Listening List: The Fourth Quarter of 2012

[valyssia]

As an aside, were any of you Spike fans aware of how many audiobooks James Marsters has narrated? Click the link and check out a sample. He makes a marvelous Harry Dresden.

Margret Atwood

• The Handmaid’s Tale

My friend Dylan called this ‘one of those books that just sticks with ya.’ That pretty much sums it up. I could add that Claire Danes’ performance is very good. Well worth a few bucks. This is one of those books that I will listen to again. As speculative dystopian futures go, this is not that farfetched. A few more stumbles, a few more dickhead conservatives and we could be there, mostly because we’ve been in very similar situations in the past. Margret Attwood is a deftly skillful weaver of words. Her narrative never bogs down. It feels like the thoughts of a unique, well-rounded individual. Everything has a place in relation to the experience. It’s a rich view of a world that I don’t want to live in.

Orson Scott Card

• Ender Saga, Book 3: Xenocide
• Ender Saga, Book 4: Children of the Mind

You can always tell how good something is by how well it sticks with you. I’m at least average when it comes to retaining stories I listen to. The details of this series have muddled in my memory. I recall the pequeninos and the hive queen. I remember how the protagonist and company arrived at instantaneous point-to-point travel. I remember the world of Path, the zealot Qing-jao, her grandfather Han Fei and her maid Si Wang-mu. I recall the progression of their story and the tandem plot unfolding on Lusitania with the Descolada virus and the issues it presented. The thing I can’t remember is the bloody point. In retrospect it seems like Card overextended himself. He had a great story with the first two books in the series, Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, but from there, it just kind of degrades into a longwinded sermon. I suppose it was worth listening to once. The quality of the audiobooks was very good, again. I own them now, so I may get bored enough in the future to give them another go, though I doubt it. There are dozens of other books that I would place before them. There are books that I’d listen to three or four times before I went back to these for seconds.

• Shadow Saga, Book 1: Ender’s Shadow

Orson Scott Card pushed the limits of my credulity with this story, which is sad because I was very curious about it based on the discussions of it from the Ender’s Game audiobook. I thought it might be good on the same level. It definitely isn’t. The author tries to sell the idea that his protagonist Bean is able to hide in a toilet tank in order to escape notice at the laboratory where he was born. The claim is that his genetic enhancements have made him able to do not only that, but walk out of the facility after all of his siblings are killed. I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. Anyone small enough to fit inside a toilet tank won’t have the muscle mass to even climb up on the toilet seat, let alone lift the top and haul himself inside, to say nothing of the coordination. And what did he do with the lid while he was climbing in? Where would he put that? He’s small enough to get inside, so he won’t have the reach to retrieve it if he rests it on the seat.  This is the foundation of his origin story. Nothing that follows no matter how clever has a lick of meaning if this doesn’t wash. The rest is passable, even if it is pointless. It’s not good on the same level as Ender’s Game by a sight, but it’s not horrible either. In places it’s interesting to see the events that happen during Ender’s Game through a different set of eyes. I don’t necessarily buy that those eyes belonged to the character Bean, but— I have it on good authority that the timetables don’t line up either. I didn’t notice anything myself, but the claim doesn’t surprise me after the toilet tank. The audiobook itself is of the same excellent quality as the others in the series. The story just wasn’t up to snuff. This is definitely the shoddiest work by Orson Scott Card I’ve read to date.

• The Alvin Maker Series, Book 1: Seventh Son
• The Alvin Maker Series, Book 2: Red Prophet
• The Alvin Maker Series, Book 3: Prentice Alvin
• The Alvin Maker Series, Book 4: Alvin Journeyman
• The Alvin Maker Series, Book 5: Heartfire
• The Alvin Maker Series, Book 6: Crystal City

I had high hopes for this series. Card billed it as his attempt to create an American Mythology as Tolkien did for England with the legend of Middle Earth. I might’ve enjoyed it thoroughly had he not made that claim. It is a good story, but that’s all it is. You see the trouble with venerating a work that way is that people like me go into it expecting literature. I’m not even sure what particular quality it is that elevates an ordinary piece of fiction into that category, but I know it when I read it, even if I can’t define it in anything more than the most simplistic of terms. The Alvin Maker Series ain’t that. It lacks that spark. The prose is very plain, almost drab in places. The plot is predictable. Any metaphors are so thinly veiled they aren’t deserving of comment. There’s no real art in it. It’s still good, but it’s average ‘good.’ It’s an adventure story and nothing more. I’d recommend it if you haven’t read it, but frankly, I found ten-thousand times more tidbits to ponder in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I have little doubt that Mr. Card would call the series drivel, if not something less kind. To each his or her own. The audiobooks are enjoyable. I didn’t get frustrated once. In fact if Card had been able to keep his mouth shut, I would’ve had some very different things to say, but the truth is his boast reeked of arrogance to me. Arrogance he didn’t have the chops to back up. He’s a good author. He even hits ‘great’ from time to time, just not here.

Robert Jordan

• The Wheel of Time, Prequel: New Spring
• The Wheel of Time, Book 1: The Eye of the World
• The Wheel of Time, Book 2: The Great Hunt
• The Wheel of Time, Book 3: The Dragon Reborn
• The Wheel of Time, Book 4: The Shadow Rising
• The Wheel of Time, Book 5: The Fires of Heaven
• The Wheel of Time, Book 6: Lord of Chaos
• The Wheel of Time, Book 7: A Crown of Swords
• The Wheel of Time, Book 8: Path of Daggers
• The Wheel of Time, Book 9: Winter’s Heart
• The Wheel of Time, Book 10: Crossroads of Twilight
• The Wheel of Time, Book 11: Knife of Dreams
• The Wheel of Time, Book 12: The Gathering Storm
• The Wheel of Time, Book 13: Towers of Midnight
• The Wheel of Time, Book 14: A Memory of Light

I made a mistake with this series right off. I started with the prequel. From it I had an impression that the core story would be much different than it is. My first impression of The Eye of the World was disappointment. The prequel is about the early years of Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche in the white tower of Tar Valon. They are two young sorceresses (Aes Sedai) who were very fond of one another. The subtext was thick including a reference or two to them being ‘pillow friends.’ The Eye of the World involves Moiraine, but not Siuan, who I like better as a character. Instead it revolves mainly around the lives of three young men who are quickly shown to be the most important and influential characters in the series. Many of the women in this series are painted as manipulative, jealous, petty, stupidly arrogant creatures. That’s not to say that there aren’t some wonderfully strong female characters that can be called heroes. They always seem to pay more for their achievements and get beaten down for doing well (which is how the world actually works in my experience). The Aes Sedai are particularly evil when it comes to rewarding achievement with scorn. I swear that the number of women broken by repeated humiliation and beatings in the core of this series likely doubles the number of men who scuff their knuckles. (That is pre-Tarmon Gai'don: the final battle.) Another trend that bothered was that the women in the series tend to lose their minds when they fall in love. It doesn’t matter who they are. They find a man and their brain falls out. There’s one example of the same thing happening to a man and it’s just revolting. Listening to Perrin Aybara whine about the Lady Faile is quite a trial, but at least there’s a setup with them. They obviously fall in love. It’s a fairly graceful thing despite the puss-whining. The thing that got me was that the one case that stands out as prominently from the fem camp is of a character who literally hates everyone. She’s arrogant to the nth degree. No one can do anything to suit this woman. Then a man comes into her life and suddenly she’s swoony, like flipping a switch. She sees the man and poof: love and stupidity. In the character’s defense, she suffers from something that many young women placed in positions of authority fall victim to. The people around her, most particularly the men, see her as a silly girl and treat her like a joke. Very few women manage to handle that well and many of them become snippy. That social trend I totally get. Instantly becoming a goof because of a romantic interest, I don’t understand at all. (It usually takes me a few months to work up to ‘complete idiot’.) The other complaint I have about the series is that it suffers from an embarrassment of words. If there are abridged versions of these stories, I would highly recommend picking them up instead. I won’t say that often. In fact I might say that just this once. I’m kind of fond of words and I’m usually not shaken by wordy prose. This was different.  I persevered through the point the series languished (which is actually about four or five books in) and found that the story acquitted itself well enough. The thing is every scene begins with a hook and booby check where every stitch of clothing worn by every character present is carefully accounted for including an exacting description of the amount of cleavage each woman is showing. (Note: the package size of each man is sadly always omitted.) The rooms, buildings, porticos, privies…are all described in studious detail. Then the author gets back to the hook that you’ve obviously forgotten because you were more interested in something more critical like bellybutton lint or Paris Hilton’s love life. If one can make it past that, the plot itself is actually intriguing and the world is impressively rich, needless to say. I suppose that the booby check is part of that. The trouble with it is that those details aren’t blended with the narrative at all. They’re presented in mind numbing, inventory-like fashion at the head of each scene. Feeling my brain switch off, then experiencing the need to play catch up with the details that actually mattered to the purpose of the scene was pretty frustrating. What Jordan lacks in skill there, he makes up for by the sheer, impressive scope of the project. The way he fleshes in the world is clumsy in part, but in the same breath it’s also kind of brilliant. A few of the characters shape up very nicely over the course of the series. I’m particularly fond of the underused rogue Matrim ‘I’m a gambler, a farm boy, and I’m here to take command of your bloody army’ Cauthon and Egwene al’Vere who is the one uncompromisingly strong, competent female character in the entire series. People might argue that opinion with me. Feel free. There are a couple more contenders for that crown. The trouble is that Jordan performs what I believe to be a bit of dubious wish fulfillment, romantically attaching the remaining contenders (all three of them) to his protagonist, Rand al’Thor (the Dragon Reborn). They’re all nauseatingly smitten at one point or another, sometimes all at once and I found that annoying. The work overall compares pretty nicely to Tolkien’s efforts with Middle Earth including samples of a language created specifically for the world, a dozen or more cultures, a glossary of world specific terms, and a healthy smattering of poetry and song. The greatest difference is the caliber and sensibilities of the wordsmith. The other work to hold this up against is G.R.R. Martin’s, Songs of Ice and Fire. Of the two, I actually prefer this, despite its flaws. I like the story better. In fact, I liked it the best of the three. After the first of the year, I picked up the last two books in the series. I’m going to include them here for the sake of continuity. The common complaints about the final books in the series are: “Perrin Aybara comes into his power too suddenly. He’s the least powerful of the three ta’veren boys who leave the Two Rivers in the Eye of the World.” I don’t necessarily agree. I think it’s interesting that one of the three resists his power, though Perrin is pretty thick skulled. It’s isn’t an attractive thing to watch, but his reasons for resisting are valid. Losing your humanity is something that should terrify anyone who is faced with the possibility. I’m not saying that I’ve suddenly fallen in love with the character, but I do get it. “There are too many supporting characters, so many that it becomes difficult to follow.” I might agree if the supporting characters were pointless to the plot; I don’t because they are and are mostly used to good effect. I think the point of showing how so many lives were changed by the events was to make the statement that any time anything world-shaping or earthshaking happens, it’s never just because a band of young men with superpowers went mucking about. There are heroes to the left and heroes to the right. All people sacrifice to bring about these sorts of events. The fact the Robert Jordan pulled out the stops to illustrate this is actually kind of cool. The story of Pervara and Androl was a fine example of this that was just plain good. I liked them. Actually, I liked them far more than Perrin and Faile. They were a marvelous couple with complimentary skill sets that did huge things that had a direct effect on the outcome of the war. “Padan Fain was a sad waste of a potentially great villain.” Padan Fain was a well applied bit of misdirection. He was the Big Bad that never really got to be a big and bad. He was that last minute ‘okay, so…how in the bloody hell are they going to deal with this?’ The fact that he splatted nicely didn’t bother me at all. “Matrim Cauthon becomes a buffoon at the end.” I might be missing something, but the Matrim Cauthon I read about was always a buffoon. He’s a scary-lucky, ungodly-blessed child who screws around with things he never fully understands and achieves results that are ridiculously good for the good guys. That’s his character from about book five on. He’s the half ton weight on the side of the scales belonging to team White Hat. The fact that over the course of four-hundred plus hours of audio Jordan made me actually enjoy that is something of a feat. He sort of eased me into taking Mat’s God Mode powers at face value mostly by making me laugh. Matrim is a funny, funny man with a uniquely skewy view of the world. I love Brandon Sanderson. Not literally. There won’t be any marriage wreaths thrown at anyone’s feeties. But the dude did do something impressive. He took a huge pile of notes left by a very prolific, somewhat misdirected author with huge vision, sorted them out and put an enjoyable ending on one of the most expansive ‘epic fantasy’ adventures of our time, or anyone else’s. The man seriously deserves cookies for that. He wrote two very solid books and managed to tie up a good ninety-five percent of the hanging plot threads in an efficient manner. In doing so he created a highly listenable couple of books that I’ll probably listen to again. As it was, I found myself marathon listening because the books were just that addictive. I didn’t want to put them down. So yeah…good job. The audiobooks are all of the same quality, by the same narrators, Michael Kramer, Kate Reading. That is to say that they were good.

William Gibson

• Neuromancer

So I made it through a William Gibson novel. I listened to it after Snow Crash, which made for a nifty doodles, cyberpunk double feature. Enjoyment was had.  They are both basically adventure stories. The huge difference is the denseness of the prose. Neuromancer plays those games with theme that are common to stories that heave themselves over the lofty wall into the category of literature. Things were moving beneath the surface. Significant things. I definitely see the appeal. That said, I’ll admit that I liked Snow Crash better. It wasn’t as dense a story, but that was fine with me. You see, I’m not a huge fan of stories involving drug addiction. I sort of have the tee-shirt. They hit me a little sideways. I tend to go ‘oh, yeah. I remember that,’ then I shut down. That’s me. My failing. Other people will have other reactions. From a purely detached point-of-view, I will admit that Neuromancer is probably the better piece of prose. I just didn’t like it as well. Thematically they are very similar works, like Granny Smith and McIntosh apples. One is green, one is red, the green one isn’t quite as tart, it’s a little bigger, not quite as good in pies, but it is still an apple. If you like apples, I suggest that you try both and decide for yourself. The audiobook of Neuromancer wasn’t particularly impressive. It was all one guy, the same guy. He had a pleasant enough voice. He read the story. It was okay. The audiobook of Snow Crash was more an exercise in voice acting. It was the funner story to listen too. The fem supporting role was taken up by an attitudinal little skatepunk who was just plain amusing. That might be another reason that I enjoyed the story more. The cast was just better. The protagonist was a borderline stereotypical badass blademaster who was easy to find funny, rather than sad. The supporting roles were all filled by absurd stereotypes of one description or another. It played more like a parody, but those farcical elements were hung on a framework that meshed eastern philosophy and technology in a clever way.

Laurell K. Hamilton

• Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, Book 8: Blue Moon
• Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, Book 9: Obsidian Butterfly
• Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, Book 10: Narcissus in Chains
• Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, Book 11: Cerulean Sins

Obsidian Butterfly is far and away my favorite of the Anita Blake books. It’s just plainly good. I enjoyed almost everything about it. From there things went downhill. I started getting annoyed at the story during Narcissus in Chains, as I knew I would because the books became more about the protagonist’s love life than anything else, and began to skip forward through to pass over the elaborate sex scenes. There was still some semblance of a story. I followed it well enough to spot the mystery antagonist just after he was introduced. It wasn’t hard, which was a little disappointing. I moved on to Cerulean Sins and that might’ve been a mistake. I’m not enjoying the book at all. There are some things that have me intrigued, but the majority of the plot seems to be a series of devices meant to prop up the overt sexual content. It’s not that I have a problem with smut. I try to avoid blatant hypocrisy. The trouble is that I mire in the three hundred word descriptions of one of Jean-Claude’s shoes. Short story length narratives about wardrobe are a bit much. It just yammers on and on about how pretty these people are and how stylishly dressed. It’s like Hamilton is trying to shove it down our throats that Anita Blake attracts handsome men and she’s really, really, really, totally, completely, utterly, entirely, overtly enamored of them. Spare me, please.

Seanan McGuire

• Ashes of Honor

Toby Daye almost dies again. She’s getting much, much better at almost dying. May develops a character back story that’s interesting, intriguing, actually kind of good… Another child is lost and found. Toby flirts more with the King of Cats and all is well with the world. That makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy it much at all. I actually like this series a lot. It’s light and fun. (Aside from the technical issues that I’ve noted in past installments, it’s been pretty much plot perfect.) And this is one of the better books. An Artificial Night still retains the top slot in my opinion as the best of the series, but this runs a close second. The audiobooks are average. Perhaps a bit above. Fun to listen to. No major gripes.

John Scalzi

• Agent to the Stars

You’re an alien entity ala Body Snatchers who looks like paint stripper (y’know, that icky, semi-clear, milky, gelatinous slime) and smells like day old, unchilled tuna, but instead of sucking people’s brains, you’re good natured, fun loving and gregarious. You want to make contact with the people of Earth. What do you do? Yeah, this one’s big fun. Will Wheaton’s a joy to listen to. Maybe you can see the opportunity for snark. He does snark so well. Expect to laugh bunches. This one’s well worth your time.

• Old Man’s War

Grumpy Old Men meets Starship Troopers. That pretty much sums this one up. John Scalzi has a gift for taking two concepts that probably shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence and melding them into a delightful narrative with interesting, well rounded characters who you wouldn’t mind sitting down to enjoy a cuppa with. The audiobook was marvelous fun. Were there only more. I could happily queue things of this ilk up and be perfectly contented in all of my off hours. Big fun. Highly recommended.

Neal Stephenson

• Snow Crash

(see Neuromancer)

Connie Willis

• Bellwether

Shall we sing the praises of Connie Willis yet again? I think I’ll keep it simple. This is a wonderful book that should be placed on your ‘to read’ list right now. It’s a romance, which is a category that usually does very little for me, combined with certain fantasy elements that are hinted at in the title. It’s just plain charming. The audiobook was good in the same way the Seanan McGuire audiobooks are. The narrator does a fine job of becoming the voice of the character, which is kind of the point. It isn’t remarkable in any way. It’s too organic to be called ‘remarkable.’ If I bothered with starsy things and ratings crap, I’d give this one a solid five out of five.

Comments

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

The Handmaid's Tale? Really? That's awesome!

And I haven't read Bellwether but Connie Willis is a wonderful author.

[chaoskir.livejournal.com]

Hey! Great! In the last years I've bought every audiobook of The Dresden Files because James Marsters narrated the books in great and wonderful ways. Then, last year they changed the narrator. I think the other one has done a great job too but I don't listen to it because in my mind James Marsters voice is The Dresden Fles and Harry Dresden. He has an awesome great way to read all the different characters and I'm glad, he reads the books again.

Thanks to your entry, I know that and of course ordered immediately the CD's.
Thank you.

[raynejelly.livejournal.com]

I'm so with you on the Orson Scott Card front - I just read Ender's Game (a little late for the first time in my life, but excellent nevertheless) and, barring the bits of my belief that refused to be suspended (six year olds, really?), I really enjoyed it.

And Boy oh Boy do I want to listen to the Dresden Files... but I usually just settle for reading them. ;-)

[valyssia]

Yeah, The Handmaid's Tale was one of the best things I listened to last quarter. Not that it was enjoyable, but it was quite good.

As I said, Bellwether is extremely good. Well worth the time.

[valyssia]

Yeah, I plan to put them on my list too. They sound quite fun.

[valyssia]

I think Card is one of those authors where it's best to stick with what is popular. He very prolific, perhaps given to specious tangent.

Yeah, well, uh...I likes to listen. Having someone good to listen to is a bonus.