Jacob Rougeau

Engaging from start to finish

Revisado: 05-06-23

I love playing RPGs and dungeon crawlers. I love raunchy humor. And I love audiobooks. Dungeon Crawler Carl puts all three together in a way that kept me engaged and laughing from the beginning all the way to the end. I’m going to stop typing now so I can go start on Book 2.

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Engaging from start to finish

Revisado: 05-06-23

I love playing RPGs and dungeon crawlers. I love raunchy humor. And I love audiobooks. Dungeon Crawler Carl puts all three together in a way that kept me engaged and laughing from the beginning all the way to the end. I’m going to stop typing now so I can go start on Book 2.

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Thorough but plagued by constant citing of sources

Revisado: 03-14-23

This book encompasses the life of Jesus from conception all the way through resurrection and focused on archaeological evidence associated with Jesus the person as well as the geography, cities, and buildings associated with him in the Bible. It used a wide range of sources and put them in context of local culture at the time. I felt it was thorough, but had two flaws.

The first challenge was the almost unbearable citing of sources. The narrator would say a few sentences then cite Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Josephus volumes and all the associated chapters and verses. It happened every 10 sentences or so. Many a time I almost quit the book. I would say 20% of the book’s content is citing sources. It would have far more efficient and less assaulting on the ears just to have a PDF with chapter and footnotes.

The second challenge, albeit not near as tough, was the author’s biases toward the divinity of Jesus. I’m a believer myself; however the biases clashed with the book’s core strength which was archaeological objectivity. The biases climaxed near the end when describing the resurrection.

Overall I am glad I got the book. It’s good but takes discipline to not gnash one’s teeth through all the constant citing of sources.

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Great story and fantastic narration

Revisado: 09-11-19

I began playing Magic the Gathering with the sets in 2020 Standard (Core 2020, War of the Spark, Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance) and picked up this book to give me more visibility of the lore the cards are based on. I wasn’t expecting to get a great story with absolutely fantastic narration in the process; but that’s exactly what I got. I recommend it!

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A book of inspiration, history, and culture

Revisado: 06-23-19

After listening to Ultramarathon Man, I was yearning for more from Dean Karnazes. After searching for his name in Audible, I found The Road to Sparta, which I thought would both add motivation to nurture my emerging running hobby and reinforce my well-seasoned love of history. It delivered. While Dean took his time getting to the race itself, I came to appreciate the reasons why, which were to share insights into both ancient and modern Greek culture, with the latter being described through detailed personal interactions with people both known and unknown. This helped me appreciate the race story even more. The history lessons interlaced through the narrative were obtained through his collaboration with scholars and experts on the subject and I found myself learning many interesting things about the Battle of Marathon that I didn’t know. With that said, I yearned for a bit more detail about the landmarks Dean and his ancient counterpart observed. I didn’t get a vivid picture of the sights and sounds of the established race path itself and what existed today that could be tied to ancient times. If you are looking for a book about how to train or run, this isn’t the book for you. But if you’re looking to be inspired by incredible accomplishments, learn about the true history of marathons, or just want an entertaining “binge-worthy” story, then you won’t be disappointed. Narration is well-done without distraction.

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Please see the PDF for my review of this book

Revisado: 06-02-19

“Please see the PDF for my review of this audiobook.” Now that would be awfully inconvenient wouldn’t it? And especially so for an audiobook eh? I shut it off and deleted it from my device after the first couple of hours because I couldn’t bear to hear “See the PDF” one more time. The author clearly has the expertise and background in the subject matter; but for me his expertise and message was lost in this audiobook format. Granted I recognize technical audiobooks sometimes need supplementary text. However if the audiobook has to instruct the user to refer to the text every 5 minutes, then it shouldn’t be an audiobook. Maybe this tapered off later in the book bit I can’t tell you how the rest of the book was.

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Good installment, but my least favorite

Revisado: 12-18-18

Soul of the Fire will keep me on the journey of exploring the world Goodkind has woven, but it is my least favorite book of the series thus far. In my opinion the story didn’t make much sense and lacked depth; the decisions the characters made were naive and seemingly out of character; an opportunity to provide substance to the Old World and the actions of its people was squandered; and the added visibility into the enigmatic magic structure of the world was spoiled by shallow rules and mechanics that seemed hastily contrived. The narration however was great with clear character distinction and effective and believable conveyance of character emotions.

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Good continuation of the story; well-narrated

Revisado: 12-02-18

Like the previous three books, the story was engaging enough to keep me listening. I learned a bit more about the fabric of the Midlands and more about the history that contributed to the state of affairs in the present. While other reviews were critical of the narrator, I have to say he’s been one of my favorites. Yes, I had to get over Kahlan being pronounced “Collin”, but otherwise I felt the narrator had consistent, distinguishable voices for the characters throughout the story and added really cool sound effects to ethereal voices and prophecy, which was very immersive for me. He was also good at conveying the various emotions/passion of the characters without sounding clownish/outlandish like in the last book’s narration. I would like to hear this narrator again and am looking forward to immersing myself in the next installment of Sword of Truth.

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Entertaining short story

Revisado: 10-24-18

I wasn’t expecting much of a ~40 minute ghost story. But I was surprised about how much I really enjoyed it. The detailed descriptions allowed me to form rich visualizations of the scenes in my head and the story was interesting enough that I didn’t feel the need to pause and come back to it later. The narration was excellent and added substantially to the gravity of the story. Nice little 40 minute escape.

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Great story. Inconsistent narration

Revisado: 10-23-18

I really enjoyed Stone of Tears. I read the book over a decade ago and wanted to revisit it via audio. The story was captivating, mired only by inconsistent narration. Voices of characters couldn’t be distinguished and the voice of a character frequently changed accent and tone. The beginning narration was tinny/computerized but got better a quarter of the way through. Voices portraying anguish made me wish Richard would lop my ears off with the Sword of Truth.

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