Alex C.

Awesome

Revisado: 11-04-24

Just when you thought he couldn’t get better, Abercrombie outdoes himself. What a ride. Can’t wait to listen to the next one.

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A fast-paced history of the Mongols

Revisado: 04-15-19

While the listener may not like the narrator at first (I certainly did not), they will get used to him, and come to like him. His slow speech can be tiresome. I just plain didn't like his voice at first.

This was a pretty good history, moving from the rise of Ghengis Khan to the rule of his successors.

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A Complex Web of Characters and Plots

Revisado: 11-02-18

Overall: 26 awesome hours of storytelling. This is the first book in Steven Erikson's main series about the Malazan Empire and introduces you to a rich world filled with warring polities, powerful mages, crafty spies, god-like ascendants, and the gods themselves who scheme in the background.

The listening experience: This book is complicated. I went back after listening for ten hours and listened to it over again. But it's worth it. If you're looking for a book that you can listen to in the background while doing other stuff, this is not that book. But if you're looking to fully immerse yourself in a story, this is the book for you. The first time reader may need to refer to the Malazan wiki to look up characters and different key words. I would encourage the first time reader to embrace their confusion and just keep going. The author does not spoon feed background information to the reader, which may be a bit confusing at first. Fear not. All will be revealed. The reader will be very satisfied when they do come to understand what exactly is going on.

No spoilers but some summary of the plot: The story: The first ten hours of the book are basically an introduction, setting everything in motion and sending characters on their way to Darujistan, the city the rest of the book is centered on. The Malazan empire has been ruled by Empress Laseen, a powerful mage, for nine years. The previous emperor died under mysterious circumstances. She has set her eyes on the continent of Genabackis, and now her armies besiege the free city of Pale, defended by a demi-god named Anamanda Rake.

There are two main sets of characters, the Bridgeburners of the Malazan army and the regulars at the Phoenix inn, whose separate plot threads are interwoven and eventually intersect.

The narration: really good. One problem is that the story switches from character to character within chapters, and sometimes their voices are done in a similar enough way that the reader may be confused. What now? Who is this? Besides that the narrator does a really good job in portraying a very wide cast of characters.

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Returned book after listening for 5 minutes

Revisado: 09-12-18

I’m sure this book is great, but I hate this narrator. His voice is just so annoying. I’ve listened to other books narrated by him. I just don’t want to listen to his voice for over 10 hours.

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Meh

Revisado: 09-09-18

This is a novel trying to do two different things: capture the spirit of Appalachia and tell a ghoulish murder story. I think the book makes a good attempt at the first, especially in the opening scenes, but goes way over the top in the telling of the ghoulish murder story.

Whereas the novel tries to ground itself in the gritty reality of the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina, complete with a scene in a Walmart where a character wanders around the aisles drinking beer, the plot lacks believability.

I was actually very excited to read this book, but ultimately disappointed in the storytelling. The story really drags in the middle and towards the end.

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Read this book

Revisado: 08-14-18

I remember taking 19th century American literature in college. We read Thoreau, some Emerson, and Louisa May Allcott’s Little Women. We also read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Prominently missing from this syllabus was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

I listened to the audiobook, which was performed by Nick Offerman. Offerman’s rendition of Huckleberry Finn’s gravely voice was one of my favorite parts of the audiobook.

While the book is a little slow to start, following the everyday childhood antics of Tom Sawyer—an orphan who lives with his aunt—it quickly escalates as Tom Sawyer’s fantastic inner life merges with reality when he and his friend become witnesses to a fiendish crime.

This novel deserves credit as one of the founding pillars of American literature. While Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an ambitious book that follows many different characters, it is mainly driven by its moralizing narrator. Not so with Tom Sawyer. While the narrator may make a quip or two, the story tries to imagine the inner life of a preteen in an America which is adolescent itself, unscarred by the civil war. Tom Sawyer is innocent and naive about many things, but understands some things very well.

This book does not moralize, but tries to paint an accurate picture of the antebellum south. Often verging on hilarity, this book, especially the audiobook, is in no way outdated or overrated.

The ending hints that Sawyer will go on to a military school, which seems good, but is heartbreaking when one understands that this bright young man will probably become an officer for the confederacy, dying for a cause that he does not believe in.

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If you like fantasy, you’ll love this book

Revisado: 08-10-18

Pretty good. Solid four stars. If you like fantasy you will definitely like this book.

It is probably very easy to be accused of being derivative when writing fantasy. You could say this is sort of derived from Harry Potter because it follows a boy as he goes through a Hogwarts-style military academy to learn special skills. But I think that would not be doing this book justice.

The author imagines a world with complex political relationships between kingdoms locked in a Cold War. He imbues this works with magic and sets a boy, Aidan, into that world.

This is definitely not a children’s book.

The breadth and scale of this book is impressive. There were moments where the book dragged a bit but the book quickly picked back up.

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Hard to get through, but worth it

Revisado: 08-06-18

I listened to the book on tape. Honestly, this book was meant to be read out loud, and it would be pretty irritating to read it on paper. Except for intuitive guesses, you wouldn’t know who was saying what until you get to the end of each passage of speech.

This story would have been better told if it was narrated in a more conventional way. But there is nothing conventional about this book.

I thought the interspersed excerpts from primary source documents was an interesting but unnecessary decision. Maybe one or two to set off each chapter, but whole chapters of these things?

They interrupt the narrative flow and were pretty irritating at first. Because I was listening to the book, I thought there were a whole family of people named “Offset” who had all apparently kept diaries etc and worked in the Lincoln household. I knew this couldn’t be the case so I looked at an actual copy of the book and discovered it was “Opp Cit.” I was hearing, a citation device.

Each star I give to this book is for creativity and experimentation. I really liked the story as a whole, but it wasn’t easy to get through. This would have been a five star book if Saunders had made a couple concessions to his audience.

In the book on tape specifically, Nick Offerman and David Sedaris do a great job of performing the parts of the two main ghosts.

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Some Good Points. Also some bad ones.

Revisado: 08-01-18

Listened to the book on tape narrated by Goldberg himself. Some good thoughts in here but also some bad ones. His discussion of tribalism in America makes a lot of sense, but I disagree with him on his argument of “the miracle” of western capitalism.

Some specific points that I take issue with:

He discredits Marx’s theory that capitalism was born out of the Atlantic slave trade. Marx argues that cheap cotton was essential to the textile industry in Britain, which itself formed the heart of industry in Britain in the 19th century. Goldberg argues that because cotton prices did not rise after the American Civil War, slavery was not actually essential to the textile industry.

Cotton prices may not have risen after slavery was abolished precisely because material conditions in the South changed very little after the civil war. Many former slaves became share croppers, working the same land they had worked before, but now paying rents to their former masters. Indeed, it would be surprising if, under this system, cotton prices did go up.

Slavery was in fact the bedrock of capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Goldberg does not consider other commodities that relied on slave labor, like sugar and tobacco, and also ignores the fact that forced labor continues to be used today in the cultivation of everything from coffee to cocoa.

This is one example of Goldberg cherry picking statistics that the reader should be aware of.

Goldberg accuses Marx of antisemitism, saying that his criticism of capital was a rehashing of an old anti-Semitic trope against usury. This is baffling when one considers that Marx himself was Jewish.

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You Will Laugh Every Thirty Seconds

Revisado: 07-29-18

As Sedaris tells us in one of his stories, he expects the reader to laugh every thirty seconds or so. You will.

I had not read any of this author's stuff before, but I'm planning on reading everything else by him soon.

This extremely humorous and emotional set of stories transcends any one genre.

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