Wilg Flanders

for me kind of awful

Revisado: 04-11-22

This is a nested-egg narrative that thinks it's hugely clever but doesn't seem to have anything really to say. I say "seem" because I couldn't get past a few hours of listening. I like puzzles and tricky narratives, but maybe I should go back to reading James Joyce for light entertainment.

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Hard to get into

Revisado: 04-13-21

I'm a pretty good listener, can pick up on story threads that some of my friends can't. However, the beginning of this recording was very difficult for me to follow. A lot of different characters, two or more real or not real timelines--none of them including our own present world--made it difficult. If I had been reading the physical book I could have read over pages to get the sense of the story. But listening to it while on my exercise machine or walking didn't work well. The story seems floridly inventive, but I can't say much more than that. (Except that some reviewers don't like the reader, but the difficulty is not with her)

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outstanding

Revisado: 02-28-21

Best book I have read or listened to this year. Although I have been reading related information for decades, this book brought me new facts and a new perspective. I am still processing what that new perspective means for how I view the world and what my moral obligations are to other forms of life.

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esto le resultó útil a 8 personas

Very poor reader

Revisado: 10-17-20

I can't really tell if I like this book or not. As an audio performance...and I don't say this lightly...it stinks. British pronunciation is fine, but not the sing-song repetitive cadence of almost every sentence. As far as I can tell, Haldane comes across as a complex but not very likable character. Some facts are thrown in just for completeness sake, without adding anything to the portrait. Disappointing, because I generally enjoy biographies of scientific figures.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Not Shakespeare but pretty good

Revisado: 12-19-19

Another reviewer compared this book to Romeo and Juliet, which is apt, given that at its core it is a story poetically told of two lovers from violently opposing political powers. But the lovers are not a young Italian boy and girl, but millennia-old time-and-space-traveling cyborg women warriors with vast and mutable murderous powers as well as superintelligence. The authors deserve many kudos for being able to somehow bring poetic language to this situation and to keep me listening until the end. However, as much as the authors mean for the reader to sympathize with these two characters, I kept harking back to the fact that the lovers' entire existence has been devoted to creating suffering and death among millions of human beings, century after century. These are not the innocents of Shakespeare's tale. And yet Shakespeare had the courage to let Romeo and Juliet die as the inevitable and tragic result of the conflict between their families, while the authors of this book allow their jaded lovers to survive. The story would have had a more appropriate ending if the two warriors for once came together at the same time and place. Then the logical ending would be 15 minutes of passion, followed by a mutually-destructive bloodbath, poetically told..

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Don't bother if you don't love sword and sorcery

Revisado: 04-05-19

Since this book and TV series are so popular I wanted to find out what it's all about. Now that I've listened to about three hours I can't imagine how I'd get through the entire 33 hrs, much less the whole series. I hate to spend my credits without finishing a book, but I'm stopping now. If you don't already like sword and sorcery books, don't waste your time or credits. Specifics: 1) living vicariously in this arch pseudo-medieval world is tiresome and unpleasant; 2) if you like to watch paint drying, you may enjoy the author slowly building his complex world, adjective by melodramatic adjective (I didn't); 3) as other listeners have said, the reader is not good...at one point he gives the voice of an old Scottish peasant to an 11-year-old noble girl; and 4) listening to the book on audio is not a good idea...at least with a paper book you can effectively skim and/or jump ahead to the good parts (whatever those are) without expending a good chunk of your life to get there.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Unpleasant

Revisado: 11-24-18

Hard to review. Writing is good, story is an interesting perspective on spy work. I can even say that the performance, in its way, was excellent. However, it was difficult to continue listening because the narrative as read was so unrelentingly dark. Beyond the fact that the world she lives in is filled with deadly uncertainty about everyone's motives, the main character's internal dialog is uniformly sarcastic and/or sardonic in content (blame the author) and tone (blame the voice actor) about everything and everyone. It's almost a parody of a certain kind of very intelligent but unloveable Britishness. On audio while walking, the Transcriptions of the title were hard for me to follow, but I don't think they play a central role in the plot or character development (though how would I know?). There's a bit of a bonus at the end when the author's end notes explain the background of the book.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Excellent and suspenseful audio book

Revisado: 08-21-18

This is one of the best audio books I have ever listened to, both in the writing and the performance. I will not duplicate what others have said here. Perhaps the only thing I can add to the discussion is that--although you wouldn't expect it in this kind of book--there is a strong element of suspense, which felt more real and dangerous than in most "thriller" books. If you want to appreciate that element of the plot, to avoid spoilers don't read summaries of the plot.

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Performance is a problem

Revisado: 03-29-18

I see that all the published book reviews are positive, but I'm having a hard time continuing the book, may not finish it. A major drawback is the narration, done alternately by a male narrator and a female narrator. The male narrator is mediocre. The female narrator has a sweet voice and delivery that feels dissonant when describing serious adult situations, more appropriate for a YA novel.
Trying to separate the book from the performance: While the historical setting is interesting, the plot seems a little dated and artificial so far, a bit Dickensian. I liked "A Visit from the Goon Squad", so this is disappointing. Perhaps things will be more interesting when I get to the parts about diving, if I get that far.

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Descends into midlevel TV series territory

Revisado: 06-30-17

I like stories that have an arc that comes to a satisfying conclusion. The first 3 Expanse stories had that arc, which was extended pretty well by the 4th. But this book feels more like an effort to keep everything going on and on forever to sell more material. A new story line is introduced that is clearly designed to fuel several more lucrative books, so is not resolved in this one. There are flashes of good writing--the authors have it in them to do insightful scenes when they try--but those flashes are outnumbered by soap opera and repetitive tropes. The authors have gotten lazy. Too bad...the earlier books revived my interest in this kind of science fiction.
Spoiler alert:
Billions of people on Earth are murdered, but the emotional impact on the survivors...including the book's lead characters...seems less than it was for me just reading about it. Such a mind-boggling disaster would have to produce PSD-like symptoms, but the plot just keeps trundling along. And the motivation for the greatest genocidal event in human history is wholly inadequate...the bad guys have a reason, but it's hard to believe that they are bad enough to think killing billions is justified.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas