Divergent by Veronica Roth

Reader: Emma Galvin

Short Review: Intense first-person YA tale with strong 16 year old female protagonist trying to find her place in a very complicated far future world. Fabulous reader, great story.

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

Reader: Grover Gardner

Short Review: The first book in one of my all time favorite series, read by a brilliant reader. Great character driven sci-fi tale.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Reader: Malcolm Hillgartner
Short Review: A fantastic, well-read, fast-paced novel of hackers, criminals, anti-heroes, terrorists, and gamers.

Anathem by 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.

Spook Country by William Gibson

Spook Country

Author: William Gibson
Reader: Robertson Dean

Short Review: A good listen. Likable characters and diverse perspectives carry us through a story set in the here. The author who coined the term cyberspace delivers a carefully wrought tale of high tech intrigue. Robertson Dean reads well – not a performance I would gush about, but it gets the job done without any mannerisms that I found annoying. He faded into the background in the telling – and in my book that is just fine.