The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire, Book 1)

Author: Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith
Reader: James Marsters

Short Review: A well read interesting blend of airships, vampires, alternate history and a strong princess coming of age and discovering her strength.

Long Review: This is one of those books where you know early on that you are meant to root for the unlikely ‘bad guy’ hero and boo the shiny ‘good guy’ megalomaniac. While part of me felt a bit manipulated, the story was quite fun once I let go that I wanted it to be more inventive or surprising. James Marsters finds a way to pull you in with the voices and the pacing.

Part of me was holding a grudge for the cover art. I hate when the art doesn’t match my interpretation of the text or gives something away. But honestly, when I admitted that this was halfway to a romance novel I didn’t begrudge them their dashing couple on the cover. The fact that the female lead is strong, with hints of greater strength in her future, helped keep me interested as well.

The authors did a nice job creating an alternate history with their own version of vampires. I liked the steampunk touches in the form of airships, clothing and overall tone. There was also a dash of swashbuckling pirate flavor tossed in. As is often the case with the first book in what is known will be a series, a lot of this story lays the foundation for what I imagine must be on the way. I will say that this gave more time for character development and very vivid descriptions that give you a real sense of this alternate version of the year 2020.

James Marsters  did a great job. I am not sure I would have stuck with this book long enough to really get hooked if there hadn’t been a strong reader. Now I just have to wait for them to release the audio version of the sequel, The Rift Walker.

Boneshaker

Author: Cherie Priest

Readers: Kate Reading and Wil Wheaton

Short Review: A steampunk adventure set in an alternate-history Seattle where the Civil War just won’t end, airships abound, mad scientists run amok, volcanoes make zombies, and intricate questions about liberty and rights continually rear their heads.

Long Review: For no good reason whatsoever, a paper copy of this book languished on my shelf for a few months before I finally broke down and bought the audio version. Initially, I’d been hesitant to listen to it because I was never a of Star Trek (I know, I know) so I didn’t have any particular connection to Will Wheaton. I also hesitate to get hooked on series that are still being written. I finally got over it and dove right in, listened to the whole series, and then listened to them again. I’m itching to start a third time, but figure I can wait for the next installment.

Will Wheaton does a great job narrating the sections of the book following Zeke, a runaway teen trying to prove that his father was a good man. Kate Reading reads the sections following Zeke’s mother Briar Wilkes, the daughter of Seattle’s late Sheriff and widow of a disgraced scientist and inventor. I adored both readers, but I particularly fell for Kate Reading’s voice. She strikes the perfect balance between Briar’s strength and the desperation that she struggles with as she searches for her son and tries to survive the nightmare that Seattle has become in the wake of her husband’s actions.

Priest is an excellent researcher, and this series really showcases her knowledge of 19th century American history. I’m often hesitant to read historical fiction or alternate histories because I find weak research so annoying, but there’s nothing to worry about with Priest’s books. She picks the perfect things to extend the Civil War in her story, and develops a creepy, fascinating plot to explain her changed Seattle.

Moreover, Priest develops excellent characters. Many series fizzle out after the first few books because the author only manages to build a few solid, interesting characters. With this book, Priest introduces a cast of fascinating people, all of whom I want to follow for book after book. The women she writes are particularly interesting, and Zeke reads true as a good but confused teen. Priest set the hook deep with Boneshaker, and I can’t wait to see where she’ll go with the rest of the series.

Author: Scott Westerfeld
Reader: Alan Cumming
Bonus: Endnote read by the author detailing what is fact and what is fiction

Short Review: In this stunning follow up to Leviathan, Alek and Deryn continue on their intricate path through the steampunk inspired alternate World War I created by Westerfeld. In this rollicking adventure we weave through the back streets of Istanbul, eggs are hatched, some secrets are revealed while others stay safely hidden.

Long Review: The fear of the sequel is quite reasonable. Many of us have been let down after long waits for the next installment of some amazing volume. Fear not – this sequel is the real deal. This is the type of sequel that makes you wish the next one was sitting right behind it on the shelf – but sadly we must wait until September 2011 for the third in the trilogy, titled Goliath.

Behemoth retains our favorite characters and introduces a few new ones. I especially love the strong women and girls in this book. Westerfeld manages to have such a great mix of male and female characters, not to mention just a great story, that this should appeal to young adults of both genders, as well as adults who enjoy alternate history or steampunk.

I don’t want to give away any of the fabulous twists and turns, but I can’t resist repeating that the bulk of the story takes place in and around Istanbul. It is a fabulous rich backdrop to this chapter of the story with lots of ornate detail (the author traveled there to get a first-hand feel for the place) as well as a great mix of cultures and languages.

The reader is still fabulous and takes on all the assorted new accents necessary. I love when the voices are so distinct that I know who is speaking without needing to be told. While I know that I am missing out on the beautiful drawings in the paper version of the book – I still feel like I have the chance to paint the tale with my own imagination while listening to Cumming’s adept reading.

The story gives us a chance to get better acquainted with both Alek and Deryn/Dylan. While the first book spent more time setting up the story and all the supporting characters necessary, this book gives us a chance to just watch Alek and Deryn/Dylan grow and evolve as they work their way around all the obstacles in their paths. We also get new beasties large and small (or should I say gargantuan and petite?) – and of course there are more clanker machines, bigger and more fabulous than ever.

As a special treat at the end we get to hear Westerfeld himself explain which parts of the story are history and which parts he made up.

If you haven’t read Leviathan, I would begin with that book first — but I wholeheartedly recommend this book without reservation.

Audible sample available.

Readers: Davina Porter and Simon Prebble

Short Review: Clarke’s entrancing, charming short stories about the magical world introduced in Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell particularly focusing on the women who practice magic in this alternate England and run-ins between Englishpeople and faeries. Prebble and Porter are incomparably good readers, taking turns reading stories about men and women, respectively. Clarke’s storytelling is downright fascinating, and her language precise and beautiful. I love this audiobook, have listened to it twice, and know I’ll listen to it again and again. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Long Review: I absolutely loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The only real fault I found with it (and yes, I know this is obnoxious) was Prebble’s mispronunciation of the word sidhe. Prebble reads the first section of this book, and I can’t tell you how widely I smiled when he said sidhe, and said it correctly. We language geeks can be pleased just as easily as we can be annoyed.

The title story of this volume is one of the real gems of the book. It describes Jonathan Strange’s meeting with the ladies of Grace Adieu, where his brother-in-law serves as a preacher. The Ladies, of course, practice magic in secret: in this alternate England, most Englishmen assume no women have any truck with magic, and that no one alive apart from Norrell and Strange has any real power. Porter narrates this story, and her reading is fantastic. She uses a precise, posh British accent for many of the characters, but switches deftly from one character and accent to another. She keeps to a quick pace, but her diction is so clear that no meaning or words are lost. Porter also reads “Mrs. Mabb;” “On Lickerish Hill,” a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin; and “Antickes and Frets.” The latter two are particularly dear to me because they trace magical spinning and magical attacks via embroidery. As a fiber-artist, I love to see anyone write well about fiber arts.

Prebble reads the introduction and the other stories in the book. Of his, my favorite is “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner,” the final story in the book. It’s a comic story about the play between the Raven King, a charcoal maker, and a variety of Christian figures. I chuckled at “The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse,” which is set in the town of Wall from Neil Gaiman’s Stardust: I love to see my favorite authors collaborate.

As in the novel that precedes these stories, Clarke plays with concepts of femininity, magic, learning, power, manners, history, and morals. She erases the silly, romanticized visions of faeries and replaces them with portraits of dangerous, powerful, careless otherworld people. Her heroines subvert the rules laid out for them, however secretly. Her heroes win more often through study and thoughtfulness than force. I love her England. I want more of it.

Clarke’s audiobooks are some of the finest examples of the art I’ve come across. The author’s stories and language are beautiful and entrancing, and the readers are engaging, precise, entertaining, skilled with accents, and a joy to listen to. I can’t wait for Clarke’s next book, and when it does come out, it will be hard to decide whether to read it on paper first or listen to the audiobook version first.

Author: Neal Stephenson

Reader: Oliver Wyman, Tavia Gilbert, William Dufris, Neal Stephenson

Short Review: A pretty good but overly long book from one of my favorite authors, read less-than-ideally. This alternate future tale depicts a world where the intellectual elite are forcibly cloistered in pseudo-monastic communities around the world where they’re free to think and learn but denied access to many technologies and to “saecular,” (i.e., non-intellectual) society. The protagonist Fraa Erasmus is layered and likeable, but the book could stand to lose a couple of hundred pages and the narration isn’t as good as it should be. In this instance, I think I would have preferred the paper book to the audio book.

Long Review: This book has gotten a lot of attention on the web. Stephenson is a very important, very good sci-fi writer, and his work is particularly popular among web monkeys like me. He wrote The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, i.e., oh-my-god-the-best-sci-fi-book-everrrrr. My heart breaks to criticize him. He’s brilliant, and he writes great women and interesting plots, and he clearly knows more about science than I do, so I won’t criticize him there. But, sometimes, he needs to be reigned in. It feels like he just plain wasn’t this time. I don’t shy away from long books. I love long books, as long as their length is merited. This time around, Stephenson came up with a huuuuuge concept and fleshed out every little bit of it. I wish he’d paired things down.

Stephenson has a habit of going on tangents that get a bit out of hand. Some of the tangents, like the those about mythology in Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, amuse me to no end. In Anathem, some of the tangents were less appealing to me because they tended to be about mathematical theory, but in an alternate reality where each theorem has a different name. It just got to be a bit much. But, I’m a mythology buff and not a math buff, so another reader could have the opposite reaction.

Most of the major characters in this novel are compelling and likable, which is perhaps its greatest strength. Erasmus, Orolo, Ala, Lio, Jad, Sammann, Cord, and Yul are the kind of people who should populate more books. So many sci-fi and fantasy writers can only write plot, and fill their plots with little more than thumbnail sketches of people. Stephenson gives a lot of thought to his characters. He ends up constructing personalities we want to continue to follow, ever after hundreds of pages with them.

My biggest complaint about this book is the narration. William Dufris, who does the lion’s share of the narration, uses some inflections and has reading habits that really, really annoy me. In moments of tension, Dufris uses volume changes and breathiness to impart emotion rather than, you know, emotion. The result is swaths of text that are hard to understand because his attempts to emote just end up being hard to hear. Over and over, I’d be happy with the narration for ages and then I’d smack right into another instance of over-wrought, odd readings. It made my ears itch. And because this is a very long book, each instance bothered me more than the last, and each made me like the audiobook less. In all fairness, the spaces between these instances were generally good. I’d be fine with Dufris for an hour or two, and then I’d want to throttle him, and then my annoyance would pass and I’d forgive Dufris until . . . Remember, this is 32.5 hours of listening. Even if Dufris was annoying for only 5 percent of that time, that’s a lot of time with itchy teeth.

There are other narrators, who largely serve as the voice of a dictionary, introducing new words at chapter openings. Tavia Gilbert read from the dictionary several times, and her voice is wonderful. I will seek her out in other audio books. Neal Stephenson also reads some of the definitions, and I vastly preferred his narration to Dufris’. Whenever Stephenson would read a portion of the book, I would latch onto his voice and wish he’d continue for the rest of the work.

All in all, this is perhaps my least favorite book of Stephenson’s, and I’m not happy with the main reader. It is the longest audio book I’ve listened to, and I knew that the whole time I was listening. I couldn’t forget its length. Far too often, it felt like a lengthy homework assignment rather than an enjoyable passtime.

Anathem

Author: Michael Chabon
Reader: Peter Riegert

Extra features: The audiobook includes an interview with Michael Chabon about his inspiration for the book, his favorite books and genres, and his writing process.

Short Review: Chabon’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning alternate history of a world without Israel but with a temporary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. Hard-boiled detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a junkie chess-player with his partner and cousin Berko Shemets, a half-Tlingit, half-Jewish cop who is a good father, a good Jew, and a good partner trying to save Landsman from himself. As the case progresses, more and more connections to organized crime, shady US government machinations, separatist Orthodox communities, and zealotry reveal themselves. Riegert is an ideal reader, comfortable with accents, Yiddish, noir, and sadness.

Long Review: I love this book. I read it on paper first, and was anxious to hear how well Reigert would handle Landsman’s voice. He does a masterful job. The book is written in the third person, but Landsman is on just about every page, so we hear his speech over and over. Reigert is careful to give Lansman, Berko Shemetz, and the other major characters distinct voices and rhythms, and he does a very good job of it. Like all of the best audiobook readers I’ve heard, Riegert balances acting with diction; maintaining a good rhythm and drawing a complete character while also keeping his accented speech easy to understand.

The novel is set in Sitka, Alaska in an alternate history. In the world of the novel, Israel fell to Arab attack in 1948, and the US agreed to make a temporary semi-autonomous federal district in Sitka for Jewish refugees. Sitka’s term of independence is ending, and all of the Jewish refugees there must prepare to leave for new homes elsewhere. As the local police are wrapping up their case files to hand over to the Americans, a junkie is murdered in the hotel where Landsman lives and Landsman takes the case. He should file the case away as quickly as possible but can’t let it go. The deeper Landsman investigates the victim and his connections, the more entangled he becomes.

Chabon writes wonderful characters, in this and all of his novels. Landsman, his ex-wife and boss Bina, Berko Shemetz, and the rest of the characters in the novel are engaging and deep and fascinating. You root for Landsman, but you also want to strangle him. Riegert’s narration intensifies that connection to Landsman and the rest. I found myself worrying about them all while listening to the novel, even though I already knew what was coming next.

Chabon does amazing things with language and speech in this novel. I’m no expert on Yiddish, of course, but I love the way Chabon intertwines Yiddish with noir phrasing and settings. It flips the whole hard-boiled detective genre–in a good way. I doubt there will ever be a sequel, but I would absolutely love the chance to follow Landsman and Shemetz on another case.

All in all, this is a fascinating, entertaining, beautifulky-read audiobook and one I know I’ll return to.