade book, I thought that the protagonist was deeply mistaken about what genre she was in. She thought it was a picaresque sort of thing while it was rather more of a tilting toward magical dystopia story. I very much liked that she came from an orphanage run by a woman who cared about her and all the other girls. I also liked the thread throughout about what makes a person (of any species) alive and real. The ending was very rushed, but I overall had fun with this book and will look for more by this author.
Cohen, Emi Watanabe. The Lost Ryu - Audiobook read by Kurt Kanazawa. This is a children's book set in our world but with dragons. The protagonist thinks that, if he can find large dragons (who all disappeared from Japan after WWII), his family troubles will be solved. There are a couple of small dragons who are characters. It's the sort of book that works best for readers who'll smooth over all the seams and gaps as they read. Which is to say that I'd have liked it much more when I was eight than I did now. Instead, I kept looking up from the trail the plot followed and thinking that I'd much rather go a different direction. The protagonist finds answers to some family mysteries that have some broader, very unpleasant implications.
Cooney, Kara. The Woman Who Would Be King - Audiobook read by the author. Biography of Hatshepsut. Some parts of this were thin on verifiable details, but the author never quite tipped over into fiction. There was a lot of 'We know x, y, and z about the general cultural practices, so Hatshepsut probably did this regularly,' with regard to religious duties, attire, food, and so on. I found the author's theories about why Hatshepsut's heir eventually erased her status as King plausable. Not proven but believable. I'm just not sure that the book needed to be as long as it was.
Dabos, Christelle. A Winter's Promise - Audiobook read by Emma Fenney. This is the first in a series. I don't think I'll go on with it because I didn't really enjoy this one. It dragged and put a lot of time into things that I didn't much want to read. The protagonist is forced to travel, on very short notice, to a foreign country for an arranged marriage. The new country has an unfriendly climate and very different social customs/structures than what she's used to. There are murder attempts, and many things aren't ever explained to the protagonist. She has to pretend to be a male servant for a vastly long time that is clearly slowly killing her. It was, sadly, one of those books where many of the complications could have been avoided if someone had sat the protagonist down and explained that her basic assumptions about what was expected and safe were wrong. I was intrigued by the world building, but the amount of character misery was off-putting.
Ephron, Nora. Heartburn - Audiobook read by Meryl Streep. I think I only finished this because it was short, and I took years to get through it. My mother is very fond of the book. My impression is that she admires it as well-executed literary vengeance. Which it is. The ex-husband and his new lover come off very badly. My caveat is that nobody at all comes off well. The narrator is more sympathetic than the ex, but there's a lot of loss of agency.
Faizal, Hafsah. We Hunt the Flame - Audiobook read by Fiona Hardingham and Steve West. This is the first book in a YA fantasy series. I was intrigued by this one, but the second book put me off by leaning into romance tropes that I don't enjoy much. This volume involves a quest for a McGuffin to stop the end of the world. I almost stopped when the adoring best (male) friend of the female protagonist got fridged. So this was fine(ish) but not my jam. I tried the sequel, but bounced off hard due to the characters having what felt to me like a weird focus on relationship issues when they needed to stop the apocalypse. I'm not logging that one because I've logged this one.
Feiffer, Jules. A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears - Audiobook read by John McDonough. I know I listened to this, but I remember nothing whatsoever about it. Nothing good; nothing bad. It was quite short.
Ferrante, Elena. In the Margins - Audiobook read by Hillary Huber. Text translated by Anne Goldstein. This was extremely short. I wouldn't have finished it otherwise. Ferrante was talking from a context that I don't even really know how to visit. No, rather one that I'm not very interested in visiting, not at this point in my life. This is a couple of hours of talking about writing and reading that includes a deep lover for Dante that eats about a third of the time. I don't dislike Dante, but a recent reread of The Inferno reminded me of why I'd never read the other two books. Revenge RPF with eternal torture and decay, even when written beautifully, isn't my genre. I expect that the other two books would have had less torture and so on, but... It made me think that I wouldn't have liked Dante as a human being.
Gentill, Sulari. The Woman in the Library - Audiobook read by Katherine Littrell. This is a double threaded mystery story. One thread is an author corresponding with a fan she's never met in person and sharing bits of her current WIP with him. The other thread is that manuscript. Alternating a chapter of the WIP with the fan's comments. The fan very clearly has strong ideas about what the book should be, strong enough that I was glad that fan and author were on different continents during the Time of Covid.
Giles, Lamar. Fake ID - Audiobook read by William Jackson Harper. I must admit that I mostly tried this because of the reader as the blurb didn't look like my sort of thing. Harper is, as usual, excellent. The first person protagonist of this book is a teen in witness protection whose family has had to move multiple times due to his father repeatedly screwing up their covers. The book has intertwining plots, one focused on the protagonist's family and one focused on the murder of a teenager at the protagonist's new school. This is not a book with a particularly happy ending. It's not tragic, however, and there's some hope. It's just... Nothing improves in the ways the protagonist hopes or wants. This is YA mystery and pretty cynical about law enforcement and adjacent things (not unreasonably so, however).
Giles, Lamar. The Last Mirror on the Left; The Last Chance for Logan County - Audiobook read by Ruffin Prentiss. 2nd and 3rd in the Legendary Alston Boys Series. Middle grade fantasy. I really loved this whole series. The protagonists are cousins, two black boys being raised by their grandmother in a town full of weird/paranormal things (such as a river where time flows differently for anything that falls in). They have adventures and solve weird problems; it's all a lot of fun and twists in ways that add complications. I recommend the series.
Hackwith, A.J. The Archive of the Forgotten; The God of Lost Words - Audiobooks read by Bahni Turpin. Second and third in the Hell's Library Series. I read the first in ebook, but the library only had the second as an audiobook. I didn't find the ending of the series entirely satisfying. The worldbuilding collected complications in a way that I found fascinating, but I found the characters largely frustrating. The plot resolved, and the worldbuilding supported it, but... This is a fantasy series about (as the series title indicates) a library in Hell. It contains unfinished and unwritten books, and some of them want to be more than that. The first book focused heavily on the library aspects. The second and third did more with the universe around the library.
McGuire, Seanan. Sparrow Hill Road; Girl in the Green Silk Gown - Audiobooks read by Amy Landon. I generally liked these, but I also feel like the things that interest the author are not the things that interest me. The protagonist is a hitchhiking ghost, and a lot of what happens is derived from urban legends but with hints of a grimmer and unifying underbelly. I plan to read the third book eventually. I've started it but don't feel a strong need to go back to it.
Nix, Garth. Newt's Emerald - Audiobook read by Faye Adele. Regency fantasy with romance. Decent adventure but also quite silly. I bounced off this in paper but enjoyed it in audiobook.
Nix, Garth and Sean Williams. Have Sword, Will Travel; Let Sleeping Dragons Lie - Audiobooks read by Marisa Calin. Middle grade fantasy about a boy who finds a magic sword and goes on a quest. His companion, a girl, is the one who wants to be a knight, but the sword has decided the boy is one. A fair amount of humor. Moves along at a good clip.
Parker, Natalie C. The Devouring Wolf - Audiobook read by Jeremy Carlisle Parker. Middle grade fantasy. The protagonist has grown up knowing that, before she turns 13, she'll become a werewolf. There's a whole hidden culture of it. The book begins in the year when the girl knows she absolutely will transform because nobody has their first transformation later and because nobody ever fails to transform. Then she and four others her age fail to transform. There's something in the woods that's hunting their kin, and they're the last hope to save everyone.
Riley, James. The Revenge of Magic - Audiobook read by Kirby Heyborne. First in series but the library doesn't have the rest. Middle grade fantasy set in world where, not too long ago, monsters attacked Washington DC. The protagonist is single-mindedly vengeful and incapable of nuance. I want to read more because the setting's fascinating, but the protagonist got tedious fast.
Riley, James. Story Thieves; The Stolen Chapters; Secret Origins - Audiobooks read by Kirby Heyborne. 1-3 in the Story Thieves Series. Reading these three makes me think that Riley can't write a plot without characters making terrible decisions based on obsession and an inability to think about those obsessions from new angles. Even in the face of new information. So much new information. I can't put it down to them all being 12 because they take turns in different books. This middle grade fantasy series starts with a boy discovering that one of his classmates has the power to step into books. She is trying to find her father who she accidentally lost in a book when she was quite young. The library has more of this series, but I want to wait to go on until I'm less cranky about the characterization. Again, the setting/worldbuilding are fascinating.
Sagara, Michelle. Sword and Shadow - Audiobook read by Khristine Hvam. I grabbed this one because I've lost track of my place in the Elantra books (after a gap of about a decade) and thought that it might be a reasonable re-entry point as it's focused on a different character. It sort of works. I remembered enough for general orientation. My primary difficulty was the names. I'm pretty sure the Barrani titles would have made more sense to me if I was seeing them on the page because I'd be able to slow down and puzzle out the differences by flipping back and forth as needed. As it was, the names were a bit too homophoneous (homophonic?).
Scalzi, John. The Kaiju Preservation Society - Audiobook read by Wil Weaton. Scott and I listened to this together and had fun with it. This is science fiction with an alternate earth, full of the titular kaiju, that can be reached from our earth at certain times and places. The protagonist takes a job with a research team there. The kaiju are kind of fascinating, but most of the serious complications are human.
Sloan, Holly Goldberg and Meg Wolitzer. To Night Owl from Dogfish - Audiobook read by many different people. This is epistolary, and each email writer has a different reader. This one is sort of a remix of The Parent Trap and sort of not. Two girls who don't know each other are sent to camp together while their fathers go motorcycling together in China. The girls become besties while their dads break up. There are more complications along the way. I was actually pleased with the ending.
Stross, Charles. Escape from Yokai Land - Audiobook read by Gideon Emery. Novella in the Laundry Files series. I don't think this is a good starting point for the series, but if you like the series, it's a nice additional installment.
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. Origins - Audiobook read by Kevin Kenerly. I mostly ended up using this for background noise, so I don't have much opinion.
White, Kiersten. Hide - Audiobook read by Emma Galvin. Overdrive tags this as horror, and that's accurate. Don't get too attached to any of the characters; most of them won't be making it out again. The blurb was a bit coy about what was happening which annoyed me a little once the book revealed the name of the sponsoring company which... This is a YA book aimed at the Percy Jackson generation. The company being called Asterion is a huge indicator of the general shape of the plot, and that comes up before the fourteen contestants enter the abandoned amusement park for a big hide-and-seek competition.
White, Kiersten. Wretched Waterpark; Vampiric Vacation; Camp Creepy - Audiobooks read by Keylor Leigh. Books 1-3 in the Sinister Summer series. Children's books that intersect overly complicated but mundane mysteries with a clear (at least to the reader) sense that there's a larger, considerably more supernatural plot just under the surface. I think this will appeal to kids who like the Series of Unfortunate Events books. I kind of expected the third book to tie things up, but it didn't. This may be a series of infinite length. Or, at the various least, the length of a Phineas and Ferb summer.
Winters, Cat. The Cure for Dreaming - Audiobook read by Jennifer Ikeda. YA book. Historical with just enough paranormal to allow working mesmerism and a tiny bit of psychic power. The protagonist is dealing with an increasingly and abusively controlling father who, when he finds her views on women's suffrage offensive, coerces a young mesmerist into taking away her ability to speak of such things without severe physical consequences. I didn't hate this, and I didn't love this. It was fine. The ending released the tangles without going for a happily ever after.
Yu, Ovidia. Aunty Lee's Delights; Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials; Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge - Audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller. Aunty Lee is an older widow who runs a restaurant and solves mysteries. These are set in Singapore which is not a place I know much about. Aunty Lee is generally fun to spend time with, and I like the supporting characters. There's more focus on food than I enjoy, but the food preparation is a big part of Aunty Lee's characterization and approach to the world.
Started but not finished:
Arroyo, Raymond. The Relic of Perilous Falls - Audiobook read by the author. First in series. I gave up on this about halfway through because I was thoroughly out of charity with all of the characters, both child and adult. I wasn't having any fun and didn't expect the next 4-5 hours to improve that . This is a middle grade fantasy set in our world.
Barker, Emily Croy. The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic - Audiobook read by Alyssa Bresnahan. I listened to almost six hours of this (out of about twenty five or twenty six) then stopped for three days and came back to discover that Overdrive had played it out to the end, completely inaudibly and without my having intentionally started it up. At that point, I realized that I really didn't care enough to try to figure out where I left off and that, really, I probably didn't like the book enough to listen to the rest anyway. It's not even sour grapes. I'm very curious about the world building and what on earth the author might have come up with to fill that much time, but I wasn't actually enjoying any of it. Once an audiobook gets longer than about 14 hours, I set the bar for justifying the time required to listen to it a *lot* higher than I would for something, say, 4 hours long. Given a two week loan period, I have to really, really, definitely want to hear the story and/or spend time with the characters or I won't finish.
Bunce, Elizabeth C. Premeditated Myrtle - Audiobook read by Bethan Rose Young. I listened to half an hour and found the first person narrator uncongenial, so I stopped. Middle grade historical mystery with a female protagonist.
Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Audiobook read by Simon Prebble. Too damned long and very much not my thing. I listened to about 20% of it because I was busy and didn't want to try to find something else, but life is too short.
Harris, Joanne M. The Gospel of Loki - Audiobook read by Allan Corduner. I didn't like any of the characters here. The performance by the reader fit the tone of the text and might appeal to someone else.
Hart, Rob. The Paradox Hotel - Audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller. I gave this a bit more than an hour and a half and still wasn't enjoying it, so I stopped. Nine and a half hours recovered for other things.
Ellis, Lindsay. Axiom's End - Audiobook read by Stephanie Willis and Abigail Thorn. I gave this an hour and wasn't enjoying myself at all, so I stopped. That freed fourteen hours for more pleasant things.
Flower, Amanda. Crime and Poetry - Audiobook read by Rachel Dulude. First in the Magical Bookshop Mysteries Series. I listened to an hour of this and found it stressful and off-putting. I gave up on it because I was feeling increasingly upset while listening. This is so very much not my genre, but I want to find some new popcorn authors. (I will note that romance is equally not my genre, but I keep trying that, too.
Flynn, Kathleen A. The Jane Austen Project - Audiobook read by Saskia Maarleveld. I got an hour in and didn't care at all. I saw no reason to invest another ten hours. This is a time travel story with two characters trying to get close to Jane Austen to steal a 'lost' book, one recently found letters reveal that she destroyed without publishing.
Gemeinhart, Dan. The Midnight Children - Audiobook read by Andre Santana. I only listened to the first CD (of eight). That one spent a lot of time on the horrors of the slaughterhouse where the protagonist's father works. Mostly with emphasis on on how eating meat in general and beef in particular is a social evil that requires suffering. The book is supposed to be about the protagonist's friendship with a mysterious group of children who're on the run. It's not clear from the blurb or the tagging if the genre is mystery with nothing supernatural or some form of SF or fantasy. I decided that I didn't care.
Jaswal, Balli Kaur. The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters - Audiobook read by Soneela Nankani. I got about 2 hours into this and kept finding doing the dishes or showering or reading a different book more important than getting back to this one. I think it was just stressful in the wrong way for me right at that moment. I might try it again later, but I also might not. The book is about three sisters, all adults, traveling to India on a pilgrimage requested by their late mother.
McDermott, Andy. The Hunt for Atlantis - Audiobook read by Gildart Jackson. I listened to slightly more than half of this. I stopped because I was only using it for background noise. It required about 30% of my attention to follow the general plot, and I could walk away and miss a few minutes without getting lost. I could have gone on, but several audiobook holds came in on Overdrive right then, and this one was no better than mediocre. It was a thriller with lots of chases and explosions and betrayals. It's set in the present day but leans on a lot of the archaeological thriller tropes from decades past, including the racist ones. I sort of expected that. The characters and prose are merely serviceable. The plot isn't long on logic-- I had to stop and rant a little when the 12000 year old map of the Amazon River Basin showed waterways identical to the ones on modern maps. Possibly that issue would have been addressed as a plot point later on, but I doubt it. It wasn't even lampshaded by characters pointing out that it is really improbable. They went looking for a lost city based on counting tributaries in order to know how far up the Amazon they needed to go.
Miro, J.M. Ordinary Monsters - Audiobook read by Ben Onwukwe. I listened to an hour and just didn't click with the book. Given that it was almost 25 hours long, pushing onward didn't seem worthwhile.
Springer, Nancy. The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline - Audiobook read by Katherine Kellgren. This reminded me why I only read two of these. I find Enola just a bit grating as a narrator, and I don't care about the mysteries. I listened to CDs 1 and 3 of 3.
Wolke, Robert L. What Einstein Didn't Know - DNF. Audiobook read by Sean Runnette. The book might or might not have been interesting, but the way it was read made it a sleeping aid.
Alexander, Lloyd. The Book of Three - Audiobook read by James Langton. This was a reread after a few decades. I had forgotten a lot of the details, but I thought it held up pretty well.
Anderson, John David. Stowaway - Audiobook read by Andrew Eiden. I found this compelling but also frustrating. The worldbuilding was kind of fascinating, and the setting had a kind of Cowboy Bebop (anime) texture, but it's a middle grade SF book. There are a lot of details the point of view character misunderstands or mentally elides as normal that indicate a very slow-rolling apocalypse. My main frustration was that I found the protagonist difficult to understand. The plot and setting timeline required him to be 13, but his decisions and interpretations and reactions all felt, at least to me, years younger. But not in a completely consistent way. The library doesn't own book two, and I'm annoyed by that because this one ends on a cliffhanger. I've requested that they acquire it.
Barnes, Jennifer Lynn. The Inheritance Games; The Hawthorne Legacy - Audiobook read by Christie Moreau. These books are both fun in a popcorn way and irritating in a this-makes-no-sense way. The teenage protagonist is named sole heir to the estate of a billionaire. Then she has to live with his children and grandchildren for a year or lose it all. Soap opera levels of complications, plus mysteries, plus the kitchen sink. My reaction to a lot of the plot twists and reveals was on the level of 'cool motive, still murder' but more 'well done plot twist, still ridiculously unbelievable.'
Bayron, Kalynn. This Poison Heart - Audiobook read by Jordan Cobb. This book is almost 100% set up for the next book. It follows the protagonist as she (with her mothers in tow) finds out about her birth mother and her own immunity to poisons and power over plant life. A lot of characters are introduced; a lot of things happen; nothing resolves. There's a villain reveal and a motivation for a quest at the very end. The protagonist is black as are her adoptive parents. The cover is really lovely. I'm looking forward to the sequel (I have a hold on it, but I'm about 6 months out).
Bradley, Fleur. Midnight at the Barclay Hotel - Audiobook read by January LaVoy. Middle grade mystery. This one will not satisfy on the mystery side as there are gaps in the logic/planning, but the characters are fun and enjoy themselves.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Assassins of Thasalon; Knot of Shadows - Audiobooks read by Grover Gardner. Neither of these is the place to start with the Penric series, but they're both solid books. I enjoyed them.
Chambers, Becky. The Galaxy and the Ground Within - Audiobook read by Rachel Dulude. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would when I started it. I liked the whole thing of people thrown together who wouldn't otherwise have interacted. Each character was reasonable within their own context, and they were all trying hard to have positive interactions in a difficult situation.
Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild Built - Audiobook read by Emmett Grosland. I don't entirely connect with this series, but they're relaxed narratives that don't rely on dramatic distress or conflict.
Chambers, Becky. Record of a Spaceborn Few - Audiobook read by Rachel Dulude. I bounced off this one the first time I tried it but managed to finish it the second time. I started off feeling really bad for the fish out of water character, and it was harder for me to follow through to the end than I'd expected.
Chee, Traci. A Thousand Steps into Night - Audiobook read by Grace Rolek. I over all enjoyed this book. The protagonist was engaging. The plot had the right sorts of twists, and the magic/mythos of the setting worked and felt lived-in. I generally had fun. The pebble in my shoe was the repeated statements about misogyny in the setting. It was definitely there and definitely a problem for the characters. I just felt like it came up too bluntly, too often. I was also dubious about how often the protagonist complained about being physically weak, due to restrictions on what girls are allowed to do, while having grown up helping her father run an inn in a low tech setting with no hired help, just the two of them. I could buy there being a lot of things she'd never had opportunity to do and therefore couldn't do well or at all, but I couldn't buy physical weakness as a general thing. Even without it being an inn, running a low tech household involves a lot of physical work.
Chokshi, Roshani. Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality - Audiobook read by Soneela Nankani. Final book in series. I really enjoyed the whole series, and the ending didn't disappoint. This was another road trip through Hindu legends, myths, etc. and with an impending deadline. The Pandava sisters have to regain the blessings of their godly parents (lost at the end of the previous book) and try to figure out a way to end a war where both sides have some extremely valid points.
Clark, Zack Loran. The Lock-Eater - Audiobook read by Ann Marie Lee. At several points while listening to this middle grade book, I thought that the protagonist was deeply mistaken about what genre she was in. She thought it was a picaresque sort of thing while it was rather more of a tilting toward magical dystopia story. I very much liked that she came from an orphanage run by a woman who cared about her and all the other girls. I also liked the thread throughout about what makes a person (of any species) alive and real. The ending was very rushed, but I overall had fun with this book and will look for more by this author.
Cohen, Emi Watanabe. The Lost Ryu - Audiobook read by Kurt Kanazawa. This is a children's book set in our world but with dragons. The protagonist thinks that, if he can find large dragons (who all disappeared from Japan after WWII), his family troubles will be solved. There are a couple of small dragons who are characters. It's the sort of book that works best for readers who'll smooth over all the seams and gaps as they read. Which is to say that I'd have liked it much more when I was eight than I did now. Instead, I kept looking up from the trail the plot followed and thinking that I'd much rather go a different direction. The protagonist finds answers to some family mysteries that have some broader, very unpleasant implications.
Cooney, Kara. The Woman Who Would Be King - Audiobook read by the author. Biography of Hatshepsut. Some parts of this were thin on verifiable details, but the author never quite tipped over into fiction. There was a lot of 'We know x, y, and z about the general cultural practices, so Hatshepsut probably did this regularly,' with regard to religious duties, attire, food, and so on. I found the author's theories about why Hatshepsut's heir eventually erased her status as King plausable. Not proven but believable. I'm just not sure that the book needed to be as long as it was.
Dabos, Christelle. A Winter's Promise - Audiobook read by Emma Fenney. This is the first in a series. I don't think I'll go on with it because I didn't really enjoy this one. It dragged and put a lot of time into things that I didn't much want to read. The protagonist is forced to travel, on very short notice, to a foreign country for an arranged marriage. The new country has an unfriendly climate and very different social customs/structures than what she's used to. There are murder attempts, and many things aren't ever explained to the protagonist. She has to pretend to be a male servant for a vastly long time that is clearly slowly killing her. It was, sadly, one of those books where many of the complications could have been avoided if someone had sat the protagonist down and explained that her basic assumptions about what was expected and safe were wrong. I was intrigued by the world building, but the amount of character misery was off-putting.
Ephron, Nora. Heartburn - Audiobook read by Meryl Streep. I think I only finished this because it was short, and I took years to get through it. My mother is very fond of the book. My impression is that she admires it as well-executed literary vengeance. Which it is. The ex-husband and his new lover come off very badly. My caveat is that nobody at all comes off well. The narrator is more sympathetic than the ex, but there's a lot of loss of agency.
Faizal, Hafsah. We Hunt the Flame - Audiobook read by Fiona Hardingham and Steve West. This is the first book in a YA fantasy series. I was intrigued by this one, but the second book put me off by leaning into romance tropes that I don't enjoy much. This volume involves a quest for a McGuffin to stop the end of the world. I almost stopped when the adoring best (male) friend of the female protagonist got fridged. So this was fine(ish) but not my jam. I tried the sequel, but bounced off hard due to the characters having what felt to me like a weird focus on relationship issues when they needed to stop the apocalypse. I'm not logging that one because I've logged this one.
Feiffer, Jules. A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears - Audiobook read by John McDonough. I know I listened to this, but I remember nothing whatsoever about it. Nothing good; nothing bad. It was quite short.
Ferrante, Elena. In the Margins - Audiobook read by Hillary Huber. Text translated by Anne Goldstein. This was extremely short. I wouldn't have finished it otherwise. Ferrante was talking from a context that I don't even really know how to visit. No, rather one that I'm not very interested in visiting, not at this point in my life. This is a couple of hours of talking about writing and reading that includes a deep lover for Dante that eats about a third of the time. I don't dislike Dante, but a recent reread of The Inferno reminded me of why I'd never read the other two books. Revenge RPF with eternal torture and decay, even when written beautifully, isn't my genre. I expect that the other two books would have had less torture and so on, but... It made me think that I wouldn't have liked Dante as a human being.
Gentill, Sulari. The Woman in the Library - Audiobook read by Katherine Littrell. This is a double threaded mystery story. One thread is an author corresponding with a fan she's never met in person and sharing bits of her current WIP with him. The other thread is that manuscript. Alternating a chapter of the WIP with the fan's comments. The fan very clearly has strong ideas about what the book should be, strong enough that I was glad that fan and author were on different continents during the Time of Covid.
Giles, Lamar. Fake ID - Audiobook read by William Jackson Harper. I must admit that I mostly tried this because of the reader as the blurb didn't look like my sort of thing. Harper is, as usual, excellent. The first person protagonist of this book is a teen in witness protection whose family has had to move multiple times due to his father repeatedly screwing up their covers. The book has intertwining plots, one focused on the protagonist's family and one focused on the murder of a teenager at the protagonist's new school. This is not a book with a particularly happy ending. It's not tragic, however, and there's some hope. It's just... Nothing improves in the ways the protagonist hopes or wants. This is YA mystery and pretty cynical about law enforcement and adjacent things (not unreasonably so, however).
Giles, Lamar. The Last Mirror on the Left; The Last Chance for Logan County - Audiobook read by Ruffin Prentiss. 2nd and 3rd in the Legendary Alston Boys Series. Middle grade fantasy. I really loved this whole series. The protagonists are cousins, two black boys being raised by their grandmother in a town full of weird/paranormal things (such as a river where time flows differently for anything that falls in). They have adventures and solve weird problems; it's all a lot of fun and twists in ways that add complications. I recommend the series.
Hackwith, A.J. The Archive of the Forgotten; The God of Lost Words - Audiobooks read by Bahni Turpin. Second and third in the Hell's Library Series. I read the first in ebook, but the library only had the second as an audiobook. I didn't find the ending of the series entirely satisfying. The worldbuilding collected complications in a way that I found fascinating, but I found the characters largely frustrating. The plot resolved, and the worldbuilding supported it, but... This is a fantasy series about (as the series title indicates) a library in Hell. It contains unfinished and unwritten books, and some of them want to be more than that. The first book focused heavily on the library aspects. The second and third did more with the universe around the library.
McGuire, Seanan. Sparrow Hill Road; Girl in the Green Silk Gown - Audiobooks read by Amy Landon. I generally liked these, but I also feel like the things that interest the author are not the things that interest me. The protagonist is a hitchhiking ghost, and a lot of what happens is derived from urban legends but with hints of a grimmer and unifying underbelly. I plan to read the third book eventually. I've started it but don't feel a strong need to go back to it.
Nix, Garth. Newt's Emerald - Audiobook read by Faye Adele. Regency fantasy with romance. Decent adventure but also quite silly. I bounced off this in paper but enjoyed it in audiobook.
Nix, Garth and Sean Williams. Have Sword, Will Travel; Let Sleeping Dragons Lie - Audiobooks read by Marisa Calin. Middle grade fantasy about a boy who finds a magic sword and goes on a quest. His companion, a girl, is the one who wants to be a knight, but the sword has decided the boy is one. A fair amount of humor. Moves along at a good clip.
Parker, Natalie C. The Devouring Wolf - Audiobook read by Jeremy Carlisle Parker. Middle grade fantasy. The protagonist has grown up knowing that, before she turns 13, she'll become a werewolf. There's a whole hidden culture of it. The book begins in the year when the girl knows she absolutely will transform because nobody has their first transformation later and because nobody ever fails to transform. Then she and four others her age fail to transform. There's something in the woods that's hunting their kin, and they're the last hope to save everyone.
Riley, James. The Revenge of Magic - Audiobook read by Kirby Heyborne. First in series but the library doesn't have the rest. Middle grade fantasy set in world where, not too long ago, monsters attacked Washington DC. The protagonist is single-mindedly vengeful and incapable of nuance. I want to read more because the setting's fascinating, but the protagonist got tedious fast.
Riley, James. Story Thieves; The Stolen Chapters; Secret Origins - Audiobooks read by Kirby Heyborne. 1-3 in the Story Thieves Series. Reading these three makes me think that Riley can't write a plot without characters making terrible decisions based on obsession and an inability to think about those obsessions from new angles. Even in the face of new information. So much new information. I can't put it down to them all being 12 because they take turns in different books. This middle grade fantasy series starts with a boy discovering that one of his classmates has the power to step into books. She is trying to find her father who she accidentally lost in a book when she was quite young. The library has more of this series, but I want to wait to go on until I'm less cranky about the characterization. Again, the setting/worldbuilding are fascinating.
Sagara, Michelle. Sword and Shadow - Audiobook read by Khristine Hvam. I grabbed this one because I've lost track of my place in the Elantra books (after a gap of about a decade) and thought that it might be a reasonable re-entry point as it's focused on a different character. It sort of works. I remembered enough for general orientation. My primary difficulty was the names. I'm pretty sure the Barrani titles would have made more sense to me if I was seeing them on the page because I'd be able to slow down and puzzle out the differences by flipping back and forth as needed. As it was, the names were a bit too homophoneous (homophonic?).
Scalzi, John. The Kaiju Preservation Society - Audiobook read by Wil Weaton. Scott and I listened to this together and had fun with it. This is science fiction with an alternate earth, full of the titular kaiju, that can be reached from our earth at certain times and places. The protagonist takes a job with a research team there. The kaiju are kind of fascinating, but most of the serious complications are human.
Sloan, Holly Goldberg and Meg Wolitzer. To Night Owl from Dogfish - Audiobook read by many different people. This is epistolary, and each email writer has a different reader. This one is sort of a remix of The Parent Trap and sort of not. Two girls who don't know each other are sent to camp together while their fathers go motorcycling together in China. The girls become besties while their dads break up. There are more complications along the way. I was actually pleased with the ending.
Stross, Charles. Escape from Yokai Land - Audiobook read by Gideon Emery. Novella in the Laundry Files series. I don't think this is a good starting point for the series, but if you like the series, it's a nice additional installment.
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. Origins - Audiobook read by Kevin Kenerly. I mostly ended up using this for background noise, so I don't have much opinion.
White, Kiersten. Hide - Audiobook read by Emma Galvin. Overdrive tags this as horror, and that's accurate. Don't get too attached to any of the characters; most of them won't be making it out again. The blurb was a bit coy about what was happening which annoyed me a little once the book revealed the name of the sponsoring company which... This is a YA book aimed at the Percy Jackson generation. The company being called Asterion is a huge indicator of the general shape of the plot, and that comes up before the fourteen contestants enter the abandoned amusement park for a big hide-and-seek competition.
White, Kiersten. Wretched Waterpark; Vampiric Vacation; Camp Creepy - Audiobooks read by Keylor Leigh. Books 1-3 in the Sinister Summer series. Children's books that intersect overly complicated but mundane mysteries with a clear (at least to the reader) sense that there's a larger, considerably more supernatural plot just under the surface. I think this will appeal to kids who like the Series of Unfortunate Events books. I kind of expected the third book to tie things up, but it didn't. This may be a series of infinite length. Or, at the various least, the length of a Phineas and Ferb summer.
Winters, Cat. The Cure for Dreaming - Audiobook read by Jennifer Ikeda. YA book. Historical with just enough paranormal to allow working mesmerism and a tiny bit of psychic power. The protagonist is dealing with an increasingly and abusively controlling father who, when he finds her views on women's suffrage offensive, coerces a young mesmerist into taking away her ability to speak of such things without severe physical consequences. I didn't hate this, and I didn't love this. It was fine. The ending released the tangles without going for a happily ever after.
Yu, Ovidia. Aunty Lee's Delights; Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials; Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge - Audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller. Aunty Lee is an older widow who runs a restaurant and solves mysteries. These are set in Singapore which is not a place I know much about. Aunty Lee is generally fun to spend time with, and I like the supporting characters. There's more focus on food than I enjoy, but the food preparation is a big part of Aunty Lee's characterization and approach to the world.
Started but not finished:
Arroyo, Raymond. The Relic of Perilous Falls - Audiobook read by the author. First in series. I gave up on this about halfway through because I was thoroughly out of charity with all of the characters, both child and adult. I wasn't having any fun and didn't expect the next 4-5 hours to improve that . This is a middle grade fantasy set in our world.
Barker, Emily Croy. The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic - Audiobook read by Alyssa Bresnahan. I listened to almost six hours of this (out of about twenty five or twenty six) then stopped for three days and came back to discover that Overdrive had played it out to the end, completely inaudibly and without my having intentionally started it up. At that point, I realized that I really didn't care enough to try to figure out where I left off and that, really, I probably didn't like the book enough to listen to the rest anyway. It's not even sour grapes. I'm very curious about the world building and what on earth the author might have come up with to fill that much time, but I wasn't actually enjoying any of it. Once an audiobook gets longer than about 14 hours, I set the bar for justifying the time required to listen to it a *lot* higher than I would for something, say, 4 hours long. Given a two week loan period, I have to really, really, definitely want to hear the story and/or spend time with the characters or I won't finish.
Bunce, Elizabeth C. Premeditated Myrtle - Audiobook read by Bethan Rose Young. I listened to half an hour and found the first person narrator uncongenial, so I stopped. Middle grade historical mystery with a female protagonist.
Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Audiobook read by Simon Prebble. Too damned long and very much not my thing. I listened to about 20% of it because I was busy and didn't want to try to find something else, but life is too short.
Harris, Joanne M. The Gospel of Loki - Audiobook read by Allan Corduner. I didn't like any of the characters here. The performance by the reader fit the tone of the text and might appeal to someone else.
Hart, Rob. The Paradox Hotel - Audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller. I gave this a bit more than an hour and a half and still wasn't enjoying it, so I stopped. Nine and a half hours recovered for other things.
Ellis, Lindsay. Axiom's End - Audiobook read by Stephanie Willis and Abigail Thorn. I gave this an hour and wasn't enjoying myself at all, so I stopped. That freed fourteen hours for more pleasant things.
Flower, Amanda. Crime and Poetry - Audiobook read by Rachel Dulude. First in the Magical Bookshop Mysteries Series. I listened to an hour of this and found it stressful and off-putting. I gave up on it because I was feeling increasingly upset while listening. This is so very much not my genre, but I want to find some new popcorn authors. (I will note that romance is equally not my genre, but I keep trying that, too.
Flynn, Kathleen A. The Jane Austen Project - Audiobook read by Saskia Maarleveld. I got an hour in and didn't care at all. I saw no reason to invest another ten hours. This is a time travel story with two characters trying to get close to Jane Austen to steal a 'lost' book, one recently found letters reveal that she destroyed without publishing.
Gemeinhart, Dan. The Midnight Children - Audiobook read by Andre Santana. I only listened to the first CD (of eight). That one spent a lot of time on the horrors of the slaughterhouse where the protagonist's father works. Mostly with emphasis on on how eating meat in general and beef in particular is a social evil that requires suffering. The book is supposed to be about the protagonist's friendship with a mysterious group of children who're on the run. It's not clear from the blurb or the tagging if the genre is mystery with nothing supernatural or some form of SF or fantasy. I decided that I didn't care.
Jaswal, Balli Kaur. The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters - Audiobook read by Soneela Nankani. I got about 2 hours into this and kept finding doing the dishes or showering or reading a different book more important than getting back to this one. I think it was just stressful in the wrong way for me right at that moment. I might try it again later, but I also might not. The book is about three sisters, all adults, traveling to India on a pilgrimage requested by their late mother.
McDermott, Andy. The Hunt for Atlantis - Audiobook read by Gildart Jackson. I listened to slightly more than half of this. I stopped because I was only using it for background noise. It required about 30% of my attention to follow the general plot, and I could walk away and miss a few minutes without getting lost. I could have gone on, but several audiobook holds came in on Overdrive right then, and this one was no better than mediocre. It was a thriller with lots of chases and explosions and betrayals. It's set in the present day but leans on a lot of the archaeological thriller tropes from decades past, including the racist ones. I sort of expected that. The characters and prose are merely serviceable. The plot isn't long on logic-- I had to stop and rant a little when the 12000 year old map of the Amazon River Basin showed waterways identical to the ones on modern maps. Possibly that issue would have been addressed as a plot point later on, but I doubt it. It wasn't even lampshaded by characters pointing out that it is really improbable. They went looking for a lost city based on counting tributaries in order to know how far up the Amazon they needed to go.
Miro, J.M. Ordinary Monsters - Audiobook read by Ben Onwukwe. I listened to an hour and just didn't click with the book. Given that it was almost 25 hours long, pushing onward didn't seem worthwhile.
Springer, Nancy. The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline - Audiobook read by Katherine Kellgren. This reminded me why I only read two of these. I find Enola just a bit grating as a narrator, and I don't care about the mysteries. I listened to CDs 1 and 3 of 3.
Wolke, Robert L. What Einstein Didn't Know - DNF. Audiobook read by Sean Runnette. The book might or might not have been interesting, but the way it was read made it a sleeping aid.
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Date: 2023-02-24 06:18 pm (UTC)I haven't read the sequel yet. I read that there was going to be a third book, so if I read them, it'll be when I can read both.
On another note, I just finished listening to The Disasters by M.K. England as an audiobook. It's YA set almost two centuries hence, in which a quartet of teens who were bounced from the Space Academy tryouts have to save the day. It wasn't totally to my taste, but I suspect you'd like it better than I did. The reader was James Fouhey, who did a fine job with the voices and accents.
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Date: 2023-02-24 07:06 pm (UTC)A friend says "The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic" is her favorite book, so it's been on my "read this someday" list for ages. No idea if I'll like it.
Tangentially related to Einstein: I just finished reading "The Other Einstein," which imagines the story of his relationship with his physicist first wife, Mileva, from her point of view. It starts up with college students having a lovely romance and ends up, as the book cover says, heartbreaking. It's interesting reading.