Justa Guy

Helped me better appreciate The Iliad

Revisado: 04-15-25

The lecturer, Dr Vandiver, (sp?) is brilliant. I’d never enjoyed or appreciated The Iliad even close to as much as The Odyssey, but she showed the deep currents and beauty here. Thank you.

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No Essay Titles

Revisado: 04-07-25

A wonderful resource made infinitely worse by there being no way to easily find which essay is which. If it’s been a while, you might get to listen to the first 15 seconds of 100 or more chapters just to find that essay on the Psalms.
Fix this, please.

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Please Re-Record This Book

Revisado: 02-14-24

Marred by mispronunciations: if the narrator gets “Catholicism” and “catechism” wrong, which are churchy but still standard English words, then I have zero faith that she’s getting Aramaic or Greek or Hebrew pronunciations right. She’s also clearly sightreading the text—and not taking in enough of the sentence at once—and so sometimes puts stress on the wrong word, especially in longer sentences. Maybe the narrator was under unreasonable deadlines or had poor direction, so two stars, given that I didn’t detect any lack of effort.

The book itself is Heiser in much shorter form than usual, for good and ill. He can’t fully flesh out arguments, but he also lays out things quickly. What could be a good intro to Dr Heiser’s work is weakened significantly by the narration. When someone tells you things you’ve never heard about the Bible, but gets basic pronunciations wrong, it’s tempting to dismiss them as not knowing what they’re talking about. That doesn’t do justice to Heiser.

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Wish de Hamel had narrated it all

Revisado: 12-05-23

Another wonderful book by de Hamel, best listened to and thumbed through simultaneously. But I miss the warmth and charm of his voice as soon as the introduction ended. (He also voices the epilogue.) The narrator was professional enough but sounded snobbish and clipped every phrase in a way strange to my ear. Your mileage may vary and I hope it does!

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Marvelous. Informative, passionate, funny.

Revisado: 07-01-23

Christopher de Hamel does his own narration, and is brilliant. His dry, humble sense of humor is a delight. I’m immediately looking for his next book.

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Sweet and filled with joy

Revisado: 04-06-23

A lovely discovery. Herriot is a delight. Never goes overboard on the gross side of the work, and his delicacy also encompasses his appreciation of his love interest in a way that seemed kind and good.
The narrator is quite good. He hits his marks convincingly on a number of accents and differentiates voices well. A few times, he gave minor characters the exact vocal expressions he gave a major character (Siegfried), which distracted—but was clearly just a bad day at the studio. Sometimes he’d get the accent, but numerous characters with that accent would sound exactly the same. This is, I admit, master class stuff, so I still give 5 stars as I hope he continues to mastery of his craft.

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Moving

Revisado: 03-13-23

This book moved me nearly to tears for men who have been dead more than a hundred years, and moved me to rage at those who wasted so much of Europe for nothing. I learned to appreciate Tolkien in new ways.
Generally, I’m leery of authors who read their own work. Rare indeed is one both an excellent writer and reader both. John Garth is an exception. Listen to the sample to see what I mean.

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Four stars might be unfair

Revisado: 02-22-23

It’s hard to disentangle one’s hopes for a famous work from the thing itself. This novel was very good. Not as good as Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was a different beast altogether. Worth the time to listen absolutely. Michael C. Hall was competent, but shows that acting one character and narrating many are separate talents, even when the many characters are all very obviously facets of Capote’s own quirky worldliness. Capote is fun to be around. Quick and intelligent, piercing and never surprised by the depths to which others fall, and only sometimes surprised by his own depth of feeling. I can see why he was a hit at cocktail parties. The book strikes me as too clever to be great. The work, I hope, of a young artist. Too performative, too taken with itself, and eager you be taken with it too. Droll. Best in short doses. A talent that’s great to meet at a party, but you don’t want to wake up to face it every day for thirty years.

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Fantastic performance. Brilliant writing. A few bad choices.

Revisado: 02-18-23

Flannery O’Connor writes with a knife. Her characters are deep, strange, quintessentially Southern, and troubling. A Christian, she writes about certain strains within Christianity with such acid contempt Richard Dawkins might tell her to go easy—but she manages to portray her religious weirdos with subtlety, clarity, and candor that feels true to the rich weirdness of human diversity.

I’ve read nothing else of her work, but will say that here, her racial attitudes do not seem particularly enlightened for her time. Nor does the usual richness of her characterization extend to the few and minor Black characters in this work. I’m sure others have more to say. It’s not a focus of this work, nor on every page, but if brief, casual depictions of racial bigotry bother you, you’ll be bothered.

There are some bad storytelling decisions. These were written long ago, to an audience that had different expectations, so I cut some slack for what today would be called flaws: her Point of View will go from third person limited to third person omniscient at times. She’ll head-hop within a scene. Then other times, she won’t. Then sometimes, she’ll tell a scene from one limited POV and later tell the same scene from a different character’s POV. Late in the book, she goes into detail about how a character appears… but there’s no one else around. To whom does he appear this way? Those are all distractions, but I’m not sure if they were more accepted at the time, so I can shrug them off.

There is a scene that is so stupid and bad it makes me want to hold a seance to resurrect O’Connor’s editor, say, “Tell me, are you in editor hell for letting your writer make a choice this bad?” It feels as if some worse writer snatched the manuscript and threw in a salacious bit out of nowhere, for no purpose except to outrage good sense and make sure O’Connor wouldn’t have a reputation as a great novelist but only short story writer. After numerous times of taking rides from strangers, late in the book, the kid takes a ride from a stranger. For the first time in the book, NOW she mentions that the great uncle always warned him not to take rides from strangers. A page later, he gets assaulted. This is not how foreshadowing works in a novel. You mention the advice the first time he takes a ride. Maybe the second time too, if you want to be obvious, but not the third time, when this happens. The scene adds nothing to the book. O’Connor doesn’t return to its meaning. It could have had thematic resonance to talk about parallel losses of innocence. It doesn’t. It could have been used for many purposes, if set up appropriately. It doesn’t. It’s bad art.

It’s also very fixable, if an editor had flagged it. Instead, it sticks out horribly. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Similarly, O’Connor makes a weird move where she reveals very early on that a minor character buries a major character. Another major character goes the whole book thinking that character hadn’t been buried—and it weighs on him. This construction is fine, but she does nothing with that tension of the reader knowing what the character doesn’t. Instead, it seems to have been almost accidental. Indeed, the plot would have been stronger if that revelation hadn’t come until the end. Again, a good editor would have helped immensely.

I’ll note that Mark Brumhall’s performance is wonderful. He’s one of the best two or three narrators I’ve heard out of several hundred audiobook recordings I’ve listened to. Great work.

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Awe inspiring to see such a great mind at work

Revisado: 01-27-23

This is my first exposure to Hannah Arendt. It won’t be my last. The way she takes apart complex questions and reveals the inner workings of them puts her among the first tier of logicians. Her ability to understand the limitations of others and fully put herself into the mindset of Eichmann puts her in the company of skilled novelists. Those gifts together? Amazing. Sharp mind and a sharp tongue, which clearly (from the introduction’s explanation) got her in a lot of trouble.
The narrator was amazing, too, using a consistent accent for Eichmann that helped me place when words were quotations when otherwise the heard text wouldn’t have made that clear. Brava.

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