Author: 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.

Long Review: ‘Divergent’ takes place in a future Chicago after some unnamed violence has dramatically reduced the population. As part of the process to broker peace, the remaining people divided themselves into five factions. Each is focused on what they believe is the key to peace. The Candor seeks total honesty, the Abnegation aim for total selflessness, the Dauntless value being brave and strong, the Amity strive for peace above all else, and the Erudite seek knowledge for answers.

Beatrice has just turned 16. She was born into Abnegation. Soon she will have to choose a faction to join for the rest of her life. This is not something that people discuss. It is a deeply personal decision – one which will make Beatrice choose between the faction of her birth and the strong feeling she has long had that she doesn’t belong. Leaving her faction means leaving her family. There is a saying that reflects the permanence of the choice: “Faction over blood”.

I really enjoyed both the story and the reader. It would have been easy for this book to be ruined by a reader who didn’t fit Beatrice. While Galvin’s voices for other characters are not as differentiated as I have heard from some other readers, she does a good enough job that you never are confused about who is speaking. The most important thing to me in the reading of this story is that Galvin’s choices for Beatrice’s inner voice are perfect. She sounds like a sixteen year old girl, but she sounds like a strong and fierce girl making hard choices and doing the best she can.

There are a number of other very interesting characters, none of which I will tell you about since I don’t want to spoil anything for you. Just trust me that there are others who you will follow anxiously, many who are more complex than they first appear.

Many people are saying that Divergent is like The Hunger Games. While I see the similarities (strong young girl in a dystopian future) I also see a number of major differences. Even though her word is constrained, Beatrice has more room to make choices for herself than Katniss ever does. While Katniss’s choice is one of self-sacrifice for others, Beatrice can and does make hard choices seeking to be true to herself. The biggest similarity I see between them is that once they make their hardest choices, they fight hard to survive and succeed. I suspect that if you liked The Hunger Games, you will enjoy Divergent.

This is just part one in a series. I look forward to see where Roth takes us. There are so many unanswered questions at the end of this book – but in a ‘I can’t wait to see what happens next’ kind of way rather than a ‘why didn’t she explain more’ kind of way. We make discoveries and learn about the world as Beatrice does. I appreciate the slow reveal and look forward to the rest of this great tale.

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

Long Review: This first book of the Vorkosigan Saga gives us a great blend of creative world building, mature protagonists and a captivating story line.

Cordelia Naismith from peaceful, liberal and scientifically inclined Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan from militaristic, conservative and tradition-bound Barrayar. The two captains are thrown together by circumstances, one forced to take the other as a prisoner. Isolated from both of their worlds and struggling to survive in the wilderness of an unfamiliar planet, they form an unexpected bond.

But of course Cordelia and Aral can’t contemplate their feelings for one another without the interference of a war, the broad reaches of space and lots of planetary politics. Bujold throws everything she can think of at them and our story includes strange alien creatures, high tech weapons, low tech tactics, and space battles and their aftermath.

Those of you who have noticed my penchant for books by Lois McMaster Bujold won’t be surprised that I recommend this book highly, but it is definitely a book which has stood the test of time. Yes, this is Bujold’s first novel and her craft improved with time, but she definitely had a clear vision of the Vorkosigan world and her primary characters. I enjoyed getting to know them as they get to know each other.

Audio sample available.

Reamde

Available from Audible.com

Author: Neal Stephenson
Reader: Malcolm Hillgartner

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

Long Review: I adore Stephenson’s books, so I was at a loss when Anathem fell short for me. When a friend told me the day after Reamde was released that I was in for a treat, I immediately rushed home and bought a copy of the audiobook. And then I rescheduled as much as I could so I could listen to it constantly until the book was over. I binged on this book like a kid with a bag of halloween candy. I loved it like I loved Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, and I love them almost as much as I love my dog.

This novel opens at the Forthrast family reunion, where we meet our protagonists. Richard owns a company that created T-Rain, a popular MMORPG, and he offers his adopted niece Zula a job working on their new game. And then all hell breaks loose. The Russian mob, hackers, terrorists, gamers, bikers, spies, special forces . . . . think of something exciting or intriguing, and chances are Stephenson found a way to incorporate it into the story with elegance and insight. Stephenson’s talent lies in his ability to pack a great deal of information into a plot that keeps moving, while also writing interesting, surprising characters. He favors intelligent, layered characters and generally makes sure at least a couple of brilliant, strong women are mainstays in his cast. I walked away from this book wanting to know these people and ask them about their experiences.

Hillgartner does a fantastic job reading the book. His regular speaking voice seems fitting for Richard, and the accents he uses for the other characters ring true. His pacing is great, his diction is clear and undistracting, and he manages to keep this very long book engaging and entertaining throughout. I plan to seek out other books he narrated for future diversions.

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: 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.

Long Review: Gibson’s latest installment is set in the here and now. Not quite a sequel to Pattern Recognition, Spook Country revisits the present day world of Hubertus Bigend – but in this book Bigend is just one of many players trying to keep their fingers in the pie. In this story we find Bigend attempting to use his vast wealth and resources to see into the center of a series of hidden activities that he can sense the shape of – if not the meaning.

I struggled with how to categorize this book. Science-Fiction? No. Fiction? Yes. Mystery? Basically. I finally settled on High Tech Intrigue. I enjoyed the assortment of tangled paths that Gibson used to lead me to the intersection of many lives and the culmination of many plots. I love puzzles and it is that part of me that especially gloried in this tale. It took a long time for me to figure out exactly who I wanted to root for – just as is often the case in life little is purely black and white.

I enjoyed learning about Locative Art and spies and why rock bands fade away and more. Gibson has mixed interesting tasty tidbits, tangible city landscapes and eloquent, textured descriptions with clues and intrigue. I like his style and have for a long time. I wonder at the new readers who will discover his work now that the present has caught up with his visions of the future such that he can still write the stories in his mind without them being tucked away in the Sci-Fi section.

The reading was all it needed to be – clear and evenly paced. It didn’t take me long to pick out the voices that Dean wanted me to recognize. I suspect that if I ever read this one on paper I will hear Dean’s voice in my mind as I do so.