Stef's entertainment year in review (2019): Part 1: Audiobooks

[firecat]

These are many of the audiobooks I consumed in 2019. Let me know if you want me to say more about any of them.

Nonfiction audiobooks

•=author is a person of color
>>>Stef-Bob sez check it out<<<

Ken Albala/Great Courses: Food: A Culinary Cultural History (not very deep, but entertaining, until it gets moralistic about how much processed, sugary food there is now.)

Marc Fennell, It Burns: The Scandal-Plagued Race To Breed The World's Hottest Chilli (I didn't know that there are intense feuds about the world's hottest chilli and I didn't know some people are more or less addicted to super-hot chillis, but I am not surprised by either.)

Ben Garrod, A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs: An Audible Original (Light update on how science about dinosaurs has changed since the 1970s, pitched at parents/grandparents whose children are into dinosaurs now; I don't have children, so I have to be into dinosaurs now on my own.)

•John McWhorter/Great Courses, Language Families Of The World (It's hard to talk about every one of the ~150+ language families comprising several thousand languages in a fifteen-hour course, but we get brief discussions of the more interesting features of some of them. I enjoyed it, but if you're new to McWhorter, I suggest trying one of his other Great Courses or books first.)

Jennifer Paxton/Great Courses, The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest (I don't know much about the history of this era, although I've read various things about how people lived then. So I learned a lot but there's not a lot of depth. Paxton is a really fun story-teller.)

•Phoebe Robinson, You Can't Touch My Hair (African-American actress narrates a series of memoir-ish essays, funny and also serious, for an audience of POC and white people)

Fiction audiobooks

Donna Ball, Flash (Dogleg Island #1) (police procedural series about a woman who is an officer on a small Florida island. Flash is her dog. This book deals really well with unreliability of memory.)

Patricia Bracewell, Shadow On The Crown (Emma of Normandy #1) (Historical fiction; I bought it thinking it would have a fantasy element, but it doesn't really.)

James S. A. Corey, "Gods of Risk" (Expanse #2.5) (Short story featuring Bobbie that ties in a bit with a plotline in the fourth season of the TV series. >>>Recommended for Expanse fans.<<<)

Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (Re-read. His dinos still don't have feathers.)

Agatha Christie, Three Act Tragedy (Poirot #11) (A little less of Poirot in this one than in some of the others.)

William Gibson, Alien III (Dramatization based on a screenplay that didn't get turned into a movie. I don't know if it was my hearing problems or the production, but I found it hard to hear the dialogue over all the other sound.)

Helen Harper, Bloodfire (Blood Destiny #1) (Paranormal fantasy about werewolves and someone who lives with them who is kinda human and kinda not.)

•Chester Himes, A Rage In Harlem (Harlem Cycle #1) (Himes is African-American and wrote a series of detective books set in Harlem in the late 50s and early 60s. This audiobook is read by Samuel Jackson and he does a great job, but be warned that there's a lot of racism and sexism in the story. >>>Recommended for Samuel Jackson fans<<<)

•N. K. Jemisin, "Emergency Skin" (Science fiction, one of a collection of six shorts, edited by Blake Crouch, titled Forward. This is a story delightfully full of schadenfreude. >>>Recommended<<<) 

Darynda Jones, Second Grave on the Left (Charley Davidson #2) (Paranormal romance series about a private investigator who can see dead people.) 

John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies (Smiley #9) (Prequel/sequel to The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Le Carré fans will like it, but it's probably better to read than to listen to, because the timeline shifts around a lot)

Michael Livingston, Black Crow, White Snow (Novella, fantasy about some people on a gender-role-reversed world who are stranded in an arctic wilderness.)

Ami McKay, The Witches of New York (Historical fantasy, set in 1880s New York City. Three women and a talking raven run what is nominally a tea shop but which also offers herbal remedies including abortifacients, charms, and the like. Very well written and many of the characters are well drawn, but it has a trope I don't like, which TVTropes calls "Sinister Minister".)

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (the life of Achilles told from the point of view of Patroclus, his companion. Beautifully written.)

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle For Leibowitz (Classic post-nuclear story. Some monks try to preserve scraps of scientific information while civilization rebuilds itself after being wiped out.)

Margaret Rogerson, An Enchantment Of Ravens (fantasy romance. A young painter is kidnapped by a faery in a world where faeries mostly don't have real emotions. There aren't enough ravens.)

Loretta Ross, Death and the Brewmaster's Widow (Auction Block Mysteries #2) (cozy mystery set in the South, about a disabled veteran named Death (pronounced "Deeth") and his girlfriend, who belongs to a family that runs auctions.)

•Param Anand Singh et al., "Reverse Transmission" (darkly satirical cyberpunk, dramatization, I found the story hard to follow.)

•Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts (science fiction, on a generation ship where society is structured like the antebellum South, a neurodiverse person who is in the slave class tries to figure out what happened to her mother. Difficult to read because a lot of abuse depicted, but >>>recommended<<<)

Laini Taylor, Muse of Nightmares (sequel to Strange the Dreamer) (fantasy, about children who are the offspring of gods and humans. They have special powers. Humans and these children mutually fear and hate each other.)

•Angie Thomas, On the Come Up (teenage girl tries to launch a rap career. From the author of The Hate You Give. The narrator is excellent. >>>Recommended<<<)

Sherry Thomas, A Scandal in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2) (historical detective fiction; a neurodiverse woman escapes from her abusive parents and with the help of various people tries to make a living pretending to be a male genius detective. I like this series a lot, but the first book doesn't give you a full sense for where it's going.)

Leo Tolstoy, Constance Garnett (tr.), Anna Karenina (in mid-19^th-century Russia, members two families are unhappy in different ways. Not much I can say that hasn't already been said elsewhere. If you've read this in more than one English translation, I'd like to hear about it.)

Gave up on

Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky (Science fiction / fantasy-ish story about two people who know each other at different times in their lives. Anders wrote in io9 that she likes stories about relationships and stories about characters who fuck up a lot. This is that kind of story. I seem to like stories with a certain amount of "competence porn," so this book didn't work for me.)

•Bates, Plain Brown Wrapper (Alex Powell #1) (Mystery, main characters are mostly African-American journalists. I stopped because I encountered some fatphobia, and in general I didn't like the values of some of the characters I was supposed to care about. That's a problem I have with a lot of mystery stories.)

Larry Correia, The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent (loud, silly dramatization)

Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (Vampire Hunter #1) (I stopped because there was too much Abraham Lincoln and not enough vampires.) 

Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men (Half-Moon Hollow #2) (Paranormal fantasy with vampires, werewolves, and the like. The first book in this series was OK, but I gave up on this one because the intensity of the monogamy culture was turning me off.)

Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic (Practical Magic #1) (Literary, magical realism. I really liked the writing style, and I listened to almost all of it, but I didn't like the main characters; they seemed passive and reactive.

Lebbon & Maggs, Alien: Out of the Shadows (Dramatization, I thought the sound effects and acting were cheesy, and the plot seemed too familiar).

Alyson Richman, The Velvet Hours (Historical fiction based on a real apartment in Paris that was re-opened after being abandoned for 70s years. In Paris just before WWII, a young woman meets her grandmother for the first time; her grandmother was a courtesan and tells the story of her life. It's beautifully written, but I didn't care very much for either of the main characters.)

Hana Walker-Brown, The Beautiful Brain (4-hr documentary about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, which starts out with a lengthy portrait of an English footballer who had it. Stopped because my mom died of dementia and I didn't want to read a blow-by-blow description of how it affected the guy.)

Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada (A young woman becomes the assistant to the head of a fashion house because she thinks it will help her break into magazine journalism, and then is horrified at what the job demands of her and how mean her boss is. I got through about half of it, but stopped because I couldn't muster up enough sympathy for the protagonist. Her attitude wasn't so much "no one should be asked to do this job" or "ten people are needed to do this job," but "I graduated from an Ivy League school, I am too important to do this job." Her boss is demanding and mean but at least in the part I read, she's not any more immoral than anyone else in the story.)

Comments

[ljgeoff]

Thank you for the recs! I haven't read anything in ages.