Just posted over on SFSite.com….
A review of Ubik by Philip K. Dick [BLACKSTONE AUDIOBOOKS]. The review is by podcaster/knitter/blogger Ivy Reisner.
And…
Furies Of Calderon by Jim Butcher [PENGUIN AUDIO] gets a review too, this time the review is by blogger Gil T. Wilson.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Little Book
By Selden Edwards; Read by Jeff Woodman
13 CDs – 15 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: Aug 2008
ISBN: 9780143143512
Themes: / Fantasy / Time Travel / Vienna / 19th Century / Philosophy /
The Little Book is the extraordinary tale of Wheeler Burden, California-exiled heir of the famous Boston banking Burdens, philosopher, student of history, legend’s son, rock idol, writer, lover of women, recluse, half-Jew, and Harvard baseball hero. In 1988 he is forty-seven, living in San Francisco. Suddenly he is—still his modern self—wandering in a city and time he knows mysteriously well: fin de siècle Vienna. It is 1897, precisely ninety-one years before his last memory and a half-century before his birth.
The genre aspects of this novel are not, well, novel. At least to the genre-savvy. Like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the method of time travel is irrelevant. What’s important and interesting is the interaction of Selden Edwards’s fictional characters with their forebears and with historical characters, most notably Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain.
Wheeler Burden has lengthy discussions with Freud, seeming to shape in some way the later ideas that Freud published. He also spends a great deal of time with his own father, who was also in the past for an unknown reason. Since Wheeler’s father had died during World War II, this was an opportunity to get to know each other. Add a very beautiful grandmother, and one can almost hear Freud furiously scribbling notes in the background.
Jeff Woodman is a terrific narrator. He performs accents in a completely believable (and completely understandable) manner. Also notable is his performance of female characters, which is subtle and effective. I’m looking forward to hearing more of his audiobooks.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
The Little Book
By Selden Edwards; Read by Jeff Woodman
13 CDs – 15 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: Aug 2008
ISBN: 9780143143512
The Little Book is the extraordinary tale of Wheeler Burden, California-exiled heir of the famous Boston banking Burdens, philosopher, student of history, legend’s son, rock idol, writer, lover of women, recluse, half-Jew, and Harvard baseball hero. In 1988 he is forty-seven, living in San Francisco. Suddenly he is—still his modern self—wandering in a city and time he knows mysteriously well: fin de siècle Vienna. It is 1897, precisely ninety-one years before his last memory and a half-century before his birth.
It’s not long before Wheeler has acquired appropriate clothes, money, lodging, a group of young Viennese intellectuals as friends, a mentor in Sigmund Freud, a bitter rival, a powerful crush on a luminous young American woman, a passing acquaintance with local celebrity Mark Twain, and an incredible and surprising insight into the dashing young war-hero father he never knew.
But the truth at the center of Wheeler’s dislocation in time remains a stubborn mystery that will take months of exploration and a lifetime of memories to unravel and that will, in the end, reveal nothing short of the eccentric Burden family’s unrivaled impact on the very course of the coming century. The Little Book is a masterpiece of unequaled storytelling that announces Selden Edwards as one of the most dazzling, original, entertaining, and inventive novelists of our time.
The Last Theorem
By Arthur C. Clarke and Frederick Pohl; Read by Mark Bramhall
10 CDs – 11 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Books on Tape
Published: 2008
Two of science fiction’s most renowned writers join forces for a storytelling sensation. The historic collaboration between Frederik Pohl and his fellow founding father of the genre, Arthur C. Clarke, is both a momentous literary event and a fittingly grand farewell from the late, great visionary author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Last Theorem is a story of one man’s mathematical obsession, and a celebration of the human spirit and the scientific method. It is also a gripping intellectual thriller in which humanity, facing extermination from all-but-omnipotent aliens, the Grand Galactics, must overcome differences of politics and religion and come together . . . or perish.
In 1637, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a book about an enigmatic theorem: “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” He also neglected to record his proof elsewhere. Thus began a search for the Holy Grail of mathematics–a search that didn’t end until 1994, when Andrew Wiles published a 150-page proof. But the proof was burdensome, overlong, and utilized mathematical techniques undreamed of in Fermat’s time, and so it left many critics unsatisfied–including young Ranjit Subramanian, a Sri Lankan with a special gift for mathematics and a passion for the famous “Last Theorem.”
When Ranjit writes a three-page proof of the theorem that relies exclusively on knowledge available to Fermat, his achievement is hailed as a work of genius, bringing him fame and fortune. But it also brings him to the attention of the National Security Agency and a shadowy United Nations outfit called Pax per Fidem, or Peace Through Transparency, whose secretive workings belie its name. Suddenly Ranjit–together with his wife, Myra de Soyza, an expert in artificial intelligence, and their burgeoning family–finds himself swept up in world-shaking events, his genius for abstract mathematical thought put to uses that are both concrete and potentially deadly.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone on Earth, an alien fleet is approaching the planet at a significant percentage of the speed of light. Their mission: to exterminate the dangerous species of primates known as homo sapiens.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
The Penguin Podcast, the new podcasting arm of Penguin Books UK and has decided to give a Christmas gift to everyone! They’ve started posting Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the unabridged audiobook as podiobook-like podcast instalments! The first of five episodes presenting the classic Christmas ghost story starts today. They will only be available until January 3rd 2005 so start grabbing it now for FREE now!
A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story Of Christmas
By Charles Dickens; Read by Geoffrey Palmer
5 MP3s – Approx. 3 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: The Penguin Podcast
Podcast: Dec 15th 2005 to January 3rd 2006
Themes: / Fantasy / Christmas / Ghosts / Victorian /
Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is now synonymous with greed and parsimony, believes Christmas to be ‘humbug’. Refusing to donate any of his fortune to the poor, he comforts himself by saying, ‘I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.’ But then the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, returns from the grave to haunt him. Dragging a long and heavy chain, representing his many sins, Marley sends down the three spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future to warn Scrooge against a similar fate…
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
By Stephen King; Read by Frank Muller
Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks [UNABRIDGED]
Date Published: November 1997
ISBN: 0140867155
Themes: / Fantasy / Parallel worlds /
This is the second book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I read the first volume a few months ago (in print) and found it very different from Stephen King’s other work. To start with, it was not set in our world, where King sets nearly all of his novels. This volume is set both in the wasteland of the first novel and this world. King expertly uses the setting along with his unforgettable characters to explore the notions of Good and Evil in a grand fashion.
The main character in the books is Roland, a gunslinger, possibly the last gunslinger, who travels in a world separate but somehow connected to our own. This second volume starts within hours after the first ends. Roland is required to draw three people from our world into his to help him on his quest to reach the Dark Tower. If none of this makes sense, that’s okay. I’m hesitant to provide too much detail. It is enough to say that what you have here is a contemporary fantasy novel written by one of the finest creators of believable characters in fiction.
And Frank Muller does the narrating. I’ve never been disappointed in a Muller narration, and this certainly is no exception. His voice is perfect for this material – I imagine Roland’s voice to be Muller’s – and the great energy which he provides this novel probably made it more interesting than it actually was. Several times when listening time came to and end, I took an extra lap around the block or listened for an extra ten minutes… and Muller’s reading is as responsible for that as King’s writing.
I am definitely a Stephen King fan. I enjoy nearly all of his stories. My favorites are from his early career, The Stand and Salem’s Lot especially. Neither of those have audio versions, unfortunately. (Well, there is a version of The Stand available from Books on Tape, but it is not the complete version of the novel that King released later in his career.)
For more info on the Dark Tower series, check the Dark Tower Compendium.