Listening List: The Third Quarter of 2012

[valyssia]

Daniel Keyes

• Flowers for Algernon

I think that most people are familiar with this story. I hadn’t read it, so I gave the audio book a listen. It’s marvelous. Jeff Woodman does a beautiful job of changing his vocal cadence and inflection to meet the evolution of the protagonist who starts off being severely learning disabled and gradually changes to a genius of the highest caliber, then gradually regresses back to a state of acute mental retardation. I would recommend this to anyone who has any interest in the novel, whether you’ve read it or not, there’s just something about hearing it that’s profound. It serves to heighten your sensitivity to the differences between laughing with someone and laughing at them. The world is short enough on sensitivity. Promoting more is never bad.

 

Dean Koontz

• Odd Apocalypse

Another Odd Thomas novel. That’s pretty much the ‘it.’ I think I might be over Odd Thomas. Of the bunch, the first book is still the best. The others exist at least in part because the public responded favorably to the character and that’s beyond just starting to show. I think the shine began to wear off of Odd during book four, Odd Hours. This one added to the tarnish. That’s my opinion, at least. If I used a miscellaneous graphical bauble system of stars, clovers, tomatoes or eggs, I’d give this story two and a half baubles out of five. It’s not abysmal. It just has shadows beneath its proverbial eyes. I know I promised I wouldn’t mention the flashbacks, but I can’t help myself. I just read another review that mentioned how tedious they were. I wanted to get a feel for whether I was being a grump or not. The customer reviews are really mixed, so I don’t think I am. If you love, love, love Odd Thomas and you found no faults with the previous book, knock yourself out. I won’t stop you. If you thought the character was getting a bit long of tooth, you could take a pass on this one and feel no loss. The audio book was good. Nothing special. *shrugs*

 

Seanan McGuire

• Rosemary and Rue
• A Local Habitation
• An Artificial Night
• Late Eclipses
• One Salt Sea

The bad new first: For the sake of my sanity Seanan McGuire desperately needs to get a better grip on both physics and the working of all things mechanical. I’m not suggesting that she get an engineering degree. I’d be happy if she took the time to look at the Wikipedia page that applies. Or better yet, she could hire or find an editor with a good sense of such things and it would improve her work immensely. As it is right now, every time she goes near either topic, I cringe. While I appreciate that the world of October Daye is a magical one, she needs to tell me if magic is effecting the laws of the mortal world otherwise I will assume that say, a gun can and will fire after being doused with water. A gun will fire after being doused with pretty much anything you can douse a gun with. Whether it will fire a second time will depend on the fluid you douse it with. Now you couldn’t pay me enough to pull the trigger of a firearm doused with any petroleum distillate, but I know it would fire. You couldn’t pay me to even do what this questionably sane fellow is doing: Test firing a Glock 21SF underwater. That doesn’t change the facts. If my life rested on firing a gun in a kiddie pool, you bet your ass I’d do it. It wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but the end of book two hinged on this. Two characters from two entirely different backgrounds were thinking exactly the same thing: that gun has been sprayed with fluid and therefore it won’t work. That struck me as more than mildly silly. A 1974 Volkswagen Beetle weighed 1,900 LBS and produced 46 BHP and 95 Ft-Lbs of torque brand spanking new…and almost everyone should understand that as an engine wears it produces less power. After some play with a top speed calculator, and more play with Google hunting for specifications, I came up with a theoretical top speed of 79MPH. Wikipedia claims that the final Beetle manufactured in 2003 produced 50 BHP and had a top speed of 81 MPH, so I guess my calculations weren’t that far off. There’s a catch. A motor that only produces 46BHP would take all day to get you from a lofty 70MPH to that theoretical nirvana of 79MPH on flat land with no tail wind…and you’d better spend all of that time sacrificing Yugo parts to the god of good car karma, otherwise the crap suspension they slung under those old beetles would land you carapace down in a ditch. Telling us that said automobile would do 90MPH on the city streets of San Francisco was just— You’d die if you tried. I doubt anyone would even send flowers. They’d have to love you lots to forgive you that much boneheadedness. The author pulled the same silly shtuff right at the beginning of Feed, so she obviously hasn’t outgrown it. I rolled my eyes and went on. For those of you who wondered: you do not twist the throttle open to drop the front end from a wheelie. The power of the engine is how you get the front end lofted in the first place. More throttle will cause more loft. As was the case in the story, a heavy guy riding pillion will provide a lovely counterbalance to make the lift that much greater. Think how much fun it would be to flip over backwards, and don’t do it. And the good news which I think far outweighs the bad: Now that I’ve bitched at great length about the minor things that didn’t work for me in this series, I should tell you how I feel about the work on a whole. The first book is good. The second book left me feeling annoyed. The third book might just be my favorite of the entire series. Nothing is wasted, even after the stumbles. Each book adds to the depth of the world and its denizens. There are almost too many characters to count and they are each dynamic. The plots of each book are independent with common threads carrying from book to book, weaving a complex history. It’s nifty stuff, light, airy and wonderfully escapist. This series shares a lot in common with the Anita Blake stuff, only Seanan McGuire isn’t so pretentious. She seems to understand that writing a compelling narrative isn’t about describing sunsets as ‘gaping wounds cut across the sky.’ Neither is her protagonist so pretentious. October (Toby) Daye has a real people kind of feel. She’s a likeable underdog who is repeatedly thrust into situations that have her treading water. She grows naturally, surviving bad thing after bad thing, becoming better at coping with the weirdness around her. Toby gets her ass kicked in too many creative ways to count. She’s a fantastic punching bag, which places her firmly on a level with another of our favorite female heroes. At times that became a bit gratuitous for my tastes. She begins to feel like a martyr, but that impression is nicely covered with a fairly graceful bit of deus ex machina and a power up or two. Like I said, this is purely escapist reading. During book three a supporting character is added who I simply love. May Daye starts off as a death omen, but evolves into a likeable character with an intriguing back story that fits into the mythology nicely. She also fills another role that I commonly gripe about: she’s a lesbian character who appears so far to be more than cannon fodder or martyr. Honestly, I don’t think she fits any of the standard tropes. She’s a death omen, so I think ‘badass.’ She so isn’t. She’s a lesbian, so I think either ‘dead before the end of the book’ or ‘overtly promiscuous and salacious’ or both. She’s neither. It’s kind of refreshing. To describe May briefly I’d say, ‘total sweetheart.’ The audio books are fun, nicely paced and easy to listen to. The most offensive thing is the mild lisp the narrator has and the occasional attempt at a husky male voice that just makes her sound silly. The important thing is that she seems to be having a good time with the performance and that translates, adding to the escapism. It’s enjoyable stuff. I wouldn’t be on book five if it wasn’t. I plan to pick up book six in October.

 

J. R. R. Tolkien

• The Return of the King

Okay, I’ve listened to all of them now. It was a lot like eating Brussels sprouts. I knew I should. I knew they’d be good for me. I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as I should’ve. I expect that there will be people who will read this and scoff. I know exactly how brilliant these books were. I understand art. I also know that art is a subjective thing. This just didn’t inspire me. Honestly, I think part of it was that the fellow who read the audio books I had just wasn’t very good. The fact that there are selections of lyrics strewn throughout the story that were sung by someone with a rather hideous voice made things that much worse. Cringing isn’t something that should happen during a leisure activity. I would love to pick up copies read by someone like Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart or someone else of equal vocal talent, though I’m not sure either of them can sing. I may in the future look again for a performance that I can sit back and enjoy more. For now I’ve taken my medicine. I know the stories. I’d take advice if anyone was willing to offer some. For now I plan to stick with enjoying the movies more. That might be sort of a sad opinion, but probably not. The movies were superb. They added a touch of Hollywood glitz in places where I wouldn’t have missed it. That’s my only objection. They also drew out parts of the books that were written as rough overviews. The additions were positive. A few of the things that were lost were kind of a shame, but for the sake of producing a product that was good and worked well in the format, those choices were very solid. It trimmed the story down to a nicely paced package.

 

Connie Willis

• Doomsday Book

This is one of the most singularly depressing books I’ve ever ‘read,’ which of course, means I’ve ‘read’ it twice and I think it’s brilliant. The author draws a portrait of a world in grand detail, full of richly rendered, compelling characters, and then the body count starts to climb. I’m not going recommend that you listen to this because it’s good. It isn’t good. It’s a horrible story that you have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to or read. It could end up being terribly depressing. What I will say is that if you are interested in reading a true tragedy that avoids all of the traps of melodrama, you’ll have a hard time finding a better example without running to the masters. The audio book I listened to is an older ‘Books on Tape’ edition. The recording quality was miserable, the performance itself unremarkable. The story is good enough to make up for those faults and keep me listening.

• To Say Nothing of the Dog

Go figure, Connie Willis’ second book was a cutesy comedy. After a story about a young female time traveler who is accidentally transported back to the Black Death, I might’ve written a comedy too. It isn’t laugh out loud funny, but it is charming. Again, the audio book was nothing special, but the story makes up for any inadequacies.

• Blackout
• All Clear

Blackout and All Clear are where the Oxford Time Travelling Historians series gets jaw-droppingly good in a way that almost anyone can appreciate. For me it is just the right mix of factual history, fictional characters and science fiction elements. I have a list of books that I listen to again every so often because I love them. These two books have made that list. They are truly remarkable.

• Passage

There are nearly as many bad reviews for this novel as there are good from casual readers. Its repetitiousness is tedious and occasionally bordering on insipid. It becomes difficult to listen to, though the narrator is quite good. That’s the one thing on which there is near universal agreement. We all like Dina Pearlman. I’ve chosen to sit it out. The core of the plot revolves around near death experiences and frankly, I feel that’s a topic that should be addressed with a touch of monotony, especially given the viewpoint of a researcher. No breakthroughs related to N.D.E.s should come without a little bit of sweat, some hair pulling and a pile of tedium. Causing us to experience some of that just seemed proper to me. The puzzle when it finally does come together is brilliant. I can’t tell you what or how or why. I’d spoil it if I did. I’m not even done. I don’t understand it all. At the point I’m writing this I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book. The pieces have just begun to fall into place. I’m wowed by the simple elegance of the metaphor. It’s beautiful in the way that only severely disturbing things can be. Yeah, I was still just as rapt at the end of the book as I was near the middle. It’s a brilliant piece of work that’s just a little languorous out of the gate. It was so bloody good that I dug out my collection of Connie Willis novels and ran through all of them again because I wanted more.

• The Last of the Winnebagos

Winnebagos is another of my repeat listen stories. It’s simply marvelous. It starts off with a very casual ‘slice of life’ sort of feel that made me sure the first time I listened to it that I knew exactly what it would be about. I was wrong. It twists around and becomes an intriguing piece of speculative fantasy.

 

Gene Wolfe

• The Shadow of the Torturer

I really need to listen to more Gene Wolfe to be certain whether his work isn’t my cup of tea. There isn’t a single shabby thing about this story, but it just didn’t appeal to me terribly much. It’s a shame. The premise is interesting too. It’s a fantasy adventure series about a professional torturer. He’s a guild member who actually grew up with torturing people for the monarch of his land as a staple of his existence. The character isn’t as harsh as you might think. In fact, he’s quite human. He has the kind of cold edge you’d expect, but he isn’t ruthless by any stretch. I actually liked the character enough that I might try again later.

 

The Reject Pile

Gene Wolfe

• The Claw of the Conciliator

This is the second book in the Urth of the New Sun series, of which Shadow of the Torturer is a part. Wolfe lost me midway through where he breaks off to describing a play by simply reciting the lines. I was fairly certain that at least some small part of it would be important to the plot, but I just wasn’t willing to wade.

 

Roger Zelazny

• Nine Princes in Amber

I tried like hell to listen to this book. I actually even enjoyed part of it, but mostly I just cringed at the sound effects they looped in the background: the same four yippy little dogs, the same cadence of hoof beats that made me think of a Lone Ranger radio serial, the overpowering wind effect that made sufficient ambient noise to muddle the narrator’s voice…and ‘my god’ the canned laugh track when one of the characters found something funny. On, and on, and on…horror after horror… The only effect they used that was tolerable was the hospital equipment, ambient muffled voices and footfalls as you hear in hospital corridors in the first scene. They were fine. They did what the rest of the effects failed to: they provided an unobtrusive bit of ambient sound that added to the performance. I gave up because the audio book was hideous. The truly sad part is that the book is read by Roger Zelazny and he actually has a fairly pleasant voice. It was the rest of the tripe that killed it for me. There are supposed to be copies of this series available without the sound effects. Maybe one day when the bitter taste has faded, I’ll endeavor to find one.

Comments

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I recently reread Flowers for Algernon myself. It is a great book. There's also a movie called Charly, which I've seen but so long ago that I don't recall it well enough to comment on.

The Doomsday Book depressing? Okay, people die but somehow I never took it that way.

And I never could get into Tolkien either.

[valyssia]

Yeah, I've heard about the movie Charly, but I don't think I've ever seen it.

Yes, I find The Doomsday Book depressing. Too many sympathetic characters die, and far too many of them are children. The way the protagonist breaks is too real as well. It's just one of those books that will jerk a few tears from me every time and I'm typically not given to that.

As I said, I think I might be able to get into Tolkien with the right person reading the story, but honestly the movies are so damned good that I'm not inclined to dig or throw a pile of money at it.

[raynejelly.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, my favorite Connie Willis novel is Bellwether. Maybe not the most profound work, but it's absurd, wry, and quirky.

[valyssia]

That's on my list. Sadly, I haven't listened to it yet. I can almost guarantee that it'll be with the quarter four material.

[gillo]

I love Flowers for Algernon. There is a British-accent radio play version which is also excellent.

Connie Willis infuriates me. So many of her ideas and characters are excellent, but her research is incredibly sloppy. The Blackout/All Clear pair drove me bonkers with all the anachronisms in language and detail, while the story was too gripping for me to follow my first instinct which was to hurl it in a corner and walk away. I believe most Brits react similarly - it's not just using Underground lines 30 years before they were built, but all sorts of tiny and large details that just throw me out of the story again and again. She does it in Doomsday Book too, with a supposedly English character talking about a "muffler", but at least the time travels bits are far enough in the past that anachronisms show less, while the WW2 stuff is so depressingly easy to spot. She's an excellent writer in dire need of a Britpicker!

[valyssia]

I really enjoyed Flowers for Algernon too. It's a fantastic book. The idea of a British radio serial really appeals. Perhaps I'll endeavor to find it, however that might be redundant. The version I have is quite good. It's probably a little bit early in the game to look for redundancies.

I'm just glad that I lacked the experience to notice the inconsistencies in Willis' work. I griped plenty enough about the impossible where it relates to my own experience. Adding to that might've made this unreadable. Or more likely, it would've made me seem even more like a pretentious so-and-so. I don't need anymore help on that account. I'll count my blessings...and be happy that I was ignorant enough to just enjoy the story. I know that when something impossible is done with a machine, it bothers me. I wonder why in the world the author didn't just ask someone who understands the subject to look at the story or teach him/her what they need to know or both. I understand exactly what you mean when you say that it shakes your immersion. I'm all for your suggestion of bringing in an expert adviser. I certainly ask for help when I need it.