firecat's 2018 in audiobooks

[firecat]

2018 Audiobooks (recommended, unfinished)

Let me know if you want me to say more about any of these.

• Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1)
  • Second or third time I've tried with this series; it didn't hold my interest.

• Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
  
  • Vampires mostly live in urban ghettos. A teenage girl, her boyfriend, and a vampire head into one of the ghettos. Interesting take on how people turn into vampires.
• Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons (Lady Trent #1)
  • I gather this series gets better, but I couldn't finish the first book. Maybe I was just sated on "women in Regencyish/Victorianish cultures struggle to break free of sexism" narratives at that particular moment in time.
• Andrea Camilleri, The Age of Doubt (Montalbano #14)
  • These books about a small police department in Sicily are funny and serious, full of raptures about Sicilian food, and kinda sexist. Many of them address important issues such as human trafficking. In the later books, Montalbano worries a lot about aging. Grover Gardner has great voices for the regular characters.
• Agatha Christie, "The Mystery of the Blue Jar"; "The Red Signal"; "The Witness for the Prosecution"
  • Short stories narrated by Christopher Lee. They all have a psychological angle.
• Rebecca Cantrell, The Tesla Legacy (Joe Tesla #2)
  • Thriller. Joe Tesla is a multi-millionaire software developer who suddenly developed severe agoraphobia so he mostly retired to live in a house in the New York City subway system with his service dog. Somewhat technical with intricate problem-solving and enjoyably little plot development by stupidity. If you like Jack Reacher, you'll probably like this. If you think Jack Reacher is annoyingly sexist and promiscuous and has too many inexplicably evil villains, you might like this even better.
• Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
  • Carroll is really good at thought experiments that help a lay person understand some of the gnarly stuff that physicists say when they talk about time, entropy, relativism, and stuff like that. He also has some interesting unprovable speculations about what exists other than this universe. The content varies from simple to very chewy. The very chewy stuff isn't really suitable for an audiobook unless you're prepared to hit rewind a lot, but overall I found this enjoyable to listen to.
• Karen Charlton, The Heiress of Linn Hagh (Detective Lavender #1)
  • Police procedural set in Regency England. Very well written. The protagonist is based on a real person who belonged to the Bow Street police. There are a few irredeemably cruel characters, which I think is a bore, but there are also some quite interesting characters.
• David Christian/Great Courses, Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity
  • I've read a lot of this sort of thing so it's hard to impress me, plus he spent a lot of time defending why he teaches this stuff in a context he calls "Big History," and I didn't care about that, so I gave up.
• Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets
  • Audible original, several episodes, in which Fry discusses family secrecy in the Victorian Age. His claim is that the Victorians weren't as prudish as we assume. I'm interested in the subject, but his delivery is so twee that I couldn't tolerate it.
• Ruth Goodman, How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life
  • The author is a freelance social historian who has investigated by living and doing many aspects of Tudor lives herself. Unlike some similar social histories, this one goes into a lot of detail about exactly how things were made. The narration isn't very good.
• Dianne M Harris, The Gospel of Loki (Runemarks #0.5)
  • Narrated by Allan Corduner, who does a very good job. The story of the Norse gods from creation through Ragnarok, from Loki's point of view. To my way of thinking, this Loki exhibits all the characteristics typically ascribed to him, except for charisma. (He's a huge whiner.)
• Joe Ide, IQ (IQ #1)
  • IQ is a young black man in East LA who has good logic and observation skills, so he solves problems for people and sometimes gets paid for it. He's also trying to make rent, and he doesn't mind doing illegal things, but he doesn't want to get involved in the more harmful and violent kinds of criminal activity, such as drug dealing. Very well written. But the book jumps around in his timeline a lot and I found that a little confusing.
• Darynda Jones, First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson #1)
  • Paranormal mystery about a PI who can see the dead and is supposed to send them on their way, but that isn't always what happens.
• John McWhorter/Great Courses, Myths, Lies, & Half-Truths of Language Use; John McWhorter, Words on the Move
  • I've listened to a lot of McWhorter books and lectures, and he manages to come up with different language stuff to talk about each time. He also clowns around a lot and laughs at his own jokes in a kind of adorable way.
• Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius/Great Courses, Espionage & Covert Operations: A Global History
  • Survey course, presented chronologically, easy to listen to and interesting, but didn't go into much depth.
• John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Angel of Death (Rumpole #15)
  • Narrated by one of my favorites (David Case), but this set of short stories is not one of my favorite Rumpole collections.
• Finn Murphy, The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
  • Memoir of a guy who drives a moving van and supervises long-distance relocations and considers himself something of an outsider. I found it really compelling to listen to; he's a very good storyteller and an interesting character. He's also judgemental and full of himself, and a bit racist in an "I'm so much less racist than most of the people I work with" way, and his politics don't completely align with mine, although he's not a MAGA-head. I was amused whenever he threw in a reference to books he has read — e.g., he name-dropped Mansfield Park.
• Elizabeth A. Murray/Great Courses, Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals
  • Presented chronologically as a set of stories with forensic elements. Unfortunately the instructor doesn't go into any depth about what's possible with forensics or how it's done.
• Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories of a South African Childhood
  • Memoir narrated by the author, who is currently the host of The Daily Show. It's a series of vignettes that don't follow a strict chronological order, so it's a little confusing to figure out the timeline. It's very funny but also presents the brutality and hopelessness of apartheid and its aftermath (which led to widespread poverty). I learned a lot.
• Jack O'Connell, The Resurrectionist
  • Audible describes this as "cyberpunk Dashiell Hammett," but it feels more like horror than noir and it doesn't have Hammett's political sensibility. There's a subplot about circus "freaks" that wasn't exactly mean, but it was very othering and it turned me off. Someone on Goodreads claims this is trying to be a book about Surrealism but it misunderstands Surrealism as "Hey, look! Weird sh-t!"
• Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body? (Peter Wimsey #1)
  • Narrated by David Case. Re-read. A good introduction to the characters.
• John Scalzi, "The Dispatcher"
  • Novella narrated by Zachary Quinto. I normally think Scalzi's prose is too clunky, but either his writing has improved or Quinto did a good job of holding my interest anyway. (Since I'm a big Quinto fan, probably at least some of the latter.) Interesting premise—the world suddenly developed a glitch where if you are murdered, as opposed to dying of natural causes, you come back to life and wake up naked in your bedroom. Therefore, there's a job opportunity for people willing to kill you if, e.g., your surgery starts going wrong. (This spoils about the first two pages.)
• Jodi Taylor, "The Very First Damned Thing," Just One Damned Thing After Another; A Symphony of Echoes; A Second Chance (Chronicle of St Mary's #0.5, 1–3)
  • This series is about an agency of historians in a universe where time travel is possible. Very imaginative, and some of the characters are interesting. Slightly marred IMO by the way the romantic relationship between the protagonist and her boyfriend is handled.
• Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer #1)
  • My word, the Goodreads reviews of this! Fantasy, beautifully written, everything is lingered over in great detail, but it's not overwritten. However, I am annoyed that it ended on a cliffhanger.
• Sherry Thomas, A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock #1)
  • Charlotte Holmes in Victorian era London has a mind like a steel trap and the menz won't let her do anything with it, so the first problem she has to solve is how to get out of the family home and figure out a way to make a living.
• Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
  • Bahni Turpin is a really superb narrator. A 16 year old black girl who witnesses her friend shot by the police during a traffic stop, and becomes an activist as a result.
• Charles Todd, A Test of Wills (Ian Rutledge #1)
  • Ian Rutledge is a Scotland Yard inspector who has returned from WWI with PTSD. He investigates a murder in a small village in Scotland.
• Darcie Wilde, A Useful Woman (Rosalind Thorne #1)
  • Historical mystery, England 19th century. Austen influences.
• Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (Call the Midwife #1)
  • Memoir, chapter-length vignettes about working as a midwife in a low-income area of England in the 1950s. Most of the women doing this work were nuns. There's a "why I converted to Christianity" thread in the narrative. The vignettes were interesting but included a lot of judgemental attitudes. I'm sure it wouldn't be possible to do the work without judgemental attitudes, but I don't especially want to read about them.