books – SFFaudio

The Reading Envy Podcast

SFFaudio Online Audio

Jenny Colvin and I (Scott Danielson) were talking about books one day, and decided there was room for another podcast. We decided that the podcast would come out once a month, and that we’d talk about what whatever we read the month prior. To limit the length of the podcast, we decided that picking three books each would be reasonable.

We also decided that the podcast needed to include guests, and that we’d go for a light conversation like you’d have in a cafe or a pub with friends. All books are fair game.

The latest episode (#2) is posted, and our guest is Bryan Alexander. Give it a listen! We hope you enjoy it.

READING ENVY 002: RETURN OF THE EUTHANIZED BOOK

Bryan brought three books along for discussion:

The Proteus Paradox by Nick Yee
Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 by John Milton Cooper Jr.
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Scott talked about:

The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara W. Tuchman
Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections and Other Obsessions by Guillermo del Toro
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton

And Jenny focused on:

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (see also “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” on The Believer)

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 002: Return of the Euthanized Book

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Posted by Scott

Review of Ur by Stephen King

SFFaudio Review

Here’s the latest in our 7th Anniversary Festival of Short Stories!

UR
By Stephen King; Read by Holter Graham
2 Hours, 20 Minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Audio
Published: 2010
Themes: / Science Fiction / Time Travel / Multiple Universes / Books / Kindle /

When this story first came out, it was available exclusively for the Kindle, and King made the Kindle itself one of the main characters. A special, one-of-a-kind Kindle, of course, that lets the user flip through universes picking books that brilliant writers wrote in parts of their lives that didn’t exist in this universe. Ernest Hemingway, for example, lived a few years longer in one universe (in one UR, as they are called in the story), and wrote a novel or two more. This description feels a bit like Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax”, and the main character is tempted to take the story in that very direction, but doesn’t. Instead, he reads and reads for his own pleasure. Things don’t get really complicated until he uses his Kindle to take a look at our UR.

I love me some Stephen King, and this is a pretty good science fiction story. It doesn’t offer anything new to the pervasive (and tiresome) “multiple universe” sub-genre, except this is Stephen King writing it, and I like the people he writes about. It’s extremely well-narrated, too, by Holter Graham.

|HERE| is a very cool promo page from Simon and Schuster that contains an excerpt of the audiobook and an interview with Holter Graham.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson