The Audiobookaneer, January 2018: Frankenstein in Baghdad, Beneath the Sugar Sky, The Beautiful Ones, and more

Posted on 2018-02-10 at 21:15 by Sam

I've no idea if I'll keep this up, but it doesn't seem like too much to tiptoe back onto the blog with one small monthly feature. I'm still chugging along with weekly release picks over on reddit, but I haven't tried to go back and pick the "picks of the picks" for a month in a long, long time, and, hey, this gives me a chance to put in pretty pictures again! Anyway, here's the first in what I hope is a monthly column this year, of use especially to those really looking for one or two recommendations, and (for the "most missing" roundup) audiobook publishers looking for a stray gem. For the full, far-too-much-at-length, probably, weekly roundups, see: January 2, January 9, January 16, January 23, and January 30. (For the purposes of my sanity, I'm going to ignore books out on January 31 until February's installment, ok? OK.)

PICKS OF THE MONTH

Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel by Ahmed Saadawi, read by Edoardo Ballerini and Kaleo Griffith for Penguin. The novel was Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Winner of France's Grand Prize for Fantasy, and here it's published in English in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mary Shelley's original, and? it's just plain brilliant. "From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, Hadi - a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café - collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive - first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path."

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire, read by Michelle Dockrey for Macmillan is book 3 of McGuire's wonderful "Wayward Children" series which began with the Alex, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning, World Fantasy Award finalist Every Heart a Doorway. With Beneath the Sugar Sky the series gets its third different narrator, and some new characters to go along with some of our now dear and familiar faces.

Posted in Sam's Monthly Listening Report

Ever Felt Like a Convention Wanted to Kill You? -- Dave Reviews I Am Providence

Posted on 2017-08-31 at 04:57 by Dave

I Am Providence
By Nick Mamatas, Narrated by Joel Richards and Rachel Jacobs
Length: 8 hours, 58 minutes
[Audible]

The first convention I ever went to was San Diego Comic Con, right around 1998. It was a huge deal, but you could still buy tickets easily enough and you didn’t have to camp out overnight waiting to get into the panels. But it was enormous, and it was crowded. The second convention I went to was a small SF/F/H literary con also in San Diego, where the panels averaged about 10-20 guests. I remember being shocked to see such a small turn out for some pretty amazing authors.

If you’ve ever been to a similar convention, or if you follow SF/F/H fandom closely, then this book is for you.

The Summer Tentacular convention celebrates the works of H.P. Lovecraft, while the attendees argue with each other about his legacy. As a wordsmith, Lovecraft was terrifying. As a human being, he was a pretty awful racist, and that perspective bled over into some of his fiction. At the Summer Tentacular, we meet our two narrators: up and coming horror author Colleen Danzig and her newly murdered, newly faceless roommate Panossian — who was murdered Panossian during the convention.

Why did someone kill Panossian? Maybe because he had a book bound in human flesh he was looking to sell? Or maybe because he was an asshole? Or…both? The local police are acting a bit weird, so Colleen takes it upon herself to investigate Panossian’s murder among her fellow convention goers, if she can survive the con herself. It sounds like a thriller, and to some extent that’s what it is, but for people who have been following fandom and the field of SF/F/H lately, it’s also pretty hilarious in a dark sort of way. Sad Puppies, convention sexual harassment policies, “fake” fans, the need for diversity in fandom and fiction, internet flame wars segueing into death threats…I mean, as I type this list up, I know in my head these aren’t actually funny — they kind of keep me up at night. But author Nick Mamatas’s portrayal of it all had me cracking up throughout the novel. That’s some kind of dark and delicious magic right there.

It’s impossible for me to talk about this book without talking about Nick Mamatas himself. From the opening chapter, it seems clear that Panossian is a stand-in for Mamatas — which is pretty funny since when we first meet Panossian he’s dead and in morgue, his face recently sliced off. Panossian wrote a cult-favorite Lovecraftian pastiche called The Catcher in Ry’leh (a Catcher in the Rye/Lovecraft mash-up). Mamatas wrote the excellent Move Underground (a Jack Kerouac/Lovecraft mash-up). They both have sharp, witty, angry, and often offensive online personalities which result in a lot of people being pissed off at them. And it’s a lot of fun to see Mamatas mining all of that into his novel to make something both accessible and entertaining.

Joel Richards is great as the dead Panosian, complete with his post-mortal world-weary snark. (A dead author can snark can with the best of them.) That said, Rachel Jacobs does a particularly great reading not only from Colleen’s perspective, but also bringing to life the bizarre cast of characters from the Summer Tentacular. If someone murdered me, I’d hope Jacobs would pounding the convention floor trying to find out who the killer is. (And I’d also hope I could sound as snarky as Richards does, even after I’m dead.)

If you’re a part of SF/F/H fandom, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s funny and smart, skewering Lovecraft and his culture while celebrating it in the most awkward way possible. I hope we get more like this from Mamatas in the future.

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Posted in reviews, Uncategorized | Tagged fandom, h.p. lovecraft, joel richards, nick mamatas, rachel jacobs

April 27th #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Madeline Ashby, Peter Watts, Jo Walton, Robert J. Sawyer, Steven Erikson, and more

Posted on 2017-04-27 at 14:16 by Sam

While I'm putting the finishing touches on the full #WhispersyncDeal roundup of the Monthly Deals in Kindle Books, today's crop of Daily Deal eBooks with Audible Narration is too good to just share out one Tweet at a time. Feast your eyes and ears on:

Company Town by Madeline Ashby, read by Cecelia Kim for Audible for $2.99+$4.49 -- "They call it Company Town--a city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bio-engineered enhancements. As such, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig--making her doubly an outsider, as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire. Still, her expertise in the arts of self-defense and her record as a fighter mean that her services are yet in high demand. When the youngest Lynch needs training and protection, the family turns to Hwa. But can even she protect against increasingly intense death threats seemingly coming from another timeline?"

Posted in Whispersync Deals

"Twisted and Frighteningly Relatable" -- James reviews The Circle

Posted on 2017-04-06 at 13:25 by Sam

The Circle
By Dave Eggers
Narrated by Dion Graham for Random House
 [Audible | Downpour]

-- Review by James Alexander --

Like a novel-length episode of Black Mirror, Dave Eggers’ The Circle paints a twisted and frighteningly relatable picture of technology and human nature gone wrong. The story beings with Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, bored, broke and overqualified at her nightmare of a job in public utility. She’s eventually recruited into the Circle, an exciting, all-encompassing tech company like Google, Facebook and Apple cranked to 11.

It looks like a dream job, at first. But what seems like an exceptionally accommodating work environment eventually becomes overbearing and unsettling. Are the constant parties and the gamification of workplace participation a team building strategy, or is it an attention draining trap? Are the campus dorms, stores, and health coverage simply convenient, or are employees being made dependent and cut off from the outside world? The longer she stays, the more the Circle and its utopian vision blurs the line where it starts to resemble a cult.

Posted in reviews | Tagged dave eggers, dion graham, james alexander, the circle

March #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Kate Reading reading Marie Brennan, Simon Vance reading Brian Staveley and James Maxwell, and more

Posted on 2017-03-31 at 03:56 by Sam

I'm getting this roundup just, barely, under the wire, as the main roundup expires at midnight on March 31. So... without further adieu, here's what most catches my #WhispersyncDeal-attuned eyes and ears among the 218 eBooks with Audible Narration in the March Monthly Deals in Kindle Books:

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan, read by Kate Reading for $2.99+$3.99 NOTE: it looks like the Audible add-on portion of this price changed to $12.99? or? I somehow had the wrong number yesterday? -- A fantastic book and audiobook, highly recommended: "All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world's preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth and misunderstanding into the clear light of modern science. But before she became the illustrious figure we know today, there was a bookish young woman whose passion for learning, natural history, and, yes, dragons defied the stifling conventions of her day. Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever."

The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley, read by Simon Vance for $2.9+$3.99 -- Book 1 of the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, fantastic epic fantasy under one of the best narrators in the business: "The emperor of Annur is dead, slain by enemies unknown. His daughter and two sons, scattered across the world, do what they must to stay alive and unmask the assassins. But each of them also has a life-path on which their father set them, destinies entangled with both ancient enemies and inscrutable gods."

Posted in Whispersync Deals

What ever happened to Sam's "Release Week" roundup posts? They're on reddit!

Posted on 2017-03-02 at 02:27 by Sam

I’ve realized that I never made any kind of “formal” post or announcement here on the blog, when I moved the “Release Week” roundup posts from here to reddit’s /r/audiobooks… So… Yeah… Sorry about that. I’ve been a moderator there for quite a long time now, and when push came to shove for that particular column, the formatting, linking, images, and such just became a bit too much to both write up here and then sanitize a bit for posting over there, and I just took to using the more or less “barebones” formatting over there and calling it a day. If you’d like to go back and take a look at what’s been coming out on a week by week basis for, oh, the past year and a half, at least, start here with my picks for the release week ending February 28 and work your way backwards through the “last week” links. Enjoy! I don’t think I’ll make too much of a habit of posting here about it, but I’ll start at least sharing the week’s picks on Facebook and Twitter. I know it’s not quite the same without the images and links (and more extensive write-ups) but, well, it’s what I’ve got time to slash together these days.

Posted in Release Week

"The past can’t be changed, but it can be learned from." -- James reviews Snapshot

Posted on 2017-02-28 at 19:21 by Sam

Snapshot
By Brandon Sanderson
Narrated by William DeMeritt for Audible

— Review by James Alexander —

Snapshot is one of those books you know will probably be a movie soon right away. I mean that in the best possible sense, the premise is just too good. In a city of millions, detectives Davis and Chaz are the only real people. Cops in this futuristic world have taken to using “Snapshots”, large scale, holodeck-like re-creations of the past to solve crimes.

Posted in reviews | Tagged brandon sanderson, james alexander, snapshot, william demeritt

February #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Octavia Butler, Julie McElwain, Wesley Chu, Greg Bear, Rysa Walker, Veronica Rossi, Ben Fountain, and more

Posted on 2017-02-26 at 17:52 by Sam

All right! February's Monthly Deals listings, of which 269 are eBooks with Audible Narration, aren't actually that long in terms of what I would call outstanding #WhispersyncDeal titles. But! A solid dozen are well worth checking out, starting with some time travel:

Kindred by Octavia Butler, read by Kim Staunton for $2.99+$3.49 -- "Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin."

A Murder in Time: A Novel by Julie McElwain, read by Lucy Rayner for $1.99+$3.47 -- "When brilliant FBI agent Kendra Donovan stumbles back in time and finds herself in a 19th century English castle under threat from a vicious serial killer, she scrambles to solve the case before it takes her life—200 years before she was even born."

All right, how about some sci-fi?

Posted in Whispersync Deals

January #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Aldous Huxley, Meg Elison, Jacqueline Carey, Alex Bledsoe, Clive Barker, and more

Posted on 2017-01-31 at 00:04 by Sam

The first #WhispersyncDeal roundup of 2017 is here! As usual I'll run down my picks among this month's Whispersync-for-voice-enabled Monthly Deals in Kindle Books, also known now as eBooks with Audible Narration, of which there are 536 to scan through this month. Well, I'm going to keep calling them "Whispersync deals", and here's what most caught my eye and ear this month; don't wait too long as these deals expire on January 31:

Island by Aldous Huxley, read by Simon Vance for Tantor Audio for $1.99+$3.99 -- Orwell's 1984 is a best-seller again, though I might suggest Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for a more apt parable for our "road to dystopian" times, not to mention it's read superbly by Claire Daines, but I'm quickly losing track of what I wanted to say here. Huxley's Brave New World is his most well-known work, also depicting a dystopian future, though one of control through entertainment and drugs rather than fear and misinformation. Here, though, is a utopian novel, and one we could all stand to revisit, and hope upon, under the superb narration of Simon Vance. "In his final novel, which he considered his most important, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope."

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison, read by Angela Dawe for Brilliance Audio for $1.99+$1.99 -- A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016, a Tiptree recommendation, and Philip K. Dick Award Winner, rather than a strictly dystopian tale, a post-apocalyptic feminist speculative novel. "When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead. In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth’s population—killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant—the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power—and the strong who possess it. A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men’s clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she’ll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence. After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide." A sequel, The Book of Etta, is forthcoming in February.

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged aldous huxley, alex bledsoe, angela dawe, clive barker, jacqueline carey, meg elison, simon vance, stefan rudnicki

December 25th #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Neil Gaiman, Harper Lee, Pax, The Nest, Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, and more

Posted on 2016-12-26 at 02:50 by Sam

In addition to the month-long December deals, Amazon.com has a pretty darned good lineup of Kindle Daily Deals today, including 26 Whispersync for Voice enabled titles. Here's a quick roundup of the best deals on the best titles:

American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition by Neil Gaiman, read by either George Guidall (the original audiobook) or the matching 10th anniversary edition full cast production, for $2.95+$3.99 -- "First published in 2001, American Gods became an instant classic—an intellectual and artistic benchmark from the multiple-award-winning master of innovative fiction, Neil Gaiman. Now discover the mystery and magic of American Gods in this tenth anniversary edition. Newly updated and expanded with the author’s preferred text, this commemorative volume is a true celebration of a modern masterpiece by the one, the only, Neil Gaiman."

Fiction: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, read by Reese Witherspoon for Harper Audio for $.99+$3.95 -- "A historic literary event: the publication of a newly discovered novel, the earliest known work from Harper Lee, the beloved, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Go Set a Watchman features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Returning home to Maycomb to visit her father, Jean Louise Finch—Scout—struggles with issues both personal and political, involving Atticus, society, and the small Alabama town that shaped her."

Kids: Pax by Sara Pennypacker, read by Michael Curran-Dorsano for $2.99+$3.95 -- "National Book Award Longlist * New York Times Bestseller * An Amazon Best Book of the Year. From bestselling and award-winning author Sara Pennypacker comes a beautifully wrought, utterly compelling novel about the powerful relationship between a boy and his fox. Pax is destined to become a classic, beloved for generations to come."

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged jeremy irons, neil gaiman, reese witherspoon, roxane gay