Verre

Significant text, but challenging narration

Revisado: 03-31-24

There isn't much Shin Buddhist content available on Audible yet—I would love to see something more historical, like a biography of Shinran. This is a competent outline of a very modern, twentieth-century interpretation of Shin beliefs, and dating back a half-century makes the text historically significant in its own right, but the narration was not well-suited to the text.

The narrator had a very high, nasal voice with a strong American accent, and an almost sing-song way of going through some parts of the text that implied he was reading mechanically and not with deep understanding. More than anything it sounded like a high school student doing a recitation in class. Meanwhile, I kept trying to imagine the voice of the actual writer, who I imagined as an elderly Japanese-American priest.

I looked up the author, Gyodo Haguri, and it turns out he was involved in the founding of the Jodo Shinshu temple in Berkeley in 1911! I've been to services at the modern incarnation of that temple, so that was a fun historical link to discover. As a text connected with the development of the BCA and its take on Shin teachings, I found this a worthwhile listen, but I wish it were narrated by someone with better voice training.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Well worth reading

Revisado: 03-31-23

Through years of lucid dream practice and deep reflection on the evasive quality of the subject/object boundary, the nature of perception, and how a shared dream must necessarily differ from a solo one, I eventually became—almost accidentally—an intuitive idealist. However, I don't have much patience for woo-woo or fuzzy thinking (those are technical terms, right?) so I was pleased to find a book that articulated arguments for idealism in a very straightforward and down-to-earth way.

The book is at its best when it points out how idealism is actually a more parsimonious and rigorous explanation than materialism to explain the nature of our observations and experiences. There were certain lines of argument I wasn't sold on, especially when the word "real" sometimes came into play in what seemed like an uncritical way (though probably the point was to contrast what is understood to be "real" under idealism compared to materialism). For my part, I tend to find the term "real" a deeply problematic term in any system of thought. It also turns out that "whirlpool" is one of those words that starts to sound absurd when you hear it too many times in close succession! But these are very minor quibbles, and I completely understand the necessity for analogy and metaphor when discussing something that ordinary language is not well suited for.

On the whole, I think the book makes a lot of great points in support of an idealist outlook, and it does so with admirable concision. The narration was very sober, well-paced, and clear, which was ideal (no pun intended!) for this subject matter.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Slow and perplexing

Revisado: 03-31-23

George Guidall is one of my favorite narrators, and in general I love nineteenth-century novels, but I found this one a real slog. I found the first third of the book incredibly tedious, because it did little but elaborate with inexhaustible detail the relationship between two characters that I found impossible to take an interest in.

By the second third of the book, I had noticed that the characters kept behaving in ways that I couldn't understand the reasons for. It gradually dawned on me that amid the endless superficially banal conversations, people were subtly making insinuations about unspeakable things—but so very subtly, and so heavily couched in the social conventions of nineteenth-century Russian cultural innuendo, that I often couldn't tell what they were intending to imply.

Luckily lot of the things going on behind the scenes became more clear by the last third of the book, which was certainly the most enjoyable from a plot perspective, but unfortunately became very perplexing in another way. A great number of characters were active by this point, and as if it weren't hard enough to keep them straight in the first place, many of them were being alternately referred to by two completely different names, even in the course of the very same passage. (I'm guessing one was their first name and patronymic, and the other their formal surname.) Because of this seemingly arbitrary reduplication of names, I had devil of a time (pun intended) just trying to keep track of who was saying or doing what at any given moment. I think the names would have been a lot easier to manage in a print book, where you could see how they were spelled, and take a little more time to keep track of who's who. However, I also know for a fact that I would never have been able to slog through a print version of this book, so I'm very grateful for the audiobook that I could at least power through and be done with.

Maybe I'm just not the best audience for this type of novel. Years ago I read Bulgakov's /The Master and Margarita/ and loved it, and I guess it gave me the unrealistic expectation that Russian novels with eerie titles like "Dead Souls" and "Devils" would incorporate intriguing supernatural elements like that one did, and so I keep ending up disappointed on that score.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Astonishingly eloquent!

Revisado: 03-31-23

I thought this would be a fun sea yarn, and it was definitely that, but I was not prepared for the astonishing eloquence of the writing. In the descriptive passages, Conrad's prose swells with an almost rhythmic poetical cadence that makes it deeply satisfying. But there is nothing pretentious or abstract about the story: the characters are all vividly portrayed, their interactions lively and often amusing. The captain comes across as a wonderfully stolid, literal sort of fellow, like Drax the Destroyer from Guardians of the Galaxy (to draw an analogy from a somewhat different genre).

One thing that makes an enjoyable story even better is good narration, and Roger Allam gives a top-notch performance!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Lost patience and returned it

Revisado: 03-23-23

Last year I read /The Great Mortality/, about the Black Plague, and loved it, so I thought I would enjoy this too. The first hour didn't talk much about influenza, just about the history of medicine in general, but I went along with it, waiting for the author to zero in on the topic. It got annoying when the second and third hours provided even less information about influenza: instead it was a hagiography of some guy being lauded as a "genius" in the most fervid tones, with far too much information about his personal life. I'm not a fan of that kind of stanning at the best of times, much less when it seems barely germane to the topic I was hoping to read about, and goes on for way too long. The fourth hour was elaborating on the development of medical school education in the US, and how remedies were developed for all kinds of infectious diseases that were not, alas, influenza.

If I wanted to read a general history of medicine in the US, I would have chosen a volume with a very different title. Presumably this book will get around to discussing influenza at some point, but I'm 3 hours and 40 minutes in, and up to this point the virus has barely been mentioned in passing. I just noticed that the return window is still open and after careful consideration, decided to return it (which is why I'm writing a review without having finished the book). Maybe it gets really good at some point, but how much tangential material do we have to wade through before we get to the part that's actually about influenza?

I might have pushed through if I liked the narrator's voice better, but his accent and intonations are not to my taste. And then in one of the other reviews I read that the last hour and a half of the book are also basically a biography of some other tangential person. I enjoyed the /The Great Mortality/ because it was focused on the fascinating details of the disease itself, to the extent that "Yersinia pestis" is now a part of my vocabulary. 220 minutes into this book, and I have not yet learned a single new thing about influenza. So... I guess I'll recycle my credit for something else.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Brilliant narration brings it to life!

Revisado: 07-20-22

I first read this book many years ago and found it a surprisingly lively and entertaining text even in print, but now as I listen to this audiobook version, I realize that my internal narrative voice never did it justice. I can't imagine a better narrator for Herodotus than David Timson! His voice is so brimming with cheerful wit and wry enthusiasm that I find myself fantasizing that I'm in a tavern listening to Herodotus himself, buying him drink after drink to encourage him to keep talking. One anecdote barely concludes before it reminds him of something else, and he goes off on another delightful tangent, sprinkling them here and there with assurances that he acquired this information firsthand from his travels, even though half of what he says is downright unbelievable, and the other half sounds far too interesting to be more than half true!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Exceptional narration, gruesome malady

Revisado: 05-01-22

The text was informative. I learned so much. "Yersinia pestis" is now a part of my everyday vocabulary. But what really made the audio version of this work was, omg, the narration. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and narration really makes it or breaks it for me. This narrator has one of the best voices I've ever heard. But... the text is so... so disturbingly gruesome at times, and yet the voice the narrator was so... so appealingly sultry that... I mean, there were moments when the text was describing some of the most disgusting descriptions of disease and death that I've ever heard into print, and yet the narrator made it sound... wow.

Okay, so if you're at least 10% goth you'll be super into this. And even if you aren't, you'll learn so very much!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

So weird and... weird

Revisado: 05-01-22

It's a weird book. So weird! I can kind of respect it for that. And I feel sorry that Melville didn't achieve more commercial success in life, but one can see why. He's no Wilkie Collins. I used to make fun of "the great Wilkie Collins," until I finally got around to listening to "The Woman in White" (1859), which, yes, probably has nothing whatsoever to do with Whistler's paintings, but was a fun gripping twisty drama, like a modern HBO series: popular, fun, fashionable.

And "Moby Dick"? Well, it was worth listening to, definitely, if only to see how much one could stretch the structure of a novel, even in the middle of the nineteenth century when they had pretty much gotten the formula down pat. I mean, it's *weird*, and weird is good, right? It's kind of like Don Quixote in that respect. The fact that the literal narrative, i.e., the stuff that actually happens, could be boiled down to a 13-page short story, but instead occupies a 24-hour novel... that's good, right? It means the writer had a lot of ideas. And boy, did he! I ended up having to google several different kinds of whales, so that was useful information. And from googling I learned that apparently there was a chapter on whale... uh... "cassocks"... so heavily stylized that I, like the English censors, seem to have completely missed the point. But golly, I sure learned a lot about how whales smell. They smell good, I guess? Not just the ambergris, but the actual, uh... "spermiceti"? (And the five-letter abbreviation of that word is repeated enough in these pages to make one never want to hear it again.)

I'm not dissing this. It's a brilliant book, right? It's a *weird* book, and that's probably better than even the most perfect, mechanically tuned plot (sorry, Wilkie!) And if Ahab is as emo as any incel of today, well, it just goes to show that archetypes are enduring. By golly, is Ahab emo. Just, like, get over yourself, broh. But he doesn't, instead he just frets and broods, and (spoiler alert) consequences ensue. So at least the ending made sense. (Ahab is also bad at interpreting really obvious prophecies.)

But the narration of this audiobook was *really* good. Ishmael had a tendency to pontificate, which was explained by the fact that he was a sort of schoolmaster on holiday, and as annoying as he was at times, I felt like the narrator did him justice. And in relation to all the other characters, the narrator really knocked it out of the park. Every character had his own distinct voice, perfectly attuned to his character. ("His" because there were, like, literally no women, except an oblique reference to a tavernkeeper's sister early on and a few female whales at one point in the middle.) The narration was not just good, it was brilliant. Emo Ahab was brilliant. Stoic Starbuck was brilliant. Sarcastic Stubb, surly Flask... every one was given a distinctive and memorable personality through the voice. I compared a lot of Audible samples before choosing this version of the novel, and I have no doubt that it was the best choice.

So... it's a weird but important story (and heartbreaking when even the narrator suggests that hunting is unlikely to diminish the whale population, unlike the doomed bison), and extremely well-narrated, and extremely odd and emo and highfalutin in its references, but still well worth the listen. Go for it.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Brilliant reading of the Bills of Mortality

Revisado: 05-01-22

The narration is fantastic. The story is... well, if the text were literally historical and documentary, one could forgive it being so highly repetitive (for which, by the end, the author repetitively apologizes) and full of tedious lists of actuarial statistics. Get used to hearing recitations of the Bills of Mortality, which are interesting primarily because one begins to wonder: what exactly is the fatal quality of "Teeth"?

This is a work of fiction pretending to be a documentary, but adding no real twist to the topic. Maybe I'm spoiled by fictional filmed documentaries along the lines of "Documentary Now!" (2015-present). All that fiction achieves in the present case is to make you doubt the veracity of the supposedly historical statistics. Did Defoe rely on real historic documentation? That would at least be something. But if so, why cast it as a work of fiction? It's not exactly Borges.

Still, in the interests of completion, the audiobook actually made it possible to get through this slog, which never would have happened had I relied on the written text. And there were a few moments of grim clarity, where the description of people's carelessness in the face of infection, especially after the first wave had just barely retreated, were strikingly relevant to contemporary circumstances.

With such good narration, I don't hesitate to recommend this, if you're a history buff. But is it history? The degree of research it would take to draw the line between which details are historical and which are fictional would take an academic career to unravel. On the bright side, I see that a fourth season of "Documentary Now!" is slated to be released this year...

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Radio plays are back!

Revisado: 03-31-22

I find it both poignant and hilarious that radio theatre, an early twentieth-century art form, was killed off by further developments in technology, but still further developments have essentially revived it a century later (minus the radio, of course).

I always wondered how people could stand to listen to a play acted out with no imagery, but now I know! The sound design is so well done that I didn't even miss the visuals, though it was cool to come to this page on Audible and see actual pictures of the main cast members, and realize that they all look as well as sound perfect for their parts.

The story was gripping and fun, and left room for a sequel, so I hope it is coming. My only tiny quibble (too minor to detract from my rating) is that the credits at the end were a full half-hour long, which formed a pretty big chunk of the total five-hour run time. For some peculiar reason they recited the full cast and crew for each chapter individually, instead of just combining them into one list, even though it was almost exactly the same names being repeated over and over again. Of course it was easy enough to fast-forward through so I could get to the end, but it was a little disappointing after all that extra run time had led me to expect another whole chapter of story, or at least a post-credit scene like they do in the movies!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña