MT

Four stars, solidly above average.

Revisado: 01-17-24

Rather good. The story overall was carefully crafted, unsentimental, and enjoyable. I sort of twigged about the culprit early on, but not other parts (can’t say more without spoilers but it seemed *someone* had a disease, and someone had, but not the person I’d thought). so nearly half the revelations at the end were a shock. The book simply ends after the climax though, and the messy aftermath, the natural consequences of the action (which could continue in several quite different directions) remain a mystery. As a literary technique this is usually a cop-out; though present in a few of the great novels, this case is not entirely successful.

Uptalk in certain lines does my head in, similar to the absent ending in a prosaic detective novel. Particularly when the narrator did it for men’s declarative statements, it jolted me from the story a bit (why’s he sounding interrogative like?). Otherwise the narrator was quite capable.

Not an absolute marvel but certainly above average and worth a credit.

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Unequivocally superior to similar audiobooks

Revisado: 07-07-23

The economy and layout of this audiobook are really excellent; it proceeds through concepts in a bottom-up, meticulous way, and covers a lot of ground. Clarifying details are given at the right moments to forestall popular misconceptions. By listening carefully, a person with no background in chemistry might arrive at a creditable understanding of tricky concepts and modern developments in relatively little time. Very few people learn at speed however, which makes this higher-order concision typically suited to people in the field rather than novices.
It’s a slightly gruelling listen. Sauder has a clear and somewhat pleasant voice, and similar to the book itself the lectures are in a way perfectly precise. Unfortunately she’s a halting, unnatural reader so I found the audio a bit difficult to follow in places, and had to rewind often. By hiring an actor to narrate this audiobook would've gone over more smoothly, and the punters carrying on about Sauder's lack of charisma would perhaps be satisfied. Only more often than not actors become lost in highly technical texts, mispronouncing words and stressing the wrong parts of sentences because they've no idea what they're reading.
On balance, this is the best of its type. If you fancy a history lesson or a list of easily-digestible facts to impress your friends, find another audiobook. If you want a science lesson, a proper conceptual understanding, or are revising for a chemistry course, Sauder actually cuts through the meat of it.

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worthless tripe

Revisado: 05-30-23

—> This review will be mostly spoiler-free, although it makes a few vague allusions to eventualities which are I think predictable given the conservatively glacial plot development following the series’ initial success
People were so invested in this series, and I was as well, meaning it’s probably quite unpopular to say so, but the conclusion is about as lacklustre as the beginning was intriguing.

Considering 53 and 54 should according to all the rules of literature have been one book (because 90% of 54’s plot can be found in 53, but then they couldn’t have overcharged you twice, I suppose), the prose appears oddly rushed, dispatching the predictable scenario at speed which suggests the authors longed for the unwieldy beast to be put down at last. Here one finds none of the flashes of moral insight visible in the first twenty books or so, and glimmering feebly on occasion thereafter. Not only is 54’s emotional impact trite and insincere (& without a plot, the final emotional impact is what one paid for, in fact) but there’s no apparent upside… the children’s voices still sound about twelve, not sixteen or older; and far from being visionary, large portions of the war's aftermath are simply unbelievable—the animorphs encounter no suspicion from earth’s leaders, no snags distributing the morphing technology, whose power humans apparently don’t covet (David having been some sort of nasty aberration I suppose), and apart from one 'poaching' incident (given a brief mention, not explored), earth’s people seem contented to share their planet with multiple alien species. How can longstanding deference to dark plausibility have deserted the authors at this critical moment? The story’s conclusion is facile; it has no substance, merely pandering to the desire for a happy & ~dynamic ending. A pile of plotless rubbish with a sickening sugary odour. When the filler books begin to make you yawn and sleep, SAVE YOUR MONEY AND READ A SUMMARY OF THE CONCLUSION ONLINE. There is no redemption. There is no end to characters being 'in character' —which is to say, before mid-series one can anticipate each character’s mawkish lines, and instead of blurring or changing like natural humans each character becomes more doggedly entrenched in the particular dilemma designated 30+ books ago, which is when the fount of new material ran dry, full stop; and even such a cleverly-contrived arrangement can after long use grow stale. If a character were to snuff it it would of course be the one handled so ineptly by ghostwriters as to be reduced to a grotesque caricature, a figure of fun. The disabled children do perish and all, though the author showed her guilt at the use to which they were destined to be put in the initial stages of recruitment, so this was not shocking.

Animorphs was after a conceptual tour de force designed in the end for emotional toddlers. A sensible reader should feel insulted; in fact my twelve-year-old self had the wisdom to quit after a few dozen, only my ageing, sentimental mind supposed I ought to give them another go… learn from my mistakes, please. Do not buy

This and other titles are probably available at your local library.

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not worth your while

Revisado: 05-09-23

First of all, this type of topical book does not work as an audiobook and no formatting modifications have been made. The way the information here is presented, it would make sense visually, but compressed to a single line of audio, it’s rendered nearly incomprehensible.

Obviously the original text was filled with diagrams and illustrations, but this hasn’t any sort of companion PDF…

A more general criticism, the title and presentation are a bit misleading, and the sorting of concepts is not well-done, so that 'big ideas simply explained' apparently means reading a timeline. As the content is historical rather than scientific, there’s nothing to explain. If you were hoping for a discussion on various physical systems, this gives both excessive historical information and a disappointingly shallow meditation on concepts.
Take for example this excerpt: 'length and time are independent but the definition of metre is dependent on the definition of a second' — tantalising statement but clarified? Never. (Answer: light moves at a constant speed in a vacuum, so after fixing a fraction of a second as the metric, one can mathematically determine the length of the metre (distance light travelled at constant speed in fixed time). Would have taken them about 5 extra seconds to mention that.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

don't bother

Revisado: 05-09-23

Trendy and credulous, this book should not be recommended to any but the most diehard enthusiasts, as nearly any other audiobook would prove more engaging.

About a third of the book is dedicated to Nessie, although this section is interrupted by a long speech about jellyfish whose introduction I must have missed as its relevance to the topic was not clear. The writer argues that the creature of numerous reports (from Loch Ness and anywhere south of Inverness, all round the Caledonian canal) could be a sort of throwback or living fossil similar to the horseshoe crab—and people including me baulk at this suggestion because of the great difference in size (not to mention additional requirements for vertebrates). I know very little about the matter and I’m not a palaeontologist, yet the author’s treatment of this most obvious objection was disappointing—clearly he regards the size argument with disdain, but fails to explain why this criticism should be dismissed out of hand. After the section on Nessie, there’s a rather long section on the wodewose or wild man/hominid, the best of the three parts. A bit of doorstepping allowed for an interesting bit of insight into human nature, to wit, the prospect of other hominids so alarms British mountaineers that many become permanent city-dwellers whose accounts are coloured by emotion (the result being that Bigfoot has acquired a sort of permanent blurriness in record as well as memory). There follows a short bit on the faerie and Black Shuck (a sort of spectral dog whose legend has amplified the eeriness in other stories, e.g., /The Hound of the Baskervilles/). One might have expected more on these, though McGrath’s argument that 'rights for creatures not yet proven to exist' might encourage tourism—lol, one glimpses his peculiar ambition in here somewhere. To read about artefacts of British legend, these pages on Wikipedia are much longer, more informative, and less biased. The final third of the book is dedicated to non-native or invasive species which indisputably exist—beavers and the like, ants and budgies you know—bit of an anticlimax after the cryptid sections.

After every section one hears a discussion of 'beastly theories' preceded by precisely the same two-minute introduction, which sounds a lot less clever the fifth time over.

Some items were clearly omitted from the audio version, although the reasons are sort of understandable, particularly as this book is mostly personal anecdote and spectacular drivelling on

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not bad but mostly biographical

Revisado: 02-15-22

While Rousseau’s sordid personal life inevitably has some bearing on what he wrote and why, it would have been more interesting if the bulk of the audiobook had focused on his ideas and their historical applications.

The ear has trouble making sense of the collection of excerpts read in sequence near the end.

As regards the performance, only one criticism could be made: an occasional dramatic or comical drop in Whitfield's voice made it a bit difficult to make out what he was saying at times. I think there's some sort of technology which can fix this, but it hasn't been applied -- be prepared to fiddle with the volume.

Also, if time is of the essence as the title seems to indicate, a canny editor might consider omitting a few of Paul Strathern’s cheeky allusions to his own open-mindedness. At one point, Strathern appears to be saying, ‘I am throwing children under the bus in an attempt to (artificially?) include women in this discussion on human development.’ Does he suppose women lack awareness of historical (not to mention modern) prejudice, or is he only under the impression that women might mentally exclude themselves from humanity if the word ‘man’ be used? It seems a bit dodgy though, to make such a public effort at inclusivity only to collapse from the strain.

That said, I’m sure there are thousands of audiobooks which are simply unendurable. This one is concise and well-written, although I had hoped for a different focus.

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why continue listening to this series

Revisado: 08-22-21

the previous novel, "A Swiftly Tilting Planet", I found melodramatic and disjointed, and it contained a surprising amount of racism? (the 'noble savage' trope, creating an ~ideal beauty by writing a bunch of american indians with blue eyes, and polishing it off with some nice banal stereotypes about the irish--too questionable for my taste)

This novel works better as a story; the pacing is much improved, but even to someone who's studied the bible and is at least aware of the beliefs one must foster to support a literalist interpretation, some of the foundational ideas in this story are really wild. If the biblical patriarchs were said to live 700+ years, that doesn't make it a typical lifespan, nor does longevity necessarily imply protracted developmental stages (and if some lives were preternaturally long, well, early civilisations had a shortage of good leaders). Also, the 'ark' is not a boat, it's just a box -- it does not require any navigational ability since God saw to its safety and ordained its landing place. Another example, the 'ancestral language' is one thing, but to assume someone who has never spoken it can know it by instinct is to imply that language is inborn, and then forgotten, perhaps due to sin, and then overwritten by the languages of Babel --which in the story has the odd effect of sanctifying these so-called normal characters (who are a long time in recognising they've hopped the old tesseract into Genesis, into one of the most famous biblical stories). It's doubly-funny because L'Engle already developed the concept of kything which does not require language. How indulgent, to dwell on this blessed family that suffers only heroic and cosmic trials, but this book firmly implies that there's something in the Murray water and they really are better than the other sad mortals trudging about. What is Job's story, then?

One final complaint: she calls on an (arguably harmful) female trope to render a certain character and then calls her a sl**. I thought this book was intended for either children or young adults, but that's really shocking to hear full stop. I don't think I've ever read that word in any serious literature.

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as expected

Revisado: 04-05-21

I thought the voice actor was doing a terrific job with the various pronunciations until we reached a language I'm familiar with and the mistakes became confusing and intolerable. I had to skip forward, haha. At least he’s confident. He could probably read anything in English masterfully, but there are too many disparate languages for him here.

The overview moves quickly between topics but that was expected considering the amount of material one must cover; looks at early human civilisations aligned chronologically with one another even before they begin interacting, which is interesting. Historical details are recounted with an eye for irony. Good production

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abandon the phenomenal world for a moment

Revisado: 02-04-21

Excellent novel, and basically a perfect audiobook for two reasons: 1) The writing style is fast-paced, complex without becoming dense, so it lends itself to being read aloud. The narrator, Richard, illuminates the full and chilling conspiracy very slowly, expanding to trace the smaller fractals with an adroit sort of pacing. Highly detailed without cramming things in or dragging along. Certain authors (perhaps someone like Lovecraft, whom I personally dislike) write in a compressed and sort of clumsy way that would be nearly impossible to listen to in a long line; you need to look at the words in their neurotic jumble on the page and quite possibly skim large blocks while keeping semantic keys in the corner of your eye to decipher the attempted message buried in inorganic sentences. 2) Unless an author is terrible at reading aloud or has an exceptionally annoying voice, they’re probably the best ones to read their own work. I’ve listened to a number of audiobooks over the past couple of years and nearly all contain at least 5 glaring mispronunciations (and some actually contain dozens), and you can hardly fault the person reading it when they’ve another 20 hours to get through. With hopefully few exceptions, authors know the meanings of the words they use, perhaps their etymologies (and I have the feeling Tartt studied classics herself), which really helps prevent this species of er, amusing distraction from the text. Then personally, I don’t mind if a narrator reads in a flat monotone, but their going out of their way to try and liven things up with character voices and exaggerated tones as if every other word was italicized grates on one’s nerves, plus generating (heaven forbid) vocal artefacts (choking and swallowing audibly, even wheezing or squealing a bit). Tartt gives the type of stylized read that usually make me cringe and manages not to be obnoxious, her voice captivating, dispassionate, at times sarcastic or disdainful. Truly she should practice her art and not waste time with recordings; at the same time I’m planning to buy every audiobook she’s read.


Apart from being a superior novel in a lot of ways, albeit one that resists summarisation, the mechanics of this storytelling is simply brilliant, a diorama with component parts lit and examined before slowly panning out, arrangements careful yet inconspicuous until suddenly you see them with great clarity, the genre which so easily lends itself to moralising and sentimentality but Tartt resists all of these temptations in favour of letting one gaze at the rich tableau. And all of this is done with such a light touch; it's lovely. Tartt’s storytelling reminds me a bit of DeLillo, while her characters have a hint of Nabokov? in their mirages, some ugliness waiting in the wings... or perhaps Morrison for the complexity, atavistic cruelty, sudden lightness -- but Morrison’s characters are more heavily influenced by fate. I don’t really know how to put it, and it’s not fair to compare Tartt to others because for some values of mastery she certainly stands alone (I mean she’s taken a bunch of familiar allegories for use as reference but the end product is absolutely unique and seminal and has been quoted and picked from heavily to inspire later media even though I’d never heard her name until maybe 5 years back). _The Secret History_ is very Greek in the irony and tragedy of how events transpire after characters make what are often very stupid choices. But the ending captures some (90s? disillusionment, fractals, unreality) zeitgeist in clearest amber, which had the odd effect of replaying some half-remembered reels from my childhood on the quickly fading image. I wish I had some better way of putting it but it’s just incredibly well done.

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not above average

Revisado: 01-03-21

The woman who performed Mina’s parts was obviously trained in Shakespeare -- she speaks very clearly and projects her voice as if it must travel a tremendous distance without amplification, which isn’t suitable for an audiobook at all, and even at a reduced volume will give the listener a headache.

The man who attempted a Russian accent had no idea how to proceed, perhaps having never in his life heard a Russian speak English. YouTube exists.

There were a few mispronunciations here and there (usually done softly as though with regret... Instead I should say, for a hasty production, it’s lucky there weren’t more errors)

I think I’ll stop listening to these full-cast audio productions, since it’s impossible to preview all of the voices, and at least one is bound to grate on one’s nerves.

I don’t see the point in reviewing such an old novel (critical theories abound and I’ve neither the skill nor the inclination to add to them). Note that it’s sexist, implausible in parts, and dull in others (especially pastoral descriptions meant to contrast the horror), but it’s not worse than its contemporaries in any of these regards. Some better work can be found earlier in the 19th century, but /Dracula/ is visibly seminal to a number of modern horror archetypes. For fans of the genre it’s certainly worth a listen.

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