Dhananjay

Great Voice Acting and Suspenseful

Revisado: 04-12-23

Great voice acting and production. Epistolary novella in the new technology of calls and voicemails.

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Sexual Explicit Parts Blasé, but Angst Real

Revisado: 08-11-21

The novel is notorious for being sexually explicit, and was definitely so for that time. But today that detail was yawn-inducing. However, slogging through the sexual excesses was still relevant to the angst, hopeless desparation and objectification of humans that pervades much of the book.

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Camp and Funny

Revisado: 06-21-21

I binge listened to this. The story is less memorable than 5 stars, but the performances are very enjoyable. I am quite OK with how it portrays sexual politics: the denouement is hilariously satisfying. The story walks a fine line: it celebrates semen as a fun part of the male sexual experience but it deconstructs semen as a symbol of male biological superiority.

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Oddball fun cross country travel thriller

Revisado: 05-17-20

This was a lot of fun combining the genres of brain-brawn duo and a cross-country road trip story.

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Needs careful listening of soft spoken passages

Revisado: 01-18-19

This is a heartwarming and poignant story of a man's everyday trials and tribulations in an old people's home.
One of the performer's strengths also turned out to be a problem for me: the use of a large range from soft to loud as appropriate for the phrase or passage. It meant that I could not listen to the book in the car or while working out, because the soft passages would get lost. My suggestion is to not multitask while listening to this book.

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Practical theorist

Revisado: 09-22-16

David Byrne is a successful musician, and has a practitioner's knowledge of how music works. He draws not only from personal experience but understands historical and modern trends well. I have learned a lot from this book. The reader was engaging and kept me interested.

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A Must Read to Understand the US Constitution

Revisado: 06-21-16

The Federalist Papers explain at length what the US Constitution tersely states. Even though the Federalist papers have no status as law, and we as readers may not find some of their arguments persuasive, they give us a window into the political and pragmatic considerations that went into the framing of the US Constitution.

The reading style is clear, and conducive to listening with attention.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Easy Self-Affirming Listen for an Immigrant

Revisado: 07-03-15

The book was an easy listen. It features a protagonist who lives the hard poor immigrant life, and excels at whatever she attempts. She does good. As other immigrants may have secretly felt, I too secretly feel "We had it harder than the Americans who were born here and we did waaay better than average". I admit to this guilty pleasure, that I found affirmed in the novel. But the novel's true conflicts about love and romance were superficial, and did not give me insight into a sensitive or interesting soul. So it is very likely that I will forget this story.
The narration was very skilled. I am not sure about the accuracy of the Chinese-English accent, but it sounded convincing to me. If you happen to be Chinese-American, though, you should check an audio sample before buying the book. (I often find narrators' attempts at Indian English inaccurate and jarring.) The narrator uses a very non-American sounding accent when the protagonist is a newly arrived immigrant child. Then, ever so slowly and smoothly, by the end of the book when the protagonist is grown up, the accent has changed to that of an educated, highly assimilated Chinese-American. This allowed me to relive many aspects of the immigrant experience in a way that words would not be able to express.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Quirky, humorous, sad

Revisado: 06-27-14

What made the experience of listening to The Illicit Happiness of Other People the most enjoyable?

The characters and the structure of the storytelling were enjoyable. The philosophical basis is presumably existentialist. However, the writer does not hit us over the head with any philosophical lecturing. The teenaged character does verbalize opinions about a philosophical perspective on life, we get it as hearsay from his friends and acquaintances - but this is just the sort of stuff about which extremely intelligent adolescents may obsess,

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

One thing I liked about the narrator was that he had a clear Indian accent, and had correct pronunciations for vernacular words. The accent is not accurate for South India, but it is quite acceptable. This was much better that other novels by Indian English authors I have listened to on Audible. Unfortunately, the narrator had very poor phrasing. Most sentences were phrased "Subject [rising tone, audibly long pause] predicate [falling tone]". For most sentences, this injured the meaning of the sentence.

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Tedious polemic and narration

Revisado: 04-25-14

What disappointed you about Calculating God?

I was hoping to be entertained and edified by the story. The story is about the dangers of ossifying any stage of scientific enquiry into a quasi-scriptural dogma. I agree about the danger. But the polemical writing was boring.

I paraphrase the author's preface: only radically close-minded evolutionists and intelligent designers on the opposite extremes would not like his book, everyone in the middle would take something from it. The author's point of departure is that an intelligent alien brings many as-yet-unknown-to-humans data. These that make an intelligent designer the most "Occam's razor" theory. I have no problem with this literary device. I read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series with great pleasure: in that series there is a world in which all evidence shows a flat world with "turtles all the way down". I can enjoy Terry Pratchett's scientific investigation stipulating the truth of a flat earth.

The problem with "Calculating God" is that there is chapter upon chapter of drearily written fictional advances in space travel, alien paleontology and quantum/particle physics that supposedly prove intelligent designer. While I was pretty much to accept the literary device from the very beginning, this droning polemic wore me down.

Instead of a fictional literary device to illuminate human nature and the fallibility of science if it is ossified, the writing was attempting to become a serious discussion about actual evidence, as though the alien were a Salviati to the human paleontologist's Simplicio in a new Galilean "Dialogue Concerning the Two Systems". The only difference is that Galileo's Dialogue only included non-fictional evidence. Which is why we do not hold Galileo to literary standards, but rather standards of logic.

Therefore, I found that I had stopped taking all the fictional evidence at face value, as expected in any other science fiction fantasy. Holding the dialogue to standards of serious argumentation, I found myself focusing on the mistaken usage of words from the probability theory, of the philosophical concept of Occam's razor, and so forth.

Then there is just plain slipshod storytelling. For example, the alien finds prior portrayals of aliens in popular culture lacking in imagination and overly mimicking earthly creatures. But then, the author's alien is some sort of a spider-creature, whose skin is of the sort that humans with only earthly experience automatically recognize as biological. That is just as poor and limited an imagination. For one moment, I went all "meta": I thought that the author was cleverly presenting the irony of his own limits. But there wasn't any more of that self-examining irony coming through. There was no ironic "meta" about this storytelling faux pas till as far as I had read before returning the book.

I was disappointed that a book that I was ready to like should turn out to be such a dreary argument.

What do you think your next listen will be?

It may be a book with a similar thesis, but written in a more entertaining way.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Jonathan Davis and Robert J. Sawyer ?

The narrator presents the alien as a motoric monotonous voice. This may be reasonable performace decision at some level, because the alien is in fact using a translator device. But the alien has a lot of dialogue. This flat tone of speech gets tedious. Perhaps the narrator could have tried to modulate the tone a little more, so it would seem motoric, but not become boring.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Calculating God?

I read about half the book and then returned it. I would cut down the "evidence for a creator" that goes on for chapter after chapter, to just one or two well-crafted chapters.All we need to know is that the alien brings a whole lot of new data that changes the current state of scientific evidence.

Any additional comments?

Given how boring the arguments were, I think that the author's prefatory statements are hubris about is skill. It isn't only the extremes of the argument that will get annoyed with the book - some people who expect good writing, flow of storyline and character development will get annoyed too.

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