speedreader

Awesome book, meh narration

Revisado: 12-28-24

If you are interested in the cross-section between postmodernism and neoliberalism, this is the book for you. The narrator … however … is rushed and robotic, and kind of sounds to me like what an audiobook narrated by someone who is illiterate would sound like. It’s as though he doesn’t understand the words, he’s just plowing through them. Doesn’t pause in between chapter breaks, and doesn’t change his tone of voice at all, when he’s reading quotations just for starters. Really quite an uninspired and irritating narrator. Overall though this title is definitely worth a listen, it’s an amazing topic, expertly and creatively rendered.

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Very Underwhelming

Revisado: 03-26-24

I really try to avoid writing negative reviews of books, but this one stood out as a completely forgettable work that the author misconstrued in her many interviews. This is mostly a tepid, middlingly written memoir of the author’s adventures (if you can call them that) as a reporter in Silicon Valley. It is not really a burn book that reveals interesting things about tech luminaries and lunatics. The scores that the author settles are pretty lame, and her stories about Musk et al. are mostly uninteresting and self-absorbed. There is no interesting analysis of Silicon Valley, no philosophical overview of “this moment,” no broad ethic to guide our understanding of what’s happening now in technology. Just the author blabbering on and on about people she likes or doesn’t like.

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Greatest American novel of the 20th century

Revisado: 12-31-23

Absolutely astonishing. Just finished it. No words. Elegant, gentle, profound, moving, human, spiritual, and, even a little funny. Masterpiece.

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Tragically bad narration

Revisado: 05-17-23

I have been holding off writing this review because I do not want to diss what is seemingly such a magnificent work just because of the terrible narration, but the fact remains that the author has ruined this audiobook with her narration. She has an almost childlike voice, and she overperforms certain sentences and paragraphs to cringeworthy effect. She reads too fast, with too much corny or melodramatic emotion. It’s embarrassing and annoying. I keep trying and trying to listen to this book, but listening to it is like kissing a bad kisser. There’s just no way to make it work.

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Don’t. Do. Voices. When you narrate an audiobook!

Revisado: 05-06-23

A classic sci-fi novel that holds up over time. However somebody needs to tell this audiobook narrator that the material can stand on its own, and every time he does a voice for a character it literally makes the hair on one’s (my) neck stand up straight in horror. I was constantly taken out of the story by the fact that the narrator is being unintentionally comical as he slips into each new character with ridiculous relish. To be honest, it sounds like he was having way more fun than the listener who’s gotta to listen to this.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 11-22-22

Lots of insights and ideas that are limited to the author’s personal experience, whimsical personal research, and the setting where he lives, Greece. You get the feeling that he just took the stuff around him, did a little research, and tried to make a book around it. Believe me, I have the greatest admiration for this approach. It can produce amazingly sharp and personal works. But it comes across as tendentious and amateurish here, as though a brilliant artist, which Bridle apparently is, decided to try his hand at lecturing us all about the environment and technology and nature and neoliberalism etc. You get the feeling that you’re being talked at, not to. Or that you’re reading a very detailed and intellectualized version of somebody’s meandering journal. Normally I would never leave a review like this, because it’s catty and I don’t like to attack an author’s genuine efforts. But I see that this book and this audiobook are making a lot of important lists, and I feel like I should offer a counter viewpoint, because I spent a lot of money on this book and it wasn’t worth it for me.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas