2023 in books
31 Dec 2023 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecatThis is a dump of most of what I read this year via audiobook or ebook , with brief comments/reviews. If you consumed any of these I’d enjoy it if you told me what you thought (positive or negative). If you want me to say anything more about them let me know!
Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way
Published 2020. Narrated by the author. Natural history / pop science. I learned a great deal and I’m thinking of buying the ebook so I can look up more about the birds described. The narration was prosaic though.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio play)
I’ve been reading this thing once every few years for a few decades so I’ve mostly memorized it by now. This is the original version of the story. It deserves its good reputation
Catherine Aird, His Burial Too; Slight Mourning; Parting Breath (Callashire #5–7)
Published 1973–1977. Mystery. First two narrated by Derek Perkins, third by Robin Bailey. I much prefer Bailey as a narrator and Audible didn’t have any others in the series with him narrating, plus the third one had a lot of gratuitous fat hate, so I decided to stop reading the series.
Patrick N. Allitt / Great Courses, Victorian Britain
Published 1999. Allitt has conservative politics but seems to treat his subject without a lot of bias except to occasionally throw in comments like "Margaret Thatcher was a great PM." I really liked this. His voice is a bit like John Oliver’s and he finds a lot of things amusing so it’s kind of as if it were British History with John Oliver. It focused on aspects of British history I didn’t know much about or didn’t know how they fit together. Like, I didn’t know the Luddites were actually an activist group. He touched on most of the parts that have special interest to me, like Holmes and Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland.
Ilona Andrews, Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #6)
Published in book form 2022. Narrated by Nora Sofyan. I love this series about a magical inn that serves as a galactic waystation. I’m ambivalent about the narration for this one. Some of her voices were brilliant and some were super annoying and some didn’t sound right.
Dorsey Armstrong/Great Courses
King Arthur: History and Legend
Arrived on Audible in 2015. Narrated by the author. I’ve listened to her courses before and really liked them, and this is the one I enjoyed most. It was much more about legend than about history, which I didn’t expect. And one thing I really liked is that it’s essentially all about fanfic, if fanfic is taking a well known story and reworking it, which I kind of think it is. Oddly enough I still don’t feel like I have enough of a grasp on these legends to write about them.
Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
Published 2006. Narrated by Mark Kamish. Inspiration for the series All Rise. I absolutely gobbled this. The narrator was perfect and the stories of how courtrooms and judges were operating in the 90s-00s were a fascinating shades-of-gray narrative. I recognized a few bits that ended up in All Rise but overall it was extremely different, much more cynical and not at all from the perspective of judges and other court employees.
Charlotte Carter, Nanette Hayes series
Originally published in the 90s (set in the 90s). Mystery. Noirish. Protagonist is a Black street busker who plays the saxophone. Audiobooks narrated by Karen Murray.
M J Carter, The Strangler Vine; The Infidel Strain; The Devil’s Feast (Avery & Blake #1–3)
Published 2014–17. Audiobooks narrated by Alex Wyndham. Historical mystery. Set in the 1830s. The Strangler Vine is set in India. The other two are set in London. I liked The Strangler Vine the best (it’s the shippiest one) but enjoyed the other two also. Blake is a bit Sherlockian. Avery is a bit Watsonian in that he is clueless a lot, but the reason for his cluelessness is class privilege. So it’s sort of a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Dickens. The author hasn’t developed the Blake character as much as I would prefer.
KJ Charles, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting; Any Old Diamonds; Jackdaw; Band Sinister
Historical gay romance; most are just historical but a couple of the series have fantasy elements. I’m reading several of her series at the same time so these aren’t in reading order. The audiobooks are narrated by Cornell Collins, who reads the smut very, um, vigorously (I like it!). I like the atmosphere and formula (men who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily meet end up together; they have conflicts and danger, they deal with societal homophobia, and it always works out in the end). The only thing I don’t like is that sometimes I get sick of how much processing the couples do before they end up together.
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
Understanding Power
Audible Original published 2014. Put together by transcribing and organizing interview tapes made between 1989–1999. With a note about 9/11/2001. This is my introduction to Chomsky’s ideas as he explains them; although as a leftish political person I’m familiar with them as part of the general leftish view of the world. I found it pretty fascinating, although most of the examples he gives are of events from the 90s and earlier. I gleaned some interesting/amusing quotes:
—“Look at the diplomatic record of any country you want — Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Libya — pick your favorite horror story. You’ll find that everything they ever did was ‘defensive’. I’m sure if we had records from Genghis Khan, we would find that what he was doing was ‘defensive’ too.”
—“That’s the way that capitalism works. The nature of the system is that it’s supposed to be driven by greed. No one’s supposed to be concerned for anybody else. Nobody’s supposed to worry about the common good. Those are not things that are supposed to motivate you. That’s the principle of the system, The theory is that private vices lead to public benefits.”
—“It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance. Only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another.”
—"This stuff doesn't even rise to the level of idiocy."
—“If you’re a great weightlifter, you’re going to be a rotten butterfly.”
The only thing I didn’t like about the audiobook was that the narrator made the questioners sound dumb and antagonistic (men) and subservient (women).
Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders (Poirot #13); Sleeping Murder (Marple #13); Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories; Murder in Mesopotamia (Poirot #14)
—ABC Murders: Narrated by Hugh Fraser. Published 1936.
—Sleeping Murder: Narrated by Stephanie Cole. Final Marple book, written in 1940s, set in 1944, published posthumously in 1976. “Christie had written an extra two books during the first years of the war in anticipation of being killed in the raids”
—Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: Narrated by David Suchet. Hugh Fraser, Nigel Hawthorne, Isla Blair, Simon Vance. This has >50 stories and is 35 hours long.
—Murder in Mesopotamia: published in 1936. Narrated by Anna Massey, who uses a low, very proper English voice, but I didn’t like her attempts at a French accent. This wasn’t one of my favorites. It turned on the psychological theory that women (specifically women) could be consciously kind but unconsciously manipulative. And there wasn’t enough of Poirot sleuthing.
Jackson Crawford/Great Courses, Norse Mythology
Audible version released 2021. Lectures. Covers more than just Snorri Sturlsson’s Eddas. I’m not sure how much I buy his claims about the intense “masculine” focus of the culture, but it’s interesting. He claims that the ancient Norsemen believed their death day was fixed but the manner of their death was not. Further, he claims that they preferred to go to Valhalla than to Hel’s realm, so they wanted to die in battle (that was the only way to get to Valhalla). Plus they had a huge fear of seeming cowardly. So they would battle at the slightest provocation. I find it interesting to imagine how people would live their lives differently if they believed their death day were fixed from birth.
Mick Finlay, Arrowood (Arrowood #1)
Published 2017. Narrated by Malk Williams. Noir victorian london. Arrowood is a consulting detective who feels that Sherlock Holmes is a rival and goes on about it at great length. The protagonist is Arrowood’s assistant/servant. They’re more downmarket than Holmes & Watson and solve mysteries in different ways.
Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology
Published 2017. Narrated by the author. Essentially the Prose Edda retold in a modern style.
Ruth Goodman, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England
Published 2018. Narrated by Jennifer M Dixon. Dixon’s narrative style was crisp & posh and contrasted in an amusing way with the prose. I enjoyed it and learned a bunch about different cultures and fashions through those years
Genevieve Gornichec, The Witch’s Heart
Published 2021. Narrated by Jayne Entwistle, who has a low woman’s voice and rich English accent and her narration really worked for me. Fanfic about Angrboda. FLAILS aaaaahhh this was AMAZING. Monster children! Loki has a reason for being so self-destructive! He’s a good guy with a long game! Anger and vengeance and forgiveness! The shared worlds built between people in a relationship! Polyamory treated as more-or-less normal! (The part where Angrboda and her female friend took so long to figure out they both wanted to fuck was kinda silly though.) Amazing scene of Loki’s being tortured and then Angrboda and Sigurd (sp?) freeing him! Witchcraft and seidr! Inexorable Odin using everyone left and right! And none of that explains why I loved it so much. Very highly recommended
Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift (Midsomer Murders Mystery/Chief Inspector Barnaby #1)
Published 1987. Narrated by John Hopkins, who plays the main character in the TV series. I liked this a great deal. Same sort of satisfaction as Christie. Barnaby is thoughtful and snarky but not mean very often. His sidekick gets some POV time and I liked hearing his take on things. Most of the characters sort of broadly drawn but perhaps more varied than in some mysteries.
Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
Published 2022. Narrated by Adetomiwa Edun. Nonfiction. The narrator has a lovely tenor British voice. It’s sort of a travelogue with one chapter devoted to one place in each epoch from beginning of Mesozoic to 20K years ago, in reverse chronological order.
Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir (Titanium Noir #1)
Published 2023. Narrated by Davis Brooks. Dystopian SF, "philip k dick meets raymond chandler". Author is the son of David Cornwall (John Le Carré). This was…a lot. There was a lot going on.
Charlaine Harris, The Serpent in Heaven; All the Dead Shall Weep (Gunnie Rose #4–5)
Published 2022 & 2023. Narrated by Eva Kaminsky. Weird-west/Post-apocalyptic-fantasy. The magic and the world are interesting but hard to describe.
Faith Hunter, True Dead; Final Heir (Jane Yellowrock #14–15)
Published 2021 & 2022. Narrated by Khristine Hvam. Series is about a shapeshifting vampire hunter and the world has vamps and weres and Native American supernatural entities and so on. It’s much better than the Anita Blake series, which is I guess the most famous series of this type. I really found this series satisfying overall—there’s too much repetition of certain tropes, but it got very complex and yet it never felt like she was just shoehorning in more things for the sake of it. There was backstory for everything and most of the recurring characters had growth and story arcs.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Published 1932. Narrated pretty well by Michael York, although I didn’t like some of the voices he chose. This is a fascinating book, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure which character if any I was supposed to identify with. The society is designed for stability via conditioning, and it almost looks better than western society now, although it’s not supposed to.
Don Lincoln / Great Courses, The Evidence for Modern Physics
Published 2021. Narrated by the instructor. I liked this quite a bit. He explained things clearly and explained what he was going to explain and was clear about what physicists know and don’t know and got into quantum mechanics and particles and the expansion of the universe. It wasn’t too dumbed down or slow and it wasn’t too fast.
Jonathan Losos, The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa
Published 2023. Narrated by the author. Pop science. I absolutely loved most of this book. It had just the right balance of “yeah I knew that” and “huh, I didn’t know that.” But I didn't like his enthusiasm for the idea of genetically editing cats using CRISPR.
The Mabinogion
Collection of eleven prose stories. Translated by Sioned Davies, narrated by James Cameron Stewart. Original translation by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1838–45, bilingual in Welsh and English. Audible has several versions by different translators: I read this one because it was available in their streaming collection, but the narration was very odd.
Val McDermid, Mermaids Singing (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan #1)
Published in 1995. Narrated by Graham Roberts. I like his style of narration. Grisly mystery about a serial killer. I enjoyed it, although I wasn’t thrilled that the serial killer is theorized to be that way because she’s what I would call a trans woman.
Robin McKinley, Deerskin
Published 1993. Narrated by Xe Sands. Based on Allerleirauh, or anyway the type of fairy tale where the king wants to marry his own daughter. This was pretty painful to read. It's about recovering from a rape. But I liked that dogs figure heavily in the recovery.
Dervla McTiernan, The Sisters; The Roommate; The Ruin (Cormac Reilly #0.5, #0.7, #1)
All part of Audible Plus and narrated by Aoife (“efa”) McMahon. Police procedural mysteries. The author has a tendency to subvert genres, which I like. Published 2018–20.
—The Ruin: Set in 1993. Won some awards. Audible tags: Crime thrillers, Noir, Suspense, Scary, Detective.
—The Sisters: Prequel, protagonists are side characters in The Ruin, explores morality in policing and there’s some gender stuff I found interesting
—The Roommate: Creepy stalker story. Sequel , POV of a bystander to a murder, who works with the protagonist from The Ruin.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Published 1851. Narrated by William Hootkins. Won Audie award. Reread. I love it so much. Great narrator, interprets/captures Ishmael’s voice perfectly, slightly excited, slightly sardonic usually, sometimes in awe.
Article in The Guardian about how subversive & queer MB was, written for Melville’s 200th birthday in 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/30/subversive-queer-and-terrifyingly-relevant-six-reasons-why-moby-dick-is-the-novel-for-our-times
Lincoln Michel, The Body Scout
Published 2021. Narrated by Greg Chun. “Baseball & body mods.” Great cybernoir. Reminded me of Effinger’s When Gravity Fails (although not as good as that).
Ellie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution
Published 2022. Narrated by the author, who is an MSNBC legal commentator. It’s about “what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them.” I enjoyed how extremely cranky the guy is and his arguments seemed plausible.
Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith (Easy Rawlins #11)
Published 2017. Narrated by Michael Boatman. This series is set in the 1940s–60s and it’s about a Black guy who’s not officially a detective, at least at first, but keeps getting roped into having to solve crimes. Some of them are more focused on the mystery and some are more focused on his family life. This is more of a family life one and not one of my favorites. I saw Mosley speak a while back, before this was published, and he was defending his decision not to publish any more Easy Rawlins books (he wanted to focus on modern day characters), but I guess he ended up having to publish more after all.
Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver
Published 2018. Narrated by Lisa Flanagan. She has a dark lovely voice, but sometimes I had trouble understanding which character was speaking. Based on several Russian fairy tales. Nominated for Nebula & Hugo. Beautiful, rich, uncompromising in that fairy tale logic way.
Philip Perry, The Butcher’s Boy (Butcher’s Boy #1)
Published 1983. Narrated by Michael Kramer. Won Edgar Award for best first novel. I enjoyed it except that it had some male characters talking about women’s bodies in that annoying way.
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials #1–#3)
Originally published 1995. Narrated by full cast. I especially liked the narrators Sean Barrett and Douglas Blackthorne. Fantasy/science fiction, that kind where you can’t quite tell which. In this world, people’s souls manifest as corporeal animals. The chapter opening music to the narration is A W F U L!!! What were they thinking? I like the first two books, but The Amber Spyglass doesn’t seem to have had an editor and I didn’t like the ending.
David Quammen, Spillover
Published 2012. Narrated by Jonathan Yen. About zoonotic viruses. It was fascinating to read this post-COVID, after “the next big one” that he predicted. It was very long and thorough and covered the famous ones (flu pandemic of 20th century, AIDS, SARS), and a lot of smaller incidences of spillover of bugs from animals to humans.
David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
Published 2019. Narrated by Jacques Roy. About molecular phylogenetics. This is a cross between a history of science and a biography of Carl Woese and a discussion of whether “tree” is a good metaphor for how life evolved. He claims that it isn’t because its way more complicated than that, but I think saying it’s wrong is like saying Newton was wrong because Einstein showed that laws of physics were different in different space/time scapes both large and tiny. But Newton’s perfectly good for what we encounter every day. I learned some things but overall there was more “the everyday lives of scientists” than I prefer and not enough “here’s what they discovered and what it means for us.” It was interesting to read about Lynn Margulis though.
Mary Renault, The Persian Boy
Published 1972. Narrated by Roger May, a Brit who is using a high-ish voice. “A novel of Alexander the Great”—last years of his life through the eyes of his lover, a eunuch. I liked it a fair bit, although it had that thing I don’t like about historical narratives where there are incidents that are described in detail and then it pulls way back to “and then for several years blah blah.”
Rebecca Roanhorse, Tread of Angels
Published 2022. Narrated by Dion Graham. Fantasy novella. I liked the worldbuilding - Virtues and Fallen standing in for racism, and a sexy demon. I hated the ending.
John Scalzi, Travel by Bullet (Dispatcher #3)
Published 2022. Narrated by Zachary Quinto. Novella. I like this world (when people are murdered, they end up back in their bodies in their safe space…usually) and this character. I think Scalzi’s writing style is clunky but with this narration I don’t care. This one had more of a classic noir feeling than the others. Quinto reads so fast that I had to slow the narration down to 0.8.
Mark A Stoler/Great Courses, The Skeptic’s Guide to American History
Published in 2013. Narrated by the author. I learned a lot because he addressed several periods I don’t know much about.
Helen Thomson, Unthinkable
“An extraordinary journey through the world’s strangest brains.” Audiobook released 2018. Narrated by the author. Fluffy, especially compared to Oliver Saks’ treatment of the same subject, but there were some interesting stories. I liked her attitude of “these are all people and we’re all just trying to get by”.
Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus
Published 2023. Narrated by Mara Wilson. Tingle is known for writing erotica with silly titles; I haven’t read much of it. This is him writing in a more mainstream genre. Description on Audible —“horror debut about the demons the queer community face in America” but also “a joyful, furious romp.” >>> OK, it’s not at all a joyful romp. A furious romp, I’ll buy. It’s somewhat similar to Never Let Me Go, in that the protagonist is in the midst of a culture that’s very antithetical to what we believe in and the horror of it slowly unfolds. I found this very compelling and I was surprised because I normally don’t like stories steeped in religion in the way this one is. One reason is that there’s a message of how even if cults suck there’s nothing particularly wrong with the underlying message of this religion, which is to help people and love them. Tingle in his social media comes down hard in favor of that. (From Tor: “Chuck writes to prove love is real.”)
Dan Wells, Ghost Station
Published in 2019. Narrated by Jonathan Davis. Spy story set in Berlin, 1961. I enjoyed this a fair bit. There is a lot of cryptography geeking, I learned some history. Wells wrote a detailed authors note about exactly what was true and what was fiction. I later learned that his position on Sad Puppies is very different from mine so I won’t be seeking out more of his books.
Martha Wells, System Collapse (Murderbot #7)
Published in 2023. Narrated by Kevin R Free. I love this series about a sarcastic android.
Coulson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Ray Carney #1)
Published in 2021. Narrated by Dion Graham. The novel is divided in three parts and covers three separate capers, set in 1959, 1961 and 1964. It culminates with the Harlem riot of 1964. Well written and the protagonist is interestingly complicated.
P. G. Wodehouse
Something Fresh (Blandings Castle #1)
Leave It to Psmith
#1 narrated by Frederick Davidson. Published 1915. I would listen to Frederick Davidson read the phone book.
#2 Published 1923. Narrated by Jonathan Cecil. He has a lovely low voice.
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Published in 2022. Narrated by the author: his British accent is very rich, he talks a little too fast, and a little hard to understand. I slowed him down a bit, which made him sound even more dramatic. He is a staff member at The Atlantic. This is pop science about animal senses. I loved it a lot, he’s really imaginative and leans into the sensa wunda aspect of his subject.
2023 Audiobooks & Ebooks
Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way
Published 2020. Narrated by the author. Natural history / pop science. I learned a great deal and I’m thinking of buying the ebook so I can look up more about the birds described. The narration was prosaic though.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio play)
I’ve been reading this thing once every few years for a few decades so I’ve mostly memorized it by now. This is the original version of the story. It deserves its good reputation
Catherine Aird, His Burial Too; Slight Mourning; Parting Breath (Callashire #5–7)
Published 1973–1977. Mystery. First two narrated by Derek Perkins, third by Robin Bailey. I much prefer Bailey as a narrator and Audible didn’t have any others in the series with him narrating, plus the third one had a lot of gratuitous fat hate, so I decided to stop reading the series.
Patrick N. Allitt / Great Courses, Victorian Britain
Published 1999. Allitt has conservative politics but seems to treat his subject without a lot of bias except to occasionally throw in comments like "Margaret Thatcher was a great PM." I really liked this. His voice is a bit like John Oliver’s and he finds a lot of things amusing so it’s kind of as if it were British History with John Oliver. It focused on aspects of British history I didn’t know much about or didn’t know how they fit together. Like, I didn’t know the Luddites were actually an activist group. He touched on most of the parts that have special interest to me, like Holmes and Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland.
Ilona Andrews, Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #6)
Published in book form 2022. Narrated by Nora Sofyan. I love this series about a magical inn that serves as a galactic waystation. I’m ambivalent about the narration for this one. Some of her voices were brilliant and some were super annoying and some didn’t sound right.
Dorsey Armstrong/Great Courses
King Arthur: History and Legend
Arrived on Audible in 2015. Narrated by the author. I’ve listened to her courses before and really liked them, and this is the one I enjoyed most. It was much more about legend than about history, which I didn’t expect. And one thing I really liked is that it’s essentially all about fanfic, if fanfic is taking a well known story and reworking it, which I kind of think it is. Oddly enough I still don’t feel like I have enough of a grasp on these legends to write about them.
Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
Published 2006. Narrated by Mark Kamish. Inspiration for the series All Rise. I absolutely gobbled this. The narrator was perfect and the stories of how courtrooms and judges were operating in the 90s-00s were a fascinating shades-of-gray narrative. I recognized a few bits that ended up in All Rise but overall it was extremely different, much more cynical and not at all from the perspective of judges and other court employees.
Charlotte Carter, Nanette Hayes series
Originally published in the 90s (set in the 90s). Mystery. Noirish. Protagonist is a Black street busker who plays the saxophone. Audiobooks narrated by Karen Murray.
M J Carter, The Strangler Vine; The Infidel Strain; The Devil’s Feast (Avery & Blake #1–3)
Published 2014–17. Audiobooks narrated by Alex Wyndham. Historical mystery. Set in the 1830s. The Strangler Vine is set in India. The other two are set in London. I liked The Strangler Vine the best (it’s the shippiest one) but enjoyed the other two also. Blake is a bit Sherlockian. Avery is a bit Watsonian in that he is clueless a lot, but the reason for his cluelessness is class privilege. So it’s sort of a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Dickens. The author hasn’t developed the Blake character as much as I would prefer.
KJ Charles, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting; Any Old Diamonds; Jackdaw; Band Sinister
Historical gay romance; most are just historical but a couple of the series have fantasy elements. I’m reading several of her series at the same time so these aren’t in reading order. The audiobooks are narrated by Cornell Collins, who reads the smut very, um, vigorously (I like it!). I like the atmosphere and formula (men who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily meet end up together; they have conflicts and danger, they deal with societal homophobia, and it always works out in the end). The only thing I don’t like is that sometimes I get sick of how much processing the couples do before they end up together.
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
Understanding Power
Audible Original published 2014. Put together by transcribing and organizing interview tapes made between 1989–1999. With a note about 9/11/2001. This is my introduction to Chomsky’s ideas as he explains them; although as a leftish political person I’m familiar with them as part of the general leftish view of the world. I found it pretty fascinating, although most of the examples he gives are of events from the 90s and earlier. I gleaned some interesting/amusing quotes:
—“Look at the diplomatic record of any country you want — Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Libya — pick your favorite horror story. You’ll find that everything they ever did was ‘defensive’. I’m sure if we had records from Genghis Khan, we would find that what he was doing was ‘defensive’ too.”
—“That’s the way that capitalism works. The nature of the system is that it’s supposed to be driven by greed. No one’s supposed to be concerned for anybody else. Nobody’s supposed to worry about the common good. Those are not things that are supposed to motivate you. That’s the principle of the system, The theory is that private vices lead to public benefits.”
—“It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance. Only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another.”
—"This stuff doesn't even rise to the level of idiocy."
—“If you’re a great weightlifter, you’re going to be a rotten butterfly.”
The only thing I didn’t like about the audiobook was that the narrator made the questioners sound dumb and antagonistic (men) and subservient (women).
Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders (Poirot #13); Sleeping Murder (Marple #13); Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories; Murder in Mesopotamia (Poirot #14)
—ABC Murders: Narrated by Hugh Fraser. Published 1936.
—Sleeping Murder: Narrated by Stephanie Cole. Final Marple book, written in 1940s, set in 1944, published posthumously in 1976. “Christie had written an extra two books during the first years of the war in anticipation of being killed in the raids”
—Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: Narrated by David Suchet. Hugh Fraser, Nigel Hawthorne, Isla Blair, Simon Vance. This has >50 stories and is 35 hours long.
—Murder in Mesopotamia: published in 1936. Narrated by Anna Massey, who uses a low, very proper English voice, but I didn’t like her attempts at a French accent. This wasn’t one of my favorites. It turned on the psychological theory that women (specifically women) could be consciously kind but unconsciously manipulative. And there wasn’t enough of Poirot sleuthing.
Jackson Crawford/Great Courses, Norse Mythology
Audible version released 2021. Lectures. Covers more than just Snorri Sturlsson’s Eddas. I’m not sure how much I buy his claims about the intense “masculine” focus of the culture, but it’s interesting. He claims that the ancient Norsemen believed their death day was fixed but the manner of their death was not. Further, he claims that they preferred to go to Valhalla than to Hel’s realm, so they wanted to die in battle (that was the only way to get to Valhalla). Plus they had a huge fear of seeming cowardly. So they would battle at the slightest provocation. I find it interesting to imagine how people would live their lives differently if they believed their death day were fixed from birth.
Mick Finlay, Arrowood (Arrowood #1)
Published 2017. Narrated by Malk Williams. Noir victorian london. Arrowood is a consulting detective who feels that Sherlock Holmes is a rival and goes on about it at great length. The protagonist is Arrowood’s assistant/servant. They’re more downmarket than Holmes & Watson and solve mysteries in different ways.
Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology
Published 2017. Narrated by the author. Essentially the Prose Edda retold in a modern style.
Ruth Goodman, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England
Published 2018. Narrated by Jennifer M Dixon. Dixon’s narrative style was crisp & posh and contrasted in an amusing way with the prose. I enjoyed it and learned a bunch about different cultures and fashions through those years
Genevieve Gornichec, The Witch’s Heart
Published 2021. Narrated by Jayne Entwistle, who has a low woman’s voice and rich English accent and her narration really worked for me. Fanfic about Angrboda. FLAILS aaaaahhh this was AMAZING. Monster children! Loki has a reason for being so self-destructive! He’s a good guy with a long game! Anger and vengeance and forgiveness! The shared worlds built between people in a relationship! Polyamory treated as more-or-less normal! (The part where Angrboda and her female friend took so long to figure out they both wanted to fuck was kinda silly though.) Amazing scene of Loki’s being tortured and then Angrboda and Sigurd (sp?) freeing him! Witchcraft and seidr! Inexorable Odin using everyone left and right! And none of that explains why I loved it so much. Very highly recommended
Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift (Midsomer Murders Mystery/Chief Inspector Barnaby #1)
Published 1987. Narrated by John Hopkins, who plays the main character in the TV series. I liked this a great deal. Same sort of satisfaction as Christie. Barnaby is thoughtful and snarky but not mean very often. His sidekick gets some POV time and I liked hearing his take on things. Most of the characters sort of broadly drawn but perhaps more varied than in some mysteries.
Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
Published 2022. Narrated by Adetomiwa Edun. Nonfiction. The narrator has a lovely tenor British voice. It’s sort of a travelogue with one chapter devoted to one place in each epoch from beginning of Mesozoic to 20K years ago, in reverse chronological order.
Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir (Titanium Noir #1)
Published 2023. Narrated by Davis Brooks. Dystopian SF, "philip k dick meets raymond chandler". Author is the son of David Cornwall (John Le Carré). This was…a lot. There was a lot going on.
Charlaine Harris, The Serpent in Heaven; All the Dead Shall Weep (Gunnie Rose #4–5)
Published 2022 & 2023. Narrated by Eva Kaminsky. Weird-west/Post-apocalyptic-fantasy. The magic and the world are interesting but hard to describe.
Faith Hunter, True Dead; Final Heir (Jane Yellowrock #14–15)
Published 2021 & 2022. Narrated by Khristine Hvam. Series is about a shapeshifting vampire hunter and the world has vamps and weres and Native American supernatural entities and so on. It’s much better than the Anita Blake series, which is I guess the most famous series of this type. I really found this series satisfying overall—there’s too much repetition of certain tropes, but it got very complex and yet it never felt like she was just shoehorning in more things for the sake of it. There was backstory for everything and most of the recurring characters had growth and story arcs.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Published 1932. Narrated pretty well by Michael York, although I didn’t like some of the voices he chose. This is a fascinating book, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure which character if any I was supposed to identify with. The society is designed for stability via conditioning, and it almost looks better than western society now, although it’s not supposed to.
Don Lincoln / Great Courses, The Evidence for Modern Physics
Published 2021. Narrated by the instructor. I liked this quite a bit. He explained things clearly and explained what he was going to explain and was clear about what physicists know and don’t know and got into quantum mechanics and particles and the expansion of the universe. It wasn’t too dumbed down or slow and it wasn’t too fast.
Jonathan Losos, The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa
Published 2023. Narrated by the author. Pop science. I absolutely loved most of this book. It had just the right balance of “yeah I knew that” and “huh, I didn’t know that.” But I didn't like his enthusiasm for the idea of genetically editing cats using CRISPR.
The Mabinogion
Collection of eleven prose stories. Translated by Sioned Davies, narrated by James Cameron Stewart. Original translation by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1838–45, bilingual in Welsh and English. Audible has several versions by different translators: I read this one because it was available in their streaming collection, but the narration was very odd.
Val McDermid, Mermaids Singing (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan #1)
Published in 1995. Narrated by Graham Roberts. I like his style of narration. Grisly mystery about a serial killer. I enjoyed it, although I wasn’t thrilled that the serial killer is theorized to be that way because she’s what I would call a trans woman.
Robin McKinley, Deerskin
Published 1993. Narrated by Xe Sands. Based on Allerleirauh, or anyway the type of fairy tale where the king wants to marry his own daughter. This was pretty painful to read. It's about recovering from a rape. But I liked that dogs figure heavily in the recovery.
Dervla McTiernan, The Sisters; The Roommate; The Ruin (Cormac Reilly #0.5, #0.7, #1)
All part of Audible Plus and narrated by Aoife (“efa”) McMahon. Police procedural mysteries. The author has a tendency to subvert genres, which I like. Published 2018–20.
—The Ruin: Set in 1993. Won some awards. Audible tags: Crime thrillers, Noir, Suspense, Scary, Detective.
—The Sisters: Prequel, protagonists are side characters in The Ruin, explores morality in policing and there’s some gender stuff I found interesting
—The Roommate: Creepy stalker story. Sequel , POV of a bystander to a murder, who works with the protagonist from The Ruin.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Published 1851. Narrated by William Hootkins. Won Audie award. Reread. I love it so much. Great narrator, interprets/captures Ishmael’s voice perfectly, slightly excited, slightly sardonic usually, sometimes in awe.
Article in The Guardian about how subversive & queer MB was, written for Melville’s 200th birthday in 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/30/subversive-queer-and-terrifyingly-relevant-six-reasons-why-moby-dick-is-the-novel-for-our-times
Lincoln Michel, The Body Scout
Published 2021. Narrated by Greg Chun. “Baseball & body mods.” Great cybernoir. Reminded me of Effinger’s When Gravity Fails (although not as good as that).
Ellie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution
Published 2022. Narrated by the author, who is an MSNBC legal commentator. It’s about “what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them.” I enjoyed how extremely cranky the guy is and his arguments seemed plausible.
Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith (Easy Rawlins #11)
Published 2017. Narrated by Michael Boatman. This series is set in the 1940s–60s and it’s about a Black guy who’s not officially a detective, at least at first, but keeps getting roped into having to solve crimes. Some of them are more focused on the mystery and some are more focused on his family life. This is more of a family life one and not one of my favorites. I saw Mosley speak a while back, before this was published, and he was defending his decision not to publish any more Easy Rawlins books (he wanted to focus on modern day characters), but I guess he ended up having to publish more after all.
Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver
Published 2018. Narrated by Lisa Flanagan. She has a dark lovely voice, but sometimes I had trouble understanding which character was speaking. Based on several Russian fairy tales. Nominated for Nebula & Hugo. Beautiful, rich, uncompromising in that fairy tale logic way.
Philip Perry, The Butcher’s Boy (Butcher’s Boy #1)
Published 1983. Narrated by Michael Kramer. Won Edgar Award for best first novel. I enjoyed it except that it had some male characters talking about women’s bodies in that annoying way.
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials #1–#3)
Originally published 1995. Narrated by full cast. I especially liked the narrators Sean Barrett and Douglas Blackthorne. Fantasy/science fiction, that kind where you can’t quite tell which. In this world, people’s souls manifest as corporeal animals. The chapter opening music to the narration is A W F U L!!! What were they thinking? I like the first two books, but The Amber Spyglass doesn’t seem to have had an editor and I didn’t like the ending.
David Quammen, Spillover
Published 2012. Narrated by Jonathan Yen. About zoonotic viruses. It was fascinating to read this post-COVID, after “the next big one” that he predicted. It was very long and thorough and covered the famous ones (flu pandemic of 20th century, AIDS, SARS), and a lot of smaller incidences of spillover of bugs from animals to humans.
David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
Published 2019. Narrated by Jacques Roy. About molecular phylogenetics. This is a cross between a history of science and a biography of Carl Woese and a discussion of whether “tree” is a good metaphor for how life evolved. He claims that it isn’t because its way more complicated than that, but I think saying it’s wrong is like saying Newton was wrong because Einstein showed that laws of physics were different in different space/time scapes both large and tiny. But Newton’s perfectly good for what we encounter every day. I learned some things but overall there was more “the everyday lives of scientists” than I prefer and not enough “here’s what they discovered and what it means for us.” It was interesting to read about Lynn Margulis though.
Mary Renault, The Persian Boy
Published 1972. Narrated by Roger May, a Brit who is using a high-ish voice. “A novel of Alexander the Great”—last years of his life through the eyes of his lover, a eunuch. I liked it a fair bit, although it had that thing I don’t like about historical narratives where there are incidents that are described in detail and then it pulls way back to “and then for several years blah blah.”
Rebecca Roanhorse, Tread of Angels
Published 2022. Narrated by Dion Graham. Fantasy novella. I liked the worldbuilding - Virtues and Fallen standing in for racism, and a sexy demon. I hated the ending.
John Scalzi, Travel by Bullet (Dispatcher #3)
Published 2022. Narrated by Zachary Quinto. Novella. I like this world (when people are murdered, they end up back in their bodies in their safe space…usually) and this character. I think Scalzi’s writing style is clunky but with this narration I don’t care. This one had more of a classic noir feeling than the others. Quinto reads so fast that I had to slow the narration down to 0.8.
Mark A Stoler/Great Courses, The Skeptic’s Guide to American History
Published in 2013. Narrated by the author. I learned a lot because he addressed several periods I don’t know much about.
Helen Thomson, Unthinkable
“An extraordinary journey through the world’s strangest brains.” Audiobook released 2018. Narrated by the author. Fluffy, especially compared to Oliver Saks’ treatment of the same subject, but there were some interesting stories. I liked her attitude of “these are all people and we’re all just trying to get by”.
Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus
Published 2023. Narrated by Mara Wilson. Tingle is known for writing erotica with silly titles; I haven’t read much of it. This is him writing in a more mainstream genre. Description on Audible —“horror debut about the demons the queer community face in America” but also “a joyful, furious romp.” >>> OK, it’s not at all a joyful romp. A furious romp, I’ll buy. It’s somewhat similar to Never Let Me Go, in that the protagonist is in the midst of a culture that’s very antithetical to what we believe in and the horror of it slowly unfolds. I found this very compelling and I was surprised because I normally don’t like stories steeped in religion in the way this one is. One reason is that there’s a message of how even if cults suck there’s nothing particularly wrong with the underlying message of this religion, which is to help people and love them. Tingle in his social media comes down hard in favor of that. (From Tor: “Chuck writes to prove love is real.”)
Dan Wells, Ghost Station
Published in 2019. Narrated by Jonathan Davis. Spy story set in Berlin, 1961. I enjoyed this a fair bit. There is a lot of cryptography geeking, I learned some history. Wells wrote a detailed authors note about exactly what was true and what was fiction. I later learned that his position on Sad Puppies is very different from mine so I won’t be seeking out more of his books.
Martha Wells, System Collapse (Murderbot #7)
Published in 2023. Narrated by Kevin R Free. I love this series about a sarcastic android.
Coulson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Ray Carney #1)
Published in 2021. Narrated by Dion Graham. The novel is divided in three parts and covers three separate capers, set in 1959, 1961 and 1964. It culminates with the Harlem riot of 1964. Well written and the protagonist is interestingly complicated.
P. G. Wodehouse
Something Fresh (Blandings Castle #1)
Leave It to Psmith
#1 narrated by Frederick Davidson. Published 1915. I would listen to Frederick Davidson read the phone book.
#2 Published 1923. Narrated by Jonathan Cecil. He has a lovely low voice.
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Published in 2022. Narrated by the author: his British accent is very rich, he talks a little too fast, and a little hard to understand. I slowed him down a bit, which made him sound even more dramatic. He is a staff member at The Atlantic. This is pop science about animal senses. I loved it a lot, he’s really imaginative and leans into the sensa wunda aspect of his subject.
no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 10:49 am (UTC)I hope you like Moby Dick!
no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2 Jan 2024 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 11:53 pm (UTC)Chomsky: I've read some of his writing and seen *Manufacturing Consent* which was good at the time and I bet much of it still holds up.
Christie: I've read a lot of hers and like some of hers better than those (I'm not big on Poirot, though I liked The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).
Walter Mosley: He's also written some good (and gritty) science fiction short stories.
I've read several of Mary Renault's and thought The Persian Boy was mostly good (I've read others I liked better).
Wodehouse: I've enjoyed many of his, including Leave it to Psmith. The cow creamer plot (in one or two of his books, Blandings-related) is great, and his wordplay ("An astonished piece of toast fell from his hand").
no subject
Date: 2 Jan 2024 03:45 pm (UTC)I started Manufacturing Consent but stopped because he was drilling so deep into stuff that happened in the 1980s that I don’t want to spend time thinking about right now. Maybe I’ll buy the ebook so I can skim past those parts.
My favorite Christie by a long shot are the Miss Marple works. I find the others satisfying too but largely for historical and language reasons.
Which Mary Renault did you like best?
Agree that Wodehouse’s language is a huge part of the appeal!
I discovered Walter Mosley via his science fiction stories.
no subject
Date: 8 Jan 2024 10:27 pm (UTC)Mary Renault: *The Praise Singer* and *Last of the Wine* are my favorites, though *The Bull From the Sea* is very good (episodic, start of Theseus books).
no subject
Date: 9 Jan 2024 06:05 pm (UTC)