J.D. McPherson

So good. So short.

Revisado: 08-14-22

The performance was a fun ride. The story itself felt like a treatment for a much grander epic, poking fun at fantasy and gaming tropes. I'd been slogging through a bunch of long-winded duds lately. I started listening to this one, and it was over so quickly, I thought I'd skipped some parts. More, please?

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Best gaming book I've listened to

Revisado: 02-15-22

I was recently christened as a product manager for a company that pivoted to gaming. In a panic, I grabbed as many books as I could through Audible, Kindle, and physical paperback. Honestly, most of them re crap. This was the one diamond packed full of useful information to help me become somewhat competent

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Curtis Armstrong fittingly narrates

Revisado: 11-24-21

This is one of those audio books I flew through. It was a genius decision to get comedic actor Curtis Armstrong to perform the stories of a period he himself went through.

Note that this focuses on male comedians from SNL and SCTV. Women and other giants like Robin Williams appear on the sidelines.

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Good Kurlansky. Skip the Recipes.

Revisado: 08-16-21

Another great nerd-out book on a specific ingredient from Mark Kurlansky. The narration was dry, similar to the Oysters book, but it was fine.

I think for audio, just compile the recipes in a PDF file and only include them when there's something crucial in them for the narrative. I ended up shuttling past the recipes, some of which ate up over three minutes. That's an eternity in an audio book.

Ingredients.

Instructions.

No one is going to make a recipe based on an audio book.

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Good, good, good! Happy, happy, happy!

Revisado: 06-02-21

I churn through so many sci-fi books, and even some of the award-winning ones I leave unfinished. Project Hail Mary was a glass of sweet water in a desert. Immediately starting off as an amnesia mystery, the vectors changed many times. Yes, it's the same general premise of The Martian, where a stranded astronaut must science his way out of a problem. And the main character has the same personality as the on in The Martian. But I liked that nerd sarcasm.

Towards the end, though, I was getting crisis fatigue. Grace starts saying something good, stops in mid-sentence, "Oh no!" And we're solving another galaxy-threatening problem. I'm able to follow it until I go science numb. Then it's fixed until the next kink. Did you have days when inanimate objects just didn't cooperate with you? That's pretty much what he's dealing with A LOT.

Such a fun ride. Gonna re-read. Elated, elated, elated! (waving two hands in the air)

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Strong metaphor of break ups

Revisado: 05-25-21

Just my addition to the pile. It's a trippy mind trip. Towards the end, I started seeing this as symbolic of a breakup from an abusive relationship. It works as a metaphor. The actions and visuals took me back to my difficult break 20 years ago, and it hit me deeply through that lens. Cathartic, really. On the surface it's a mindbending sci-fi horror romp. Deeper, it's a story of emotional entrapment, abuse, mental illness, and escape from toxic relationships.

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More mind expanding concepts

Revisado: 04-01-21

This gives me my fix of mind-expanding sci-fi. While I was getting through this novel, I watched more YouTube octopus videos than ever. I gave it three sears because my experience with the novel was adequate. I found myself waiting for something to happen or trying to figure out where the plot was going. I kept repeated passages because there's something in the prose that makes my mind drift off.

Then I realized I had pretty much forgotten what happened in the previous novel and had to look it up. He has an ethereal convoluted writing style, and it took me a while to latch on to which character was which.

I'll look forward to reading the next installment because the concepts intrigue me. But I'm sure by that tune I would have forgotten again what happened before.

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For Hardcore Bobiverse fans

Revisado: 10-21-20

For me, the techno-babble peppered this episode so much I had to repeat a few times because of zoning out. Like all the other Bobiverse novels, Dennis E. Taylor explores some mindbending concepts, which make for the best sci-fi. It takes a good while to get the flow of where the scattered story lines head.

Ray Porter's approach to narration, I'm sure, makes sense in encapsulating the gist of the Bobs' characters. The trouble is that they sound like a guy waking up from a hangover, taking a drag from a cigarette and a sip of hair-of-the-dog Scotch, and sign in to his obligatory voice reports. With all the sighing, teeth sucking, and verbal eye-rolling, he sounds bored. It's like he's narrating because he's forced to, and he's told the story a hundred times before.

It's only near the climax that the narration pace exhibits excitement.

As with the other Bobiverse books, I'm two-thirds through by the time I get the rhythm and start wrapping my mind about the core concepts of the work.

I'm still in for the full ride with the Bobs. Looking forward to more.

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Great to have this on audio

Revisado: 12-13-18

Daniel Tudor's popular intro to modern South Korean culture is one of the required reads about this amazing country.

It was published in 2012, so a good chunk is already in need of an update, considering how fast Korea changes.

The narration was a good honest effort. I don't expect non-Korean speakers to get Korean pronunciations right all the time, but I think the narrator could have benefited from some Korean coaching. After a while, the pronunciation flailing gets distracting. At some parts, especially in the Korean Wave bit with a deluge of Korean names and titles, he sounds almost spiteful of the Korean words.

Good voice, but I think he was way outside his comfort zone.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Imaginative Connections

Revisado: 11-13-17

Other reviews have gushed about the imagination in this work. They're right. This is one of those rock-your-point-of-view sci-fi novels that also packs the action. It's literally as epic as you can get. Broad and sweeping yet somehow stays with core characters.

They say characters who grow make good writing. Great writing makes the reader grow.

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