Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – Audiobook Review

Sep 302011
 

readyplayerone pictureReady Player One by Ernest Cline, narrated by Wil Wheaton
Published in audio by Random House Audio, published in print by Crown, both imprints of Random House

Synopsis:

In 2044 people are going hungry and electricity is unreliable at best. To serve as a distraction from the constant misery, most people barely even live in the real world any more anyway. Instead, they are plugged almost constantly into the virtual reality called the OASIS. For Wade Watts, the OASIS is basically the only thing he has going. In the real world he is an orphan living with his mildly abusive aunt who steals all his food vouchers. After the death of the OASIS’s creator James Halliday, Wade finally seems a glimpse of hope for his future in the Easter Egg Halliday left for whichever game can solve his puzzles. Somehow, Wade is the first among the millions of Gunters (Egg Hunters) to solve the first riddle and locate the first key, but he can’t rest on his laurels, because the Sixers are right behind him. The Sixers will stop at nothing to find the Egg, and if they do the idyll of the OASIS will be lost forever.

Thoughts on the story:

If you lived through the 80s, were born in the 80s, or have ever watched VH1′s I Love the 80s you are probably going to want to read this book. It is a bit heavy on video games, but the cultural references are accessible to anyone who has ever seen a John Hughes movie, and explained well enough that readers will get the gist of anything they weren’t already aware of, without being annoyed by excessive exposition on things they are well aware of.

Cultural references are all well and good, but what is really important to know about Ready Player One is that it is a really good story. Wade is a wonderful protagonist, extremely kind-hearted, but also flawed and driven. His surrounding cast of characters is diverse and easy to relate to, but epic quest on which they find themselves is the real star of the book. Halliday’s Easter Egg quest is fun, suspenseful, and just complicated enough to really capture the imagination.

Thoughts on the audio production:

Wil Wheaton did a magnificent job narrating Ready Player One. Really just phenomenal. His young American characters didn’t have a huge differentiation in voice, but it was never a problem to tell who was speaking, and he did include accents for some other characters. The best part about Wheaton’s narration was his unending enthusiasm, which made an already fun book an absolutely joy to listen to.

soundbytes pictureOverall:

Ready Player One is really great, and I’m sure it would be marvelous in print, but Wil Wheaton’s narration lends it that extra oomph, so get ahold of it in audio if you can!

Buy this book from:
Powells: Audio/Print*
Indiebound: Audio/Print*

I’m launching a brand-new meme every Friday! I encourage you to review any audiobooks you review on Fridays and include the link here. If you have reviewed an audiobook earlier in the week, please feel free to link that review as well. Thanks to Pam for creating the button.

Source: Publisher.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
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Embassytown by China Mieville – Thoughts

Aug 302011
 

embassytown pictureEmbassytown by China Mieville
Published by Del Ray, an imprint of Random House

I struggled with Embassytown when reading, and I’ve struggled over the past months thinking about it for a review. In lieu of a formal review, I am simply going to add a few of the thoughts that linger after all this time. For some context, here is the description from Indiebound:

In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.

When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

  • The linguistics pieces were very interesting, perhaps the most intriguing part of the story. The interplay of language and truth, inability of the Ariekei to lie, or even express abstract concepts unless they had previously been made concrete was consistently interesting.
  • The descriptions of the more science fiction elements of the story, such as the complexities of space travel, the interstellar political systems, and the systems that kept humans alive on the Ariekei world fell flat for me. They seemed neither interesting, nor well enough explained. I am not sure if Mieville has other works set in this universe in which these things are better explained, but it didn’t work for me here.
  • I found Avice to be a thoroughly uninteresting and unsympathetic character. I didn’t care who she was with or what she did, and the rest of the plot was not compelling enough counteract that.
  • My other two experiences with Mieville have both been in audio, narrated by John Lee. I think that audio might be the best way for me to experience Mieville, because talented narrators like John Lee carry me on past these pieces that would otherwise bog me down.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
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Forever by Maggie Stiefvater – Book Review

Jul 182011
 

Forever pictureForever by Maggie Stiefvater
Published by Scholastic Press

This is the third book in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series. This review may contain spoilers for the first two books, Shiver and Linger. I also have a giveaway going on now for Forever.

Ever since her brother Jack was presumed to be killed by them, Isabel Culpepper’s father has had it in for the wolves of Mercy Falls. Of course Isabel knows that the wolves aren’t really wolves at all, but humans who spend time in wolf form, and that they didn’t kill Jack so much as turn him. Luckily Sam is human again these days, as is Cole most of the time, but Grace is finally turning, and has been a wolf all winter. Frankly, Sam has enough to worry about as a suspect in Grace’s disappearance, without worrying about Mr. Culpepper getting together a hunt and directly threatening her life, and the life of the rest of the pack.

There are some really interesting threads of story going on in Forever, particularly in Cole’s development. He is a much more multifaceted character than he was in Linger, especially as he begins to care for Grace and Sam – or at least for what they have together. By this point, Cole and Isabel really get to tell a great amount of the story, especially with Grace spending so much of her time as a wolf.

I think it was the fact that Grace was narrating out of a wolf’s brain so often that made me less enthused about Forever than about Shiver and Linger. Of course I love Sam, how could anyone not? And Isabel and Cole are certainly fascinating and relatively well-developed secondary characters, but it seems that Grace is the anchor of the series for me. With her a relatively small part of the book, narration-wise, I had much less emotional investment in this portion of the story. Luckily it was still strongly-written with an engaging plot, but it just didn’t do quite as much for me as the first three.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the third book in the series, I do recommend the Wolves of Mercy Falls series as a whole. Although secrets are kept and parents defied, the relationship between Grace and Sam is built on familiarity, respect, and affection, and it is much more romantic than certain relationships between certain klutzy girls and sparkly vampires, and much more the type of relationship I would like to read about myself and share with teens

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publicist.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
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Deadline by Mira Grant – Book Review

Jun 142011
 

deadline pictureDeadline by Mira Grant
Published by Orbit Books, an imprint of Hachette

This is the second book in the Newsflesh series. This review will contain spoilers for the first book in the series, Feed.

Since the death of his sister George (Georgia), blogger Shaun Mason doesn’t have much to live for anymore. At this point, the only thing that his keeping him alive at all – and even then, only marginally – is the prospect of revenge, exposing whomever it was who ordered George’s death. The man who was her most immediate cause of death is no more, but Shaun knows there is a conspiracy that set everything up, certainly Tate could not have done everything on its own. This conspiracy seems to reach into the highest echelons of national and international power, and likely even into the CDC – the organization tasked with protecting Americans from the zombie-forming Kellis-Amberly virus, among other things.

Left nearly a metaphorical zombie himself after George’s death – a very dangerous condition, mind you, in the midst of literal zombies – Shaun gets a a jumpstart on life again when a CDC researcher who helped him and George in the past shows up on the doorstep of the After the End Times blog headquarters. Of course, this reanimation almost ends when a massive outbreak of zombies follows close on her heels. With the help of this researcher, herself fearing for her life due to her Kellis-Amberly research, Shaun realizes he might finally have enough information to figure out what happened to George and avenge her death.

It would not be inaccurate to say that Deadline is, more than anything else, a bridge between the first book in the Newsflesh series, Feed, and the third book, Blackout, which will be out in 2012. There are a great number of revelations both about Shaun and Georgia’s early life and their close relationship, and about the nature of Kellis-Amberly and the reality of the epidemic. Certainly things happen – the After the End Times news team does a great deal of traveling and hunting down leads to confirm the truth that is beginning to be unveiled. In addition, there is continued character development, mostly of Shaun, who becomes a much more strongly drawn character than he was in Feed. But primarily, Deadline is setting the scene for Blackout, complete with the traditional mid-series OMG moments.

What is really impressive about Deadline, is that it never feels like filler while you are reading it. All of the hard work that Grant did with world building in Feed helps Deadline feel fully realized. Interestingly, there were not nearly as many run-ins with zombies in Deadline, but this choice made sense for the story that is being told. As in Feed, the zombies are not the point, but more a part of the setting, telling a story of news, blogs, politics, and the culture of fear. It is this that makes the Newsflesh series so successful for me. Grant is using her zombie setting to tell us all a story about ourselves.

Highly Recommended. (Also: I can’t believe I have to wait an entire year to read the third book. This is worse than after I read Catching Fire.)

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
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Kraken by China Mieville – Audiobook Review

Sep 232010
 

5016532196 b355a55a66 m pictureKraken by China Mieville, narrated by John Lee
Published in audio by Random House Audio
Published in print by Del Ray, and imprint of Random House

Synopsis:

As Billy prepares to take another group on a tour through The Darwin Center, where he is a curator, he expects nothing but an ordinary day at work. Billy’s day is going to be anything but ordinary, however. When his tour reaches the room where the Center keeps its giant squid, the kraken, the beast has mysteriously disappeared from the glass tank in which it is kept. All of this would be odd enough, but the disappearance is being investigated by a special arm of the police, the cult (and, essentially, magic) squad who suspect that the Krakenist religion – The Church of God Kraken – may be behind the whole thing. Before too long, Billy actually finds himself evading the police and working with a renegade member of The Church of God Kraken in a desperate attempt to locate the squid before this left causes the end of the world.

Thoughts on the story:

Just as in “The City & The City,” in “Kraken” Mieville takes me on a journey that I never expected. “Kraken” is a remarkably inventive story. I went into it completely blind, knowing nothing but that I had loved “The City & The City” so I was not expecting the whole religion/cult/apocalypse angle and I absolutely adored it. I did think that the story lost a bit of steam in the middle. It is over 16 hours in audio or 500 pages in print, so perhaps it could have used a slightly stronger editor, someone to keep the plot moving a little more in the middle. Regardless, the entire thing was so novel – even after 10+ hours – that the pacing problems did not particularly bother me.

Thoughts on the audio production:

John Lee is a fantastic narrator and did a great job with this challenging title. You can see my entire review of the audio production at AudioFile Magazine.

Overall
If you are only going to read one Mieville book, I do think I would still recommend “The City & The City” over Kraken, largely because I think it had better pacing, but this is a fabulous story that works will in audio and seems that it would be equally fabulous in print.

Buy this book from:
Audible
Powells: Print*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound: Print*
Amazon: Print*

This review was done with an audiobook received from AudioFile Magazine for review .
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

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