Tag: audiobooks

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? 11-27-11

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Virtual Nightstand

What’s on my iPad for this week? Pretty much everything that was on it for last week. Plus next week. We did go to my mom’s for Thanksgiving. And of the two options, read a lot or not very much, it turned out to be the not very much option.

But wait, the recap is supposed to come at the end of the post, isn’t it?

I left December as a deliberately “light” month, in the hopes of catching up with stuff I left behind back in September. Also, there’s a whole gaggle of reviews for December 27 and January 1, and I’d like to get a jump on those before they gang up on me. So I’ll be playing a lot of “catch up” this month.

Is anyone else out there having a problem with the idea that December starts this week? I am. For one thing, living in the South means that I miss all the seasonal markers that I’m used to. In Atlanta, at least the leaves do fall off the trees, but it’s still warm outside. In Chicago, we used to get the first serious snowfall most Thanksgiving weekends. There might not be a White Christmas, but there was usually a White Thanksgiving. I know it’s not traditional, but it was normal. Never mind about Anchorage. They usually have a White Halloween.

The last book in a trilogy I’ve been enjoying and reviewing (Den of Thieves, A Thief in the Night) is due Thurday, December 1. Honor Among Thieves by David Chandler finishes up The Ancient Blades trilogy. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out. I’m wondering about that title, since there usually is no honor among thieves. We’ll see…

I did get an email over Thanksgiving from Library Journal, asking me to review a Carina title for them, so Holiday Kisses, with stories by Jaci Burton, HelenKay Dimon, Shannon Stacy and Alison Kent is on my list for this week. I’d stared at this several times on NetGalley but resisted the impulse, because I’ve read books by all four authors and enjoyed them immensely. I’m glad LJ gave me the excuse to read the book anyway.

I have a second Christmas novella anthology for next week. A Clockwork Christmas, also a Carina Press title from NetGalley. The difference is that this one is all Steampunk Christmas stories, and this is one I just couldn’t resist. I love Steampunk!

The other book I couldn’t resist is Deadly Pursuit by Nina Croft. It’s the second in her Blood Hunter series. I reviewed the first book, Break Out, back in August. This is not just space opera, this is vampires in space. When I read the first book, I said I wanted to see more of the world, well, here’s my “more”. I have to see what comes next.

As far as the recap from last week goes, I didn’t do so well. Actually, I did pretty awful. Family visits are not conducive to maintaining any kind of routine, as probably every person recovering from their own Thanksgiving holiday is groaning about at this very moment!

I was caught up for one brief shining moment on Tuesday, and it felt so good! It just didn’t last very long. Dagnabbit!

I have one of this week’s books read. Her Christmas Pleasure is pleasurably completed. It helped a lot that it was the shortest! Every other book rolls over to this week. This does not help me get to the September backlog. Not at all.

On the other hand, when I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, I picked up Cast in Fury by Michelle Sagara, which does get me more forwarder on the September backlog. One of the books in that list of titles to be reviewed is Sagara’s Cast in Ruin. In order to review Cast in Ruin, I feel the need to read the rest of the series. Whenever I can’t make myself read something due for the week, I pick up the next Elantra book, and get myself back on track. What I’ll do when I run out of those, well, I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

It’s a 450 mile drive from Atlanta to Cincinnati, each way. Long trip. We listened to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Wil Wheaton. Wow. Just wow. The book was absolutely awesome, and I can’t think of a better choice for narrator than Wheaton. The book was so good that when we realized we weren’t quite going to be finished when we got home, we drove around a little, just so we’d finish. It was that good.

Of course I’m going to review it this week. But I just couldn’t resist giving a sneak preview.

Tomorrow is Ebook Review Central. This week will feature Dreamspinner Press for October.

Return next week for another edition of “The Readings of Marlene”. Sort of like “The Perils of Pauline” except all the cliffhangers are between the pages.

Happy Halloween: L.A. Theatre Works Dracula

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks

For my own personal Halloween Treat, I listened to the L.A. Theatre Works dramatization of the one, the only, the original, prince of the night, Count Dracula.

This L.A. Theatre Works dramatization is a full-cast adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic Victorian horror story, Dracula. It’s absolutely perfect for anyone’s holiday listening pleasure, complete with chills and thrills.

We all know the story, or we think we do. And it doesn’t matter. Hearing the story, with each part portrayed by an excellent actor, as was done in this production, makes the entire story fresh and new. You feel Jonathan Harker’s terror as he watches helplessly when the Count’s boxes of earth are packed and shipped to England. You share in Dr. Seward’s and Lord Godalming’s surprise, disgust and ultimate belief when Dr. Van Helsing proves to them that Lucy Westenra has, in fact, become a vampire. All while hearing only the actors’ voices.

The quest to solve the mystery, destroy Dracula, and save Mina, all while scouring London, and then trekking through half of eastern Europe, is painted through voices that can’t help but etch themselves in your mind.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a classic for a reason. Listen to this production and you will have an absolutely marvelous time remembering the reasons why.

A few personal comments about listening to the recording. If you can download this, do it. The download is currently $3.95, that’s 4 bucks. The CD is $17. Talk about a holiday treat for downloading!

Second comment, this initially caught my attention because of the voice actors. David Selby plays Van Helsing, Simon Templeman voices Dracula. I would have bought it for those two names alone. I used to run, not walk, home from school to watch the original Dark Shadows. Climbing into the “Way Back Machine”, David Selby played Quentin Collins, the werewolf member of that rather unusual family. Hearing his voice again brought back a lot of memories.

Returning to the present, I play a lot of role-playing video games, in what I refer to with some irony as my “copious free time”, mostly because said free time doesn’t exist. For the past two years, my video game of choice has been Dragon Age Origins and its sequels and DLCs. In Dragon Age, Simon Templeman is the voice of Loghain Mac Tir, an extremely compelling character who has listened to the darker side of his nature. Actually not unlike Dracula in some ways. Without the blood-drinking. Loghain had a henchman for that.

And in case it wasn’t totally obvious, Escape Rating A+.

Inspector Gamache

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

I drove to South Carolina last week in the urbane company of Chief Inspector Gamache of the  Sûreté du Québec. My trip to Collection Development Mini-Conference in Columbia was the perfect opportunity to listen to the latest unfortunate incident in Three Pines, Québec, where murder seems to be a cottage industry.

A Trick of the Light is the most recent book in Louise Penny’s series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. For some reason, an awful lot of murders seem to occur in the rather small village of Three Pines, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. So many murders that Gamache and his team have become friends with some of the local residents–even the ones they’ve investigated as suspects.

The “trick of the light” referred to in the title refers to a painting. One of the Three Pines residents, Clara Morrow, is an artist. So is her husband Peter. But it is Clara who has been “discovered” after working in obscurity for almost 30 years. Her one-woman show at the famed Musée in Montreal is a rousing success. But the after-party at her home in Three Pines is ruined by a dead body in the garden. Even worse, the corpse belongs to an old friend turned enemy of Clara’s from childhood.

And the corpse was everyone’s enemy. The dead woman was an art critic. A particularly venomous one. And she was especially good at being venomous–a deadly combination for any budding artist’s career. There was no difficulty in figuring out who wanted to kill the woman. Everyone at the party had a motive. Including the caterers.

Escape Rating: A+ It was an 8 hour trip and an 11 hour book. I kept finding excuses to finish listening to the book. The central mystery is all about the art world, and I did get fooled, so points for that. And, and, and, there is a whole lot of neat, weird, sad and truly angst-ridden stuff going on with the continuing characters and I want to know where that is leading now. Now and not next year, dammit, or whenever the next book will be. I’m really worried about Jean-Guy. And if you’ve read the series, you know exactly what I mean.

In other news, Bury Your Dead, the previous book in the series, was recognized this past weekend with some more well-deserved awards. Mystery Readers International awarded Bury Your Dead their Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel for 2010. And, at Bouchercon 2011, the World Mystery Convention in St. Louis on September 17, Bury Your Dead also won the Anthony Award for Best Novel. In 2010, the previous Inspector Gamache book, The Brutal Telling, won the award.

Also, again, thank you to the person on the Letters of Mary group (Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell) for recommending this series. Which only emphasizes the importance of recommending books to people. I’d never have found the Chief Inspector but for her.

Spoiled but not rotten

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | reading

When I think of “spoilers” I hear the word spoken in River Song’s particular sing-song, usually accompanied by the endearment, “Sweetie”, and inevitably followed by the opening of her Tardis-blue diary.

The Doctor and River Song are living their relationship out of sync with time relative to each other. The first time the Doctor meets River, she has known him all of her life but he’s never met her before. Every time they meet after that, each of them remembers different pieces of their relationship, but on the whole, at least so far, what she remember is his future, and what he remembers is her future — and he knows that her future is going to end badly. His is going to contain an unbearable amount of pain. But then, so does his past. However, there’s the inevitable time paradox involved. His future is her past, so what has happened must happen. Even though River knows it will bring him agony, she must let it happen–she can’t spoil it. The actual fate of the universe is at stake. “No spoilers,” are allowed.

But we regular humans seem to like spoilers. Or we do according to an article that appeared earlier this month in Wired that immediately went viral. The research indicates that spoiling the ending of the book or the big surprise finale of a TV show helps most people enjoy the story.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? How many readers thumb to the end to find out what happens? Honestly? I know I do. Not at first, because the ending wouldn’t make sense. But after a third or maybe halfway, then I’m interested in seeing if I’ve figured things out. I’m curious if I’ve guessed “whodunnit”. Or if the evil villain I thought it was really is the actual “big bad”, because sometimes the “man behind the curtain” conceals yet another “man behind another curtain”. Of course, sometimes that “man” is a “woman” or a vampire, or a dragon. To each genre their own.

Even when I find out the ending, I still don’t know how the author gets there. The journey is always entertaining, even when I am certain of the destination. And when I have guessed wrong, then I really, really want to know how the author fooled me.

If we humans didn’t enjoy predictability in our fiction, we wouldn’t re-read the same books over and over, which we do. We also wouldn’t re-make the same story in different settings. West Side Story is still Romeo and Juliet. It was a good story both times, but it was the same story, dressed up in different clothes. Everyone knew how it ended.

The thing about thumbing to the end is something that is different with ebooks and digital media. I wonder what effect it will have?

Listening to an audiobook, it’s just difficult to zip to the end and then zip back to where you were. This is particularly true since people often listen to audio because their hands are otherwise occupied with something important, like driving. The medium just doesn’t lend itself to the idea of the casual flip to the back of the book and then flop back to where you were before.  Mysteries are particularly popular in audiobooks, and this maybe the reason. It’s just plain hard to find out if “the butler did it” until the end, even if you really, really want to.

With ebooks its a lot easier. I can bookmark the page I’m on, go to the end, and then go back to my bookmark. It’s possible. It’s even easy. I’m realizing that I just don’t do it, and I don’t know why. New medium, new method.

June is Audiobook Month

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audiobooks

The Audio Publishers Association promotes June as Audiobook Month. Last week, when we had to drive up in separate cars, I couldn’t even think about the drive without planning for an audiobook. I never drive long distance without one. The question was, which one?

I was in the middle of a mystery, A Test of Wills by Charles Todd. It’s the first book in his/her/their Inspector Ian Rutledge series. (Charles Todd is a pseudonym for a mother-and-son writing team) There was no question that I was going to either finish the CDs before I left Florida, or I was going to copy the thing to my iPod and finish on the road. I finished on the road.

By the time I decided to return everything to the library, I only had 2 discs left, so I needed a second book for the 6-hour trip. I chose An Impartial Witness, the second book in Todd’s Bess Rutledge series as my next selection, and purchased it from Audible.com. I had already read A Duty to the Dead, the first book in the series, and found it excellent, so I was looking forward to continuing Bess’ story.

Both books were appropriate choices for the Memorial Day weekend, as well as just plain good books. The Todds series are historical mysteries, focusing on the World War I era in England. Bess Rutledge serves as a nurse or, as they were called in England during that period, a nursing sister, with the British Army. Her father is a retired Colonel still doing classified work for the military, and Bess and her mother have “followed the drum”, going with her father to his various postings around the British Raj. From her travels and her own profession, she has acquired a much broader and less prejudiced viewpoint than would be typical of her race and class at that time. Her nursing experience, and the disruption brought about by the Great War, cause her to get involved with people and circumstances she might not otherwise, and bring her into contact with potential crimes, as well as potential spying and put her life in danger at home as well as from bombing near the front.

Inspector Ian Rutledge survived his war, just barely. Rutledge is the victim of shell-shock, what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He was an officer during World War I, but before the war, he was a police inspector, solving homicides. He has returned to Scotland Yard in the hope that returning to his old job will help keep the quite literal voices in his head from hounding him into bedlam. He is uncertain if he retains enough of his old skills to perform his old job, and he is handed a case deliberately designed to trip him up. But coming face to face with his own demons turns out to be just the boost he needs.

So, on Memorial Day I listened to mysteries during wartime. I admit, I didn’t see the symmetry until afterwards. I was looking for compelling stories, and I found them.

Read or listen?

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

The name of the wind is not “Mariah”, just in case anyone still remembers that very old song.  A friend quipped that to me when I said I was listening to Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind a couple of weeks ago.  Name of the Wind Cover

Yes, I know, I should have read it when it first came out.  But that was 4 years ago!  See, I was patient and now I don’t have to wait for the sequel, since it’s finally out.  But dammit, he committed trilogy!  Who knows how long it will be until book 3?

And I’m not patient.  I’ve been listening to Name of the Wind.  It’s marvelous.  This is a great fantasy.  It’s storytelling.  Kvothe is telling his story to the Chronicler, and he emphasizes that he didn’t do things the way that he would have if he’d known it was a story, because he was living it.  It’s beau-ti-ful.

There is a symmetry in my listening to the audio and the fact that in the story, Kvothe is actually telling the story.  It’s as though he is telling me the story.  But, but, but, it is taking him forever and ever to get on with it.

Wise Mans Fear CoverListening to a book, especially a 667 page book (yes, I have a print copy too, it’s an old Advance Reading Copy, I kept it) takes a long time.  28 hours to be precise.  I’m halfway done.  I could finish the book, if I read it, tomorrow sometime, or maybe Thursday at the latest.  And I could thumb to the end, if I wanted to see how stuff turned out.  Then I could start book 2 (Wise Man’s Fear) a LOT sooner.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.