I love me some Veronica Mars, it was one of the few non-sci-fi shows I watched in real time. Kristen Bell and her friends just work for me. Kristin Bell narrates the audiobook and does an amazing job, I felt like I could hear the actors from the show laughing about her impersonations of them. She really nails some of them and gets close enough with the others that it made the story even better. ...
Changing pace yet again I decided to binge on some Cory Doctorow goodness. If you don’t know who he is check out Cory’s Wikipeida entry, he is an interesting character. His politics are about as far from mine as they could be, but he is a really great storyteller. You can download and read Cory’s books for free and even remix, mash-up, re-write, and mangle the contents to your hearts content following the Creative Commons Attrivutions-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. You can get his books at Craphound.com. ...
Freedom is book 2 in the Daemon series of novels. It continues right where Daemon left off, more of the same. I enjoyed Freedom, there are a lot of subplots in it that I really enjoyed, but it is not as good as Daemon and I found the end wanting. I would like more, I would like more of the subplots to be wrapped up. I just want more. ...
I don’t remember how this series by Daniel Suarez came to my attention. It could have been as simple as the title of the first book, “Daemon”, or my proclivity for techno-thrillers that get most of it right. I burnt myself out reading Jack Campbell space battles one after another for a couple of months and needed a break. Daemon is about as far away from The Lost Stars as I could get. ...
The Lost Fleet is a science fiction series written by John G. Hemry writing as Jack Campbell and consists of 6 novels centered around Captain “Black Jack” Geary and the Alliance Fleet. This is good old military science fiction space war stuff. I listened to these novels as audiobooks from Audible. Christian Rummel does a great job narrating all 6 of the novels and brings all of the characters to life. When adding up the playtime of all six novels you get 60 hours of space battles, political infighting, and military atmosphere. ...
Here is something new, an single audiobook with 2 performances. Not 2 narrators in the same recording, but 2 narrators with their own recording. Kinda cool. I bought the audiobook from Audible as a pre-order that came with the added benefit of giving me the Amber Benson recording of the book. I first listened to the Wil Wheaton recoding and really enjoyed it. Wil Wheaton has turned in some great performances as a narrator of audiobooks and this is no exception. ...
In Extinction Machine Jonathan Maberry has Joe Ledger and Echo Team delving into the mysteries of ancient alien artifacts. This is yet another, the fifth one in fact, exciting adventure of Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Science. I hope there a dozen more. I enjoyed Extinction Machine more than the last one, I find the subject more interesting and a little bit different than other books I have been reading lately. ...
Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger is back in action. I don’t want to say anything about what is going on in Assassin’s Code as it would give away the most interesting thing about it. Suffice to say that Joe and Echo team are faced with another challenge that threatens the world while more personal threats step out of the shadows. Ray Porter continues to do an amazing job narrating the Joe Ledger series and bringing all of the characters to life. ...
Listening to Ivanhoe caused me to read more Wikipedia articles than any other book or audiobook. I looked up info on the Normans, the Saxons, and a bunch of different royals. But the story never caught my attention. It was interesting from a fictional historical perspective, but the pacing and dialog never grabbed me… Until I realized the narrator is the same guy who reads the “Lies of Locke Lamora” series by Scott Lynch. Michael Page is a great narrator and for the rest of the book I pretended that it was the Gentlemen Bastards on another adventure instead of Ivanhoe. That worked until the Robin Hood story kicked in and shattered that illusion. ...
I am ready to be done with Titus and Gormenghast, the ride was fun but it went on for just a bit to long. I will have fond memories of the Gormenghast Trilogy but will probably never listen to or read them again. Titus Alone had a lot to like but I never got into it, I was ready for it to be over almost as soon as it began. ...