Matthew

Fantastic narration!

Revisado: 09-10-21

Once again, Rasamund Pike proves herself one of the very best narrators on Audible. It's a pleasure to listen to anything she reads... but happily this isn't the phone book. It's not as good as The Girl on the Train, but Paula Hawkins does again deliver a twisty, well-written mystery from multiple points of view. It's a very bleak book, and by its premise perhaps overly reliant on coincidence, but it's full of very memorable characters, all seriously flawed, but many still very likeable. All of them carry trauma of some sort, most of it very, very terrible. It's primarily a story about how we process trauma, and secondarily a murder mystery. But between Hawkins' engaging narrative and Pike's sublime performance, it will definitely keep you listening!

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Great deep dive for Slough House fans!

Revisado: 12-04-20

If you're a fan of Mick Herron's Slough House books (beginning with Slow Horses), then this podcast is a great way to fill the hours waiting for the next installments. Each episode is a compelling deep dive into one of the books, with host Jeff Quest joined by erudite and insightful guests who are all engrossed in Herron's world. They explore connections you might have missed between the books, discuss recurring themes, and of course the characters you grow to love or hate. After listening to one, you'll want to run back and read or listen to the book under discussion all over again!

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5 Terrific Chandler Stories!

Revisado: 11-29-20

Scott Brick doesn't embody Marlowe for me the way the Ray Porter totally did, but he's a reliably excellent narrator and still does a great job. I hope he eventually records all of Chandler's short stories for Audible as well as the novels that are already scheduled.

All of the stories in this collection are very good ones, and for the most part they're ones that Chandler didn't later "cannibalize" in creating his novels, so they won't feel overly familiar if you've read all of those. These will be original Marlowe adventures to you. But one stands out above the rest: "Red Wind." I honestly think it might be the best thing Chandler ever wrote, even when put up against powerful novels like THE LONG GOODBYE. It's at once a classic Marlowe case, complexly plotted and packing as many seemingly separate threads for the detective to string together as one of the novels... and a just a great piece of literature. (There's also a great essay by Chandler included in this collection about placing the detective story within "literature.") It's a powerful meditation on lost love, the power of memory, the deception of nostalgia, and self-delusion. And the theme is as effectively and emotionally packed into the short story format as any of Fitzgerald's best short stories. But all five stories and the essay are excellent!

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Very exciting spy novel

Revisado: 08-27-20

I'd heard good things about this one when it came out in Britain, and I was not disappointed. This is an exciting and fast-paced spy novel that mixes great internecine inter-agency rivalries and office politics with tense, suspenseful action. Alfon does a great job of jumping between different characters (with two main protagonists) in different continents to keep the listener on the edge of their seat. Honestly, this should satisfy fans of both the cerebral le Carre side of the genre and the pulse-pumping Ludlum side. I hope it's the first in a series.

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Another great Matt Helm adventure!

Revisado: 08-07-18

The Matt Helm series is pretty consistently great, but it does have highs and lows within that consistency. The Poisoners is one of the good ones, for sure, though not among the very best. I wouldn't recommend starting with this one simply because I would recommend listening to this series in order, as characters do tend to return and die off, and events from earlier books are sometimes referenced. For those who might know the character only from the Dean Martin movies, this is not really that Matt Helm. The Helm of the books is totally serious, and the books themselves are brutal and hard-boiled. Fans of Jack Reacher or Adam Hall's Quiller would definitely enjoy Helm.

I loved seeing Matt Helm in Los Angeles (a city he doesn't enjoy), before he moves south to more familiar territory in Mexico. The (returning) villain's plot is a good one, and there's a good twist on what we think it is in the final moments. The new characters are all well-drawn, and I expect (and hope) to see a few of the ones who survived return.

Once again, Stefan Rudnicki does a truly stellar job giving voice to Matt Helm. He's perfect for the first-person narration, and has the character's competence and droll humor down pat. Eve if you've read these books before, I recommend listening to the audio series for what Rudnicki brings to the character. I wish these audiobooks came out more often, but I'm glad that they're still at least rolling out ever six months or so. Please finish the series, Audible! If you released all the rest at once, I would buy them all and tear through them--then start again.

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The narration isn't as bad as you fear

Revisado: 09-03-16

Would you consider the audio edition of The Hunt for Red October to be better than the print version?

No, it's not better than the print version, but it IS pretty good. I was worried from the sample and from other reviews that J. Charles would be an annoying narrator. But overall, I ended up liking him. He does a good job with the action scenes. Where he's atrocious is with accents--especially British ones, and there are a fair amount of British characters in this book. He's also not great with Texan or Southern accents. I'm not qualified to judge the accuracy of his Russian accents, but as a listener they didn't get on my nerves, which is good since nearly half the book is about Russian characters. Again, overall, he is actually quite good. Don't let the sample put you off of listening to this audiobook.

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?

Absolutely! I first read this book in high school in the 90s, and of course I've seen the movie plenty of times over the years, but Clancy is a master of suspense and I was STILL on the edge of my seat listening! He moves between so many different characters and locations, giving you little pieces of the puzzle along the way, that you can't wait to learn how they all come together as a whole.

What three words best describe J. Charles’s voice?

Can't do Brits.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Of course there is an excellent film of this book already. It's rare that an adaptation is so good. Even though I'd read the book before, I've seen the movie more, and at the end I found myself surprised that there were still a couple of hours left after the events that form the climax of the film. I actually think that the filmmakers improved on Clancy's narrative by streamlining the ending. The book has two separate climaxes; the film mashes them together intensely into one.

Any additional comments?

Clancy knocked it out of the park with his first book. There's never been anybody who did what he did quite as well, weaving a complex tale of many characters and lots of hardware, of espionage and military action into such a tense, compelling read. He was at the top of his game in the 80s, at the end of the Cold War, and his first four Jack Ryan novels are outstanding.

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A really terrific memoir

Revisado: 11-23-15

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Absolutely! Not just to HERCULES fans, either. I'd recommend it to people interested in a showbiz autobiography that accurately portrays the huge demands made of actors and crews in weekly television production (Sorbo was only sleeping 4 1/2 hours a night during the first years of HERCULES, and working the rest of the time) and to people interested in recovery from brain trauma equally. The majority of the story is how he and his wife dealt with a terrible illness, but the slice-of-life bits as both a jobbing actor in the early 90s and as a TV star on a hit show are great as well.

Which scene was your favorite?

Personally I loved Sorbo's account of getting the call that he'd been cast in LOIS & CLARK in the days before cell phones, when he had to pull over to a pay phone at the top of Barham Blvd. to get the news... followed by the crushing blow the next day that the network had decided to go another direction. It encapsulated the highs and lows of a Hollywood career at once, but was bearable knowing that he would land HERCULES not long after.

Any additional comments?

Sorbo is a wonderful narrator of his own story, and his wife Sam Sorbo (a key figure in the story) does a great job narrating portions from her point of view as well as bits written by Sorbo's colleagues and crew like Bruce Campbell, Michael Hurst and others.

While the focus of this book is Sorbo's battle with his illness and betrayal by his own body, the all-too-few recollections we get from the set of HERCULES prior to his strokes are wonderful as well. So much so that I would love to see a follow-up memoir all about his time in New Zealand filming the show. The time after the strokes is well covered here, and I doubt he has any memories from that period that aren't about how awful it was to try do all that was asked of him while in such pain, and hiding the magnitude of that pain from most of the people around him.

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Reacher in a full-on spy story

Revisado: 11-21-15

What did you like best about this story?

It's great to see Lee Child deliver a full-on espionage story! And even better to see it done with Reacher. He wrote a fantastic spy story for the anthology Agents of Treachery, but there was a twist to that story that made it not quite the straight-up spy story readers might have expected. This one is, and the Cold War setting makes it even better--even if it might be dealing with industrial espionage rather than political espionage. Unsurprisingly, Child does an excellent job!

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

It's actually not Dick Hill's best performance. It's not BAD at all, but I think Hill is at his best reading the first-person Reacher books. This is one of Child's rare exercises in third-person narrative, and Hill just isn't as good at that. I always find his falsetto female voices (or perhaps I should say voice; there's basically only one) kind of annoying, but I can somehow forgive that when heard in the context of a first-person story told by a man. But like I say, he's not bad here. He's still one of the best narrators going, and the story is short.

Any additional comments?

This takes place in 1986, when Reacher is still with the military police. He's seconded to military intelligence and transferred to Washington D.C. It's short, but has a beginning, middle and end. It's even got some surprises! Child packs in the twists we expect of the spy genre and of the Reacher series into the brief duration, and Reacher gets to demonstrate why he was such a good investigator for the army.

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An excellent James Bond continuation novel

Revisado: 11-21-15

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would recommend this audiobook to anyone who's already read all the Ian Fleming James Bond novels and is looking for more. Amis really manages to capture Fleming's style and pace and attention to detail without copying him, and the result is one of the best post-Fleming continuation novels about the character. He clearly loves Fleming and Bond (one need only read his James Bond Dossier or The Book of Bond to realize that), but also can't quite help indulging in just a bit of parody. But the parody is very subtle (so subtle that in sending up Fleming's xenophobia, Amis actually comes off as even more xenophobic), and in keeping with the sense of humor Fleming had about his own material anyway.

Basically, there is Fleming, and then there are the continuations. None of the continuations are as good as the real thing, but for what they are, there are some excellent ones to be found. Colonel Sun has always been one of my favorites, and revisiting it after many years as an audiobook I find it still holds up as such.

What did you like best about this story?

The pace is great. Amis's Bond story moves very quickly. Bond feels like the same character Fleming wrote about, and the Bond Girl, Villain, and Ally are all great characters true to some of Fleming's best as well.

What about Simon Vance’s performance did you like?

Vance is a totally competent narrator, and I like the sense of continuity of having the same person who reads the Fleming novels take on the continuation novels.

Any additional comments?

The audiobook is unfortunately a bit poorly edited. On several occasions the same exact passage is repeated twice. It's annoying, but definitely not detrimental to the listening experience.

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An unusual but rewarding listen

Revisado: 11-21-15

Any additional comments?

Michael Kitchen is not a typical sort of narrator, but he ends up being absolutely perfect for Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, which is not a typical sort of novel. If you're familiar with Kitchen from FOYLE'S WAR, then just imagine Christopher Foyle reading an audiobook and you have some idea what to expect. Kitchen uses the same cadence and delivery that he does in that character, offering unusually breathy, matter-of-fact, brisk narration. It doesn't sound like someone narrating an adventure; it sounds like someone recounting events. And... that perfectly matches Crichton's writing style.

The Great Train Robbery is a novel, and some of the events are fictionalized, but it is based on true events. Crichton uses the same quasi-non-fiction style that he uses for his other historical novels like Eaters of the Dead or Pirate Latitudes. There are so many accurate period details and references to other events happening at the time or even events happening later that you think you're reading non-fiction... but then the events seem just a little too thrilling to be completely true. The novel is as much about early Victorian society as it is about the titular robbery, and it's largely a condemnation of that society. A story about the criminal element proves the perfect vessel for such condemnation, and Michael Kitchen proves the perfect narrator. He sounds like a professor - granted, a really interesting professor, probably the best you ever had - delivering a particularly good lecture. And that really does add to the reading experience!

The downside to Crichton's historical style is that you never really get into the characters' heads, since the tale is delivered as if by a researcher who would have no way of knowing their inner throughts. But then, rich characterizations were never what Crichton was best at anyway. What he's best at is making details - be they about genetics or viruses or Victorian London - fascinating and exciting. And that's certainly the case here.

Kitchen's unique style takes some getting used to, and despite being a fan of his, I wasn't sure I was going to like it at first. But stick with it, because you suddenly realize it's PERFECT for this material, and adds a lot!

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