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Audiosynced: January 2013 Edition

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Welcome to another edition of AudioSynced, co-hosted by myself and Abby (the Librarian). Each month we offer up links to reviews, news, and other interesting audiobook tidbits from around the web. You’re welcome to contribute anything you’ve written about audiobooks in the month of December by dropping a link in the comments. If you missed out last month, AudioSynced will be hosted over at Abby’s blog in February, so send her your goods. 

A couple of thoughts before the round up: would people be interested in an updated list of Twitter accounts or strong audiobook reviewing blogs? It’s probably been almost two years since we did that, and we could put something together again. If so, what are some of your favorite — strongest, most interesting, most helpful — blogs and Twitter accounts for audiobook information or reviews? Or if you know other great resources, including Pinterest boards (I’ve included one below) or Facebook pages, those would be worth knowing about, too. 

Second, I haven’t reviewed an audiobook in a long time, but I did get the chance to listen to one last month, and it’s made me eager to try bringing that back into my life and routine. If anyone has good tips or suggestions for doing that, I’d love to hear. I commute to work — about 20 minutes each way — which is one way to sneak it in, but I’d love to hear your tips and tricks, too. 

Don’t be shy. AudioSynced is meant for you to promote what you’ve written, so share away in the comments. 

Audiobook Reviews


  • Melissa over at Book Nut has a review of Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts. She says, “This book was fascinating. It did spawn a lot of thought and discussion: about the nature of evil, about relationships, about what could have been done, about politics.”
  • Trish at Hey Lady, Whatcha Readin’? shares a review of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and says, “Gaiman does an amazing job, making me eat my opinion about authors reading their own books.”
Audiobook News & Features

  • An interesting piece out of New Hampshire Public Radio — in this interview with AudioFile founder and editor Robin Whitten, she talks about the best audiobooks read by celebrities. You can even listen to some clips to see what makes the production worthwhile. 
Have something interesting from December you want us to know about? Leave a link. Or if you want to share anything interesting from elsewhere on the web, you know what to do. And no worries — if you didn’t review anything this month but want to participate, Abby will be hosting AudioSynced next month. 

AudioSynced: October Edition

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First, check out our new look! After using the old image for more than a year with incorrect blog addresses, we thought it about time to update that. To make sure we were completely updated, we swapped out our ear bud image for the big headphones because, well, it looked neat.

AudioSynced is hosted by yours truly and Abby, and we swap each month who hosts the roundup of all things audiobook in the blogging and book world (best as we can, anyway!). This month, I’m covering the audiobook reviews and news posted in October, and Abby will take the charge next month. If you posted something and want it included, drop a link to your post in the comments. Missed out this month? Abby will host next month, so send her your goods.

Apologies for a relatively thin edition of AudioSynced. It seems like a lot of the usual audio reviewers are taking a listening hiatus this month. So if I missed something or you want to add to it, don’t be shy!

Reviews

Heidi over at Bunbury in the Stacks has a couple of reviews, including Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood and Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

Lisa at Shelf Employed reviews an early chapter book, Nancy Krulick’s What’s Black and White and Stinks All Over, which is the fourth book in the George Brown, Class Clown series.

Beth of A Foodie Bibliophile in Wanderlust reviews Gabrielle Zevin’s Because it is My Blood, Yes Chef by Marcus Samuelsson, and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson.

Lee at Reading With My Ears lends her thoughts on Maryrose Wood’s The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Hidden Gallery, Mark Haddon’s The Red House, Christian Burch’s The Manny Files, Ian Rankin’s The Falls, and Georgette Heyer’s The Convenient Marriage. She also snuck in a review of Joseph Delaney’s The Last Apprentice: Rage of the Fallen.

Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead is this month’s audiobook contribution from Sarah at YA Librarian Tales.

Over at Good Books and Good Wine, Allison takes a stab at reviewing an audiobook. Her choice? Amanda Quick’s Seduction. April offers up an audiobook reviews of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula and Walter Dean Myers’s Sunrise Over Fallujah.

Flannery at The Readventurer reviews David Levithan’s recently released Every Day.

News & Other Audio Bits


Janssen has a thought-provoking question: do you reread audiobooks? Would you? She enjoyed her audiobook “reread” experience quite a bit.

Sharon Grover and Liz Hannegan talk about how educators can use audiobooks to meet STEM initiatives, including common core standards.

Crusher by Niall Leonard

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Crusher is a book with a marketing problem. Or perhaps “peculiarity” is a better word than “problem.” You see, Niall Leonard happens to be married to E. L. James, she of the Fifty Shades of Grey fame, and the publisher has been touting this in its press about the book. I suppose it’s attention-grabbing, but I think it does the book a disservice for a number of reasons: Crusher is a completely different book, written for a completely different audience, and this sort of marketing makes it seem like Leonard used his wife to pave his way to publication.

Actually, Leonard does have some good writing credits, which were thankfully also mentioned in the press release I received. He’s written for several well-known UK television shows like Hornblower and Wire in the Blood. I suppose it’s inevitable that his relationship to James would have emerged, whether or not the publisher touted it. Perhaps the strategy really does help sell more copies of the book – I wouldn’t know – but I still think it’s strange (and funny).

All that aside, Leonard has written a thoroughly enjoyable mystery of publishable quality. It doesn’t surprise me that he has experience writing television – the book is fast, with lots of dialogue and action. It’s one of those books that could also accurately be described as a thriller, although it’s certainly a whodunit as well.

Seventeen year old Finn Maguire is a high school dropout, working at a London fast food place and living with his dad, a has-been actor now struggling (and failing) to start a new career as a screenwriter. Finn comes home from work one day to find his dad bludgeoned to death, and as is almost always the case in mystery novels, our protagonist is the prime suspect.

Since Finn figures the police are too busy focusing on him to find the real murderer, he decides to do some investigating of his own. His search leads him to a mob boss named McGovern, and before long, Finn is in deep, deep trouble. But he’s also uncovering lots of secrets and getting closer to finding the truth.

Crusher doesn’t have a large number of characters, which also means it doesn’t have a large pool of suspects. Due to this fact, many listeners may find the culprit easy to guess. They may also feel that a certain red herring takes up entirely too much of the plot. Still, these flaws are easy to overlook, at least in the audio version, in light of the book’s strengths.

Primary among these strengths is Finn’s (first person) voice, of which the narration is part and parcel. I’m a sucker for narrators with accents, and Daniel Weyman has a terrific one. He’s great at conveying Finn’s bluster and toughness, but also the emotion that his tough words try to hide. I read a review of Crusher that called Finn a “cold fish,” but I found that to be far from the truth in Weyman’s capable hands. Finn puts up a strong front, but he’s clearly torn up about his father’s death, and later events in the story show his shell cracking further. After a pretty heart-breaking denouement, I was really feeling for the guy.

One element that was not as easy to overlook, however, was the female element. Basically, all the females in Crusher are awful. One or two may approach “realistically flawed,” but that’s pushing it. Of course, the males aren’t too great, either, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it would otherwise. This is a book peopled with some very unsavory characters, not unexpected for a book about the mob. (Normally I stay away from books that feature the mob in any way, but I love listening to mysteries on audio above all, and I figured I would give this a shot.)

Leila reviewed this one a little while ago, and she focuses on how it doesn’t seem to really be a young adult novel, due to its lack of “firsts” for its main character. That’s a question I don’t have a firm opinion on, but I think it’s interesting to ponder. Regardless, I think Crusher will certainly appeal to teens who like grittier mysteries and stories about the mob, and this is a well-done audio version.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Crusher is available now.

Audiosynced: August Edition

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Welcome to the monthly round up of all things audiobook. Audiosynced is hosted by STACKED and Abby (the) Librarian. If you reviewed or blogged about audiobooks in some capacity during the month of August and you don’t see a link to your post, share it in the comments! Next month, Abby will host the round up at her blog.

Audiobook News & Features

Over at School Library Journal, Sharon Grover and Lizette Hannegan write about how audiobooks develop core critical reading skills.

Audible offers up their 25 essential teen audiobooks, complete with samples. Of course, a number of these aren’t even teen books, but you know.

Remember the Olympics happened last month? Did you catch the commercial about athletes who use audiobooks to get their reading in while working out? Here’s a nice blog post about it, with the commercial.

Audiobook Reviews

Lee over at Reading with My Ears reviews Miles, the Autobiography, Sara Zarr’s How to Save a Life, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Jill Paton Walsh’s The Attenbury Emeralds.

Heidi at Bunbury in the Stacks offers up a bunch of mini audioreviews, including Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, and Red Glove and Black Heart by Holly Black. She’s also got a review of Jeff Hirsch’s Eleventh Plague and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793.

Melissa at One Librarian’s Book Reviews also has a pile of mini-reviews, including Gabrielle Zevin’s All These Things I’ve Done, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Angie Sage’s Magyk, and L.A. Meyer’s In the Belly of the Bloodhound.

Liz reviews Gary Schmidt’s Okay for Now.

Nicole at Linus’s Blanket reviews Hilary Mantel’s Bringing Up the Bodies.
 
Flannery over at The Readventurer reviews Tina Fey’s Bossypants.

Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness reviews Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.

Have a link? Drop it in the comments!

Madapple by Christina Meldrum

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I’ve written about Madapple a bit before, but I actually just finished it a couple of days ago. (My commute is all of five minutes, so it can take a while to get through an audiobook.) The listening experience was a positive one, although I found myself murmuring “This is such a weird book” more and more as the story progressed.
Aslaug lives with her mother in a rural area of Maine. Her mother has told Aslaug for years that she was conceived of a virgin birth, but Aslaug isn’t quite sure she believes that. In fact, Aslaug’s whole upbringing is strange: she’s kept isolated on the land with no interaction with other people, and her mother seems obsessed with religions (all of them) while claiming to ascribe to none of them. Her mother also teaches Aslaug about the wild plants that grow around their home and how they can be used – for good or ill.
When Aslaug’s mother dies, she goes to live with her mother’s sister, Sara, and things get even stranger there. Sara is a preacher with two children – Susanne and Rune. Aslaug grows close to them both, and they examine her mother’s old papers and explore the possibility of Aslaug’s virgin birth. Things soon take a turn for the worse – the relationships grow twisted, Sara begins drinking, and Aslaug’s stay with them culminates in an act of violence – maybe.
Interspersed with Aslaug’s first-person present-tense narration are excerpts from a court transcript set a few years later. We learn quickly that Aslaug is on trial for something, and the nature of the trial is revealed as Aslaug tells her story.
This is a heavy book, despite the dreamlike quality of its writing. It’s a novel that explores, among other things, teen pregnancy, incest, child abuse, and the nature of religious belief and miracles. It’s full of very messed up people who do very messed up things. Aslaug is caught up in all of it, and Meldrum does a tremendous job of portraying these events through her eyes. Throughout the novel, Aslaug is unsure if what has happened is real or a dream, and as readers, we are unsure too. I think part of what makes the novel so strange is Aslaug’s reaction to it all: we expect her to either lash out or withdraw, and she does neither. Instead, she seeks to understand the meaning behind it.
The writing is very, very good. I don’t think many readers would dispute that. That said, Madapple is not a book with wide appeal. To enjoy it, a reader must appreciate thoughtful, dark, and somewhat twisted stories. I’m no stranger to bizarre things in my genre fiction, but this is realistic fiction, and it’s bizarre in a completely different way. I think it might appeal to fantasy readers as long as they’re aware that this is not a fantasy, since the writing lends itself to an otherworldly feeling. In fact, it’s been shelved as fantasy on Goodreads by many people, which I find pretty amusing. 
If you’re looking for something a bit different and don’t mind a leisurely-paced book with more than a shake of darkness, you might enjoy Madapple. It’s a book that makes you think the entire time you read it, and long after too. I would definitely recommend it on audio; Kirsten Potter’s narration was excellent throughout and enhanced that otherworldly feeling that was so essential to the tone of the novel.