Episteme

Delightful!

Revisado: 08-31-24

I loved it all. I have loved all the Rivers of London series, but this added a whole other element. As a young teenager, I discovered, and loved, P. G. Wodehouse, and in so many ways this reminded me of his stuff. Gussie was distinctly reminiscent of Bertie Wooster, but with added heroic elements. Jeeves was distributed across a couple of characters, and there were a couple of grace notes from other Wodehouse books as well, while the whole was pure Aaronovitch. If he has more young Nightingale stories in him, bring them on! And if they happen to include Gussie, that would definitely be all right with me! And as always, Kobna Holbrook-Smith’s narration was superb. His American accents aren’t quite perfect, but are much better than most British narrators’, and way better than most American narrators’ British accents.

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This is really for Audible

Revisado: 08-07-24

Dear Audible: i HATE your new way of providing samples. Not only does it now take THREE clicks to actually listen the sample, I can now do nothing else while it plays. I can’t read the summary or reviews, or turn my screen off while it plays. Inefficient and annoying. Further, it is buggy—for a significant percentage of the books I have wanted to consider, the sample won’t play. This is not a good business model for you—I never buy an audible book without listening to the sample, for a variety of reasons.

As an additional issue, your misnomered “help” system is useless. The topic is not listed at any point as an option, your so-called chat system provides no opportunity to chat with even a bot, let alone a human being, and it asks a yes-no question without providing the option of saying no. Stupid. When I resorted to trying a phone call, it didn’t connect—apparently it would only work with Alexa. Apple users are tough out of luck.

All this is why I have resorted to writing this review. I have no faith it will be read by anyone associated with Audible, but at least I was able to get it all off my chest. Not fair to the author or narrator, but it was the only avenue left to me.

Please, for the sakes of all your customers who can multitask and prefer to do so, go back to the previous, actually functional sample system, and improve your help system at least to the extent of allowing general feedback.

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DNF

Revisado: 07-30-23

After the first couple of chapters, it began to feel like someone put, oh, twenty or so plotline cliches taken from TV scripts in one pile, and thirty or forty dialog cliches in another, and began pulling them out one or two at a time to write the book. Five or so chapters in the basic silhouette of the story was clear, with only final details not yet known, at which point I skipped to the end and endured the final cliches just to be able to let my irritation at this mess go. Maybe at my age I’ve just watched too much crummy TV detective dramas—or maybe young’uns have had their observations so shaped by TV they think real life really looks and sounds like that, but seriously folks—there should be a noticeable difference between a book and a cheap TV script.

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One of Le Guin’s better stories

Revisado: 10-26-22

It’s been a long time since I last read this, and I enjoyed it all the more because of that. Rudnicki’s narration was excellent; his deep bass voice took a few minutes for me to get used to, but he did an excellent job of having a distinct voice for each HILF (Highly Intelligent Life Form). This has to be one of the best in the Audible Plus catalog.

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Really disappointed in this one

Revisado: 03-14-22

I very much enjoyed the first four in the series, and saved this last one for a treat. But it was like driving pleasantly down a country road, only to have the car suddenly yank the steering out of my hands, swerve off the road, head down a hillside, and crash into a tree.

(Spoilers ahead)
One of the things I liked about the first four was that Faucon solved his mysteries by thinking things through. Rational thought and real-world evidence were to the fore. But in this one we have what amounts to a Halloween tale about a ghostly army from hell, and we’re supposed to take it seriously. Not my cup of tea at all, and not what I signed up for. So I skipped to the end, to see if that would carry through—if it hadn’t , might have stuck with the book and finished it. But sure enough, there the army from hell is and the religious fanatic serial killer we’ve seen throughout the series rides off with them, presumably joining them in hell. Yuck. DNF.
Worse, apparently that serial killer was intersexed, which comes way too close to condemning sexual abnormality as inherently evil or inevitably leading to serious psychological pathology for my taste.
I had been kinda hoping Domning would continue the series, but now I don’t trust her as an author and will be wary of trying anything else she has written.
Will try to get my credit back.

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Borderline

Revisado: 02-14-22

Very uneven. Good enough that I may—perhaps—try the next one. If she gets a good (better?) editor, and eschews the worst of her cultural anachronisms, and evens out some of her attempts at humor (I assume that’s what they were) to be less over the top, she could get better and be more worth reading. But if she decides what she needs is to inject even more drama, and more modern sensibilities—well, some will like that perhaps, but I won’t.

And I have to wonder if she’s ever tried to get around in long skirts, let alone long skirts with corsets and petticoats. It’s virtually impossible to crawl with a long skirt on, unless you hike it up well above your knees and find some way of fastening it. I know this from personal experience. My “you have to be kidding” reaction engendered by that no-doubt-intended-to-be-humorous scene toward the beginning colored my opinion of the rest of the book, as I noticed how it went from slapstick to sentimentality to drama, interspersed with some quite good and sometimes original and creative writing. I hope the author evens things out in her next book, because the foundations are there.

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Saw the culprit almost from the beginning

Revisado: 11-28-21

The author couldn’t seem to make her mind up what she wanted to write. A highly competent detective? Or an insecure one? A good mystery, or a romance? A put-down of old fogies, or of millennials?
And as far as highly competent is concerned—it’s a hard sell when your detective entirely ignores suspicious behavior and leaps to entirely unwarranted conclusions. And fails to ask really obvious questions when interviewing witnesses. The weaknesses got harder to ignore as the book went along, until I finally gave up and skipped to the end just to get it over with.

And a pet peeve of mine—please, please don’t try to convince me someone is a math dude by tossing in the name of a famous unsolved conjecture that you as an author obviously do not have the slightest understanding of. Anyone capable of understanding the statement of what that conjecture is would NEVER claim someone majored in math because “he likes numbers” or thinks it’s cool how equations can have a single answer. Arithmetic, yes, elementary HS algebra, ok, but higher mathematics? Not a chance.

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Ugh

Revisado: 11-23-21

Yuck. Seriously not my cup of tea. It may be ok if you like this kind of thing, but I do not like this kind of thing. Also: the author has watched way too much scklock coming out of Hollywood.

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Just me

Revisado: 09-01-21

Thousands love Louise Penny, and I was desperate for something to listen to, so I decided to give her one more try. (I’d tried a couple others, years ago, and didn’t like them.) But OMG, never again. All the moralizing! And her apparent complete inability to distinguish between math and the moral or political interpretations to be derived from the math! Or the distinction between math and science, or the relationship between them! To say nothing of “garbage in, garbage out”, which applies to math and science as well as computers! And her overly emotional writing! And the implausible actions and motivations of her characters, including the police! Or, for that matter, all the rude and obnoxious behavior that didn’t even get any comment, let alone push-back. I mean, who crashes someone’s party, a party of strangers, and goes in and accuses them all of bad behavior, and no one even comments on the fact that this is rude? I thought Canadians were more polite and had better manners than us Americans? My eyes were rolling so much I got worried about damaging them. Finally skipped to the end so I could find out whodunnit and why and put myself out of my misery. And after all the eye-rolling and OMGs and “you have GOT to be kidding“ were over, decided to write this review.

But truly, a lot of people love her stuff, so your mileage may vary.

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DNF

Revisado: 04-04-21

I love Mark Twain and have all my life. If he had a fault, it was being sometimes over-wordy. But he was also witty and could tell a story and inform us along with it. Heck is wordy, and long-winded, but lacks the wit that makes up for it. There’s probably a story in there somewhere, but I just couldn’t hang in there long enough to get to it. And even for a hundred years ago, I just found the idea of a NYC policeman leaving his jurisdiction and anyone acceding to his authority in entirely other states too implausible. The narrator has a pleasant voice and dealt with the accents well enough, but all that folksiness without any wit to go along with it got to me and ultimately led to my DNF.

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