Slightly more specific request:
I’m looking for a family audiobook for a road trip. I’d like something with quality audio work. Harry Potter has been a hit in our house but we’ve listened to it plenty. We also tried The Mysterious Benedict Society and it was slow slow and boring I couldn’t stay awake sitting at home.
I’ve gotten Animal Farm and Watership Down from the library but want some other suggestions.
Have you tried Land of Stories? I listened with my 10yo son to half of the first book during a trip and we both loved it. He did not want to wait for the next occasion and continued this book and all the rest alone (he is currently listening to book 6 as far as I know).
Thanks! I’ll look in to it.
JFC how tough are your kids.
It will depend on how good the narrator is, but there’s a bunch of great classics that should work: The Once and Future King, The Borrowers, Redwall, and The Hobbit.
Just finished Mercury Rising, R.W.W. Greene. I went into this having forgotten why it was on my list to be read, and having purchased it because it was cheap on Kindle when I had some credits that were expiring. So I knew I at one point wanted to read it, but had no idea what virtues I expected to find in it, or even whether I was still interested in whatever it was doing. Consequently, I almost didn’t make it past the first chapter, which is not like the rest of the book. The tagline “Top Gun in space!” is bizarre, and moderately suited to that first chapter, but the rest of the book is more like a cross between Top Gun and Catch-22 in space, and isn’t really aiming at the main virtues of either. Instead, it takes a main character who is initially sort of bluntly disappointing as a human and develops him into someone I was happy to read a book about, while taking the sci-fi elements in a moderately extreme direction without ever quite feeling like science fantasy. It’s neither heavily political nor strategic–the characters are generally low-ranking folks with the sorts of concerns you’d expect, and the book spends enough time on those concerns to make their connections to anything larger feel coincidental, rather than character-defining.
After a pretty terrible first impression, I enjoyed it a good deal!
I’m making them tough, lol.
Redwall is a great suggestion, though I forgot to mention that we have listened to about a dozen of Jacques’s books already. I suppose another wouldn’t be bad, though.
Unsure of the audiobook status, but my oldest really enjoyed the Percy Jackson series after finishing HP.
@OhBollox, What in the FUCK did I just read?
Really enjoyed this novel of a mid-twentieth century artist, spending time in an artists’ retreat to find The Next Big Thing. Or is she? Wonderfully written, highly descriptive, and hard to put down.
Enjoyable, although the last one turned out to be the SF equivalent of “it was all a dream“ and chucking your iPad across business class is frowned upon.
Fucking cunt’s trick.
Yep. Viewpoint character experiences continuity errors and other characters have inexplicable powers, what could it be. Beaten to death by Star Trek on its less imaginative days.
To say nothing of the Wizard of Oz.
Enjoyed the first, couldn’t finish the second. Seems I chose well lol.
Wesley Chu’s The Art of Prophecy and its recently-released sequel, The Art of Destiny. I think of the wuxia genre are having largely visual virtues, so I was intrigued to see that a book in that genre was well-reviewed. I cannot recommend starting the series at this time; I was under the mistaken impression that it was a duology. From the end of the second book, it very clearly is not, and I am sad that my poor memory is unlikely to be up to the task of remembering all of these characters until the sequel comes out, and am somewhat impatient. Conversely, while I quite enjoyed both books, I found the prose in the second a little less polished in some kind of obvious ways which made it feel like maybe it was a touch rushed (for example, on one occasion, a group is described as “tired and exhausted”, and a little later the word “exhausted” is used in successive sentences). So, not that my preferences are relevant anyway, but if they were to be, I would satisfy myself with a deliberate pace to the release of the next novel in the series.
I really didn’t follow the fights well at all, and I’m not sure how much it matters–Chu basically puts in placeholder names for a lot of moves which bear some associations, but effectively communicate that the reader, not being an artist of war themselves, couldn’t understand the action at anything like the level the participants are (and perhaps the author couldn’t, either). So they serve as simply a way to convey a vibe, which is probably about the best approach. Consequently, the book doesn’t dwell on the fight details in the way that kung fu movies typically do–it gives you a sense of the impact the action has on the characters, and keeps it snappy. This leaves a lot more room for characterization, world-building, and larger-scale political considerations, all of which it does pretty well (in part by not fussing too much about explaining everything).
Next up will be Black River Orchard. Horror’s not my usual genre, but I’ve found Chuck Wendig to be a good follow on Bluesky, so I keep hearing about it, and thought I’d give it a shot when I saw it in the library.
I’m about 100 pages into Black River Orchard and m going to finish it in spite of having to fight through bad prose and what seems to be a political screed. None of the characters are likable thus far and the married couple has relationship that makes me wonder if the author has made up his wife because that is not how married people act with each other. Maybe something will come up that explains it later.
The political thing, though, is killing my interest. I understand that authors have their own worldview and that worldviews will show up in their writing but I want that worldview to be represented naturally as part of the story. This reads as if he took the top 10 political talking points of the day and artificially inserts them into the story wherever he can. This is not a critique of the worldview, but how it is used; I would be just as turned off if was the opposite views but presented in the same way. If feels way too forced and it is off putting.
Edit: Oh, this prose…
I put the book down for the night when the farmer noted another character get in to his “big ass SUV” and drive away. I understand that when you write from a character’s point of view their use of language may be different, but Every. Single. Character. is written in the same voice and it is all the same immature and vapid voice that sounds like a teenager even though teenagers don’t talk like that.
Edit: Finished it. Hated it. 600 pages of terrible dialogue and even worse decision-making. Also, aside from the apple conceit, unoriginal and predictable.
Very good. It’s still amazing to me how arbitrarily some people qualify as Roman and some do not, and it’s especially telling who is still consistently a barbarian. The messy ‘end’ of the Western part of the Roman empire, and the successors to it.
