Sam Clemens

Great, maybe drags a bit in the middle

Revisado: 03-31-23

Mostly this was a page-turner for me. Very rigorous magic system, well-thought-out world, decent characters in general, just generally good work.

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Rocky experience

Revisado: 01-30-23

This is a bit hard to follow in audio form because of the *many* similarly or identically named characters. The narrator also does not really do voices and more or less straight-up reads the text rather than delivering a dramatic performance. The whole thing has a dreamlike quality where lots of nonsensical or semi-magical things happen for no discernible reason, making it all the harder to follow. I kept thinking I was missing symbolism and deeper meaning, e.g. surely the butterflies meant something, and surely the frequent incest must have been a reference? There are no answers in the audio version, at least. Maybe reading this with a commentary is the way to go.

The text itself is very unique and undeniably well-done. On the other hand, it gets fairly repetitive as more horrible things happen in an unending slog to a revolving cast of characters who are mostly quite awful people. Not a particularly pleasant experience, and perhaps overly long, but thought-provoking and remarkable.

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Solid, engaging, nice sarcastic touches

Revisado: 09-07-22

This was pretty good. By no means flawless, but I finished it quickly because I got invested in the characters and kept wanting to know how things worked out. Fun read, good narrator, give it a shot.

My biggest issue was that the author included many characters who are far more intelligent than she is, and she just didn't know how to write people who are actually that smart. We're told Laurence thinks extraordinarily quickly and is a child prodigy. Great--but in essentially all of his dialogue, he's thinking at an average speed. He has the voice of a whiny tech bro with a touch of heart, not a child prodigy. This kept coming up and breaking my suspension of disbelief.

Many story beats were predictable or obvious. Various sacrifices felt obligatory. By far the most surprising things were micro-scale and basically irrelevant, like the Happy Fruit startup's pitch, which I found to be hilarious. The dialogue with tech bros deciding they know how to fix the world was also excellent.

I'm a bit of a connoisseur of magic systems, and this one was not interesting. The rules were fairly ad hoc and it wasn't deep. Likewise I very much enjoy hard science if the author can manage it (ah Andy Weir), but that's not this book at all. Oh well.

I really liked Patricia's character overall. Complex, troubled, likeable. Her friends also worked well. Laurence and his set were fairly two-dimensional and unlikeable, sadly.

The narrator's voices themselves aren't too different, but she does a great job changing the rhythm, pitch, and "feel" all at once, resulting in plenty of diversity. I'll complain that Feynman is pronounced "FINEman" and not "Faneman".

I was satisfied with the ending. Maybe a bit too tidy and sudden, but endings are hard.

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An academic history of the American "right"

Revisado: 06-06-22

Continetti aims to give a comprehensive account of the major players and events in conservative American politics from about the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. As a current member of the conservative intellectual establishment and the American Enterprise Institute, he is well-suited to the task. He inevitably focuses on presidential administrations including Eisenhower, Reagan, and Trump, as well as conservative "thought leaders" including William F. Buckley, Jr. and Rush Limbaugh. While the book is entirely about politics and the author clearly has strong political preferences, this is more of a history lesson than anything. Continetti largely avoids the sort of heavy-handed "analysis" you find in politicized spheres like talk radio, cable news, and editorials.

The author seems to have been motivated by the question: "how did Donald Trump happen?" To answer that question, he delves into a century of clashes between progressive, conservative, libertarian, and populist thought, mostly from the perspective of conservative intellectuals. We follow the banishment of conservatism through the New Deal era to the establishment of the National Review all the way to the January 6th riot. Ultimately, Continetti draws a populist, anti-establishment through-line roughly from Andrew Jackson to William Jennings Bryan to George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. By the end, Trump seems to be less of an aberration and more of a once-in-a-few-generations confluence of popular pushback to "excessively liberal" liberal democracy, mixed with an unusually strong cult of personality and the shamelessness of the social media era.

There is something in this book for everyone to dislike. Trump fans will inevitably see it as a creature of the establishment disparaging their hero. Progressives will be furious at the lack of soul-searching in response to decades of right-wing contact with racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia. Non-academics will find the references to Alexis de Tocqueville, Milton Friedman, and many others off-putting. Academics will find it devolves into relatively disorganized historical recitation without explicit corresponding analysis aimed at proving a central thesis.

Nonetheless, Continetti does an admirable job with a difficult topic. By largely avoiding partisan analysis, he is able to cover many contradictory strains of thought without getting bogged down in any particular one. It is exceedingly difficult to find clear-eyed, even-handed political discussion in today's heavily polarized era, especially from the right, and Continetti largely succeeds in providing such discussion here.

The narration is perfectly fine. A few words are mispronounced here or there (e.g. "co-relation" for "correlation"), but it's not frequent. This is the sort of book where the narrator should be heard and not seen. He too succeeds at this.

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Thoroughly enjoyable

Revisado: 02-16-22

This was a fun listen. Quality whodunit wrapped around a slice of historic queerness. It's refreshing to have an essentially well-adjusted, incidentally gay hard-boiled detective, and it's especially noteworthy in a story that's decades old.

Most everything about the writing was very solid: three-dimensional characters with their own lives and motivations, evocative descriptions of the seedy side of Southern California, clear exposition, appropriately subtle hints that made plot points seem natural instead of arbitrary. My only complaints were that it was pretty short and it overused some gay tropes. But it was a solid intro for Dave Brandstetter, and I plan to continue the series.

The narration was perfectly fine. I had no problem following along. I don't know what some of the other reviews are talking about when they say they had trouble keeping up while listening. There are only around a dozen characters, the exposition around them is clear, and the narrator does a decent job with using multiple voices. I prefer some other narrators (e.g. James Marsters), and this one was a touch fast in places, but I have no complaints of substance.

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Compelling character study, plot's not the point

Revisado: 09-19-21

This long-ish short story explores the life of one of the Protogen Researchers. It does not advance the plot of the series in any way or develop any main characters--that's not the point, and if that's your main interest, you should probably just skip this one.

Instead we get an interesting glimpse of the Basic class system, Expanse academia, sociopathy, and a quality portrayal of male homosexuality that's all-too-rare for Sci Fi/Fantasy (where for decades lesbianism has dominated the mostly straight male author's uncommon depictions of minority sexuality).

The usual Expanse taut dramatic tension and melodrama abounds. Very competently done all-in-all. Great so long as you don't go into it expecting main series revelations or the like.

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Beautifully realized

Revisado: 09-01-21

Everything about this is well-done: the two important characters are deep, the prose and diction are crisp and perfect for this story, the mystery is (redacted), the themes are sophisticated, bordering on the profound, and the narration is excellent. Highly recommended.

My only complaint is that it's just long-novella length. Best buy it outright without using a credit. I very much hope Susanna Clarke will continue to share her worlds with us.

(Spoiler warning!) It doesn't seem a stretch to imagine the author as Piranesi. They're perfectly content inhabiting a private world with minimal outside contact. That world is detailed, fantastical, and fantastically beautiful. Spending too much time there all alone makes you mad and shouldn't be done, but if only....

It was heart-wrenching to watch Piranesi discover that the ideas of others, even others with entirely pure motives and nothing but good will, have the ability to completely shatter our peace and contentment. It's as if Clarke acknowledges our physical and psychological need for others while pointing out the inevitable tragedy of that arrangement: you will be hurt, perhaps by those who mean you well more deeply than those who mean you harm, possibly from a single glance at the simplest of ideas.

It's hard not to imagine Clarke wrapped up in the Minotaur's embrace, perfectly content and at peace while the noisy would outside goes ever on. Eventually someone breaches her bubble, and she is dragged, willingly though wistfully, back to society. Where she writes another book!

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Epic, maybe a little too much so sometimes?

Revisado: 08-28-21

The scope of the series is immense, covering multiple continents, empires, and realms of existence with a large pantheon and a world with hundreds of thousands of years of living history. It all starts to culminate here.

There are so many characters to keep track of throughout the series, which is harder in audio form. It seemed worse here in Book 8. There were entire scenes where I had no idea if I should remember the characters or if they were entirely new, especially in the first half. So many random portions of plotlines are strewn about over thousands of pages, and you never really know who will come up again in a later book and who's gone forever.

Many of the characters are pretty similar too--there's gotta be a dozen assassins alone, half a dozen "masterminds", dozens of canines, and just so many Malazan soldiers to keep straight. I'd prefer a smaller cast with more attention to each one, especially cutting many who aren't important to the plot or who are basically redundant, but ah well. It sometimes feels like a series of DnD campaigns where new parties were started up and abandoned several times, only to be replaced by variations on the original characters.

But if you're 8 books in, you should expect all this by now! (For the love of Mother Dark don't start the series here.) The usual strengths of a deeply built world and an epic web of plots based on reasonable, conflicting motivations are here in spades. So are the usual weaknesses of exposition, bloat, and a seemingly never-ending stream of hypersexual women.

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Who to believe?

Revisado: 08-05-21

It can be hard to know who to believe when everyone involved is self-serving in one way or another, though that isn't the authors' fault. They have chosen in each case to pick a main narrative, often told through quoted conversation which evidently depict their most likely guess as to what really happened. Numerous times after such an episode a line will be added at the end saying whoever looked worst disputes that the conversation ever took place. So it goes.

Extensive investigative journalism and fact-checking underlies the whole text. Many of the principal players like Trump, cabinet secretaries, top aides, Congressional leadership, etc. were interviewed and contemporary records were consulted for accuracy. The authors are probably right vastly more often than they're wrong. Opponents with an axe to grind have had a chance to point out such faults and so far have not done so convincingly. It would be nice if every source spoke on the record, and relying heavily on anonymous sources is really problematic so I took off a star, but the authors probably couldn't reasonably do otherwise.

There isn't much of a connecting narrative, but I was happy to have more "meat" anyway. The authors rarely flat-out tell you how to feel and mostly recount their reconstruction of the facts.

Some episodes are particularly horrifying, like one time late in the pandemic when Trump is told masks cut transmission at 1 meter by around 70% and he's surprised at this apparently new information. The most damning episodes were related to the 2020 election, like Trump's inaction during the January 6th riot. He is described as being holed up in the White House and glued to the TV while Pence and his family are minutes from being torn apart by a mob, and Trump never even calls Pence during or after to check up on them.

By the end it's clear the authors see Trump as an unrepentant and gifted liar who mishandled the pandemic and became a clear danger to the country and the institution of Democracy. Well, fair enough, they're entitled to develop an opinion when they've backed it up with mountains of careful research.

It would have been nice to hear what the Trump administration did right rather than focusing so exclusively on chaotic infighting and obfuscation at the highest levels, but that wasn't the book they wanted to write. The development of vaccines at record speed is indirectly praised, along with provisional praise of the early pandemic travel bans and Kushner's Middle East accords.

The reader is perfectly fine--clear, well-paced, not distracting or annoying in any way. She doesn't do voices, which is fair in non-fiction. My only minor gripe is that I felt her rendering of Trump quotes in the epilogue was somewhat mocking, though honestly normal people would have trouble saying most of those things with a straight face, so who knows. I had no issues with her renditions of conversations in the rest of the book.

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Weakest Sanderson I've read, wish I could give 3.5

Revisado: 07-03-21

Weakest Sanderson I've read, wish I could give 3.5 stars. Often simplistic, barely dodging tedious tropes, bad romance, main character is a very very special boy. Fun world-building, Hrathen was decently complex and interesting.

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