Paul

Overpraised Tripe--Inauthentic in Every Way

Revisado: 04-25-23

Bonnie Garmus should have stuck with copy writing. She can't write a character who isn't an overblown cliche or utterly unbelievable. She can't plot a mystery. She's not funny, although this book is praised as comedy. (Rape and attempted rape and suggested pedophilia don't make me laugh. Sorry.) This book is a calvalcade of jarring anachronisms that took me right out of the story. The readers aren't bad but the production assistants failed miserably at their jobs. There are egregious mispronunciations that took me right out of the story. Ten seconds on YouTube would have shown them how to pronounce Jack LaLanne, for instance. The character with the Italian last name was performed as if he stepped out of The Sopranos. And done badly. Took me right out of the story. Maybe I shouldn't complain about being taken out of this poorly written and ultimately unbelievable story. Maybe I need to do some research on mass hysteria to understand how this substandard book garnered such fandom.

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Despicable, The Audible Equivalent of a Snuff Film

Revisado: 03-19-18

What would have made The Wasted Vigil better?

An editor who would have checked Aslam's perverted love of the violent. Aslam can write a beautiful sentence but he did so in service to a book that is nothing more than torture pornography.

What was most disappointing about Nadeem Aslam’s story?

The slim story--and it was slim--is buried under an avalanche of disgusting violence and repetitive religious zealotry that didn't advance the story at all. The love story aspect of the book was utterly uncompelling. Also, the transitions between locations and time periods were clumsy.

What aspect of Basil Sands’s performance would you have changed?

He's a good performer with the glaring exception of his interpretation of a Russian woman. Lara sounded like a Natasha reject from Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. His accent really took me out of the story, though, given how much I loathed this book, maybe that was a good thing.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Wasted Vigil?

There were so many, many egregiously violent scenes that added nothing to the story. What was a tale of slaughter from the US Revolutionary War doing there? It's as if the author had a check-list of every wartime atrocity ever committed and was determined to shoe-horn them in even if, as they usually did, added nothing to the story.

Any additional comments?

I listened to this book for my book club, which I very much enjoy. If I were reading this on my own, I would have stopped very early on. I cannot remember ever reading a more loathsome book.

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Christian Claptrap Masquerading as Philosophy

Revisado: 01-02-09

For the first time, I feel cheated by Audible.com and will ask for a credit on this book. The description did not mention the author has a rightwing Christian Agenda--yes, with a Capital A--and views these books through that prism. I stopped listening after his ignorant and illogical discussion of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan.

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