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Audible.com asks some of the industry's best narrators: "What's the Best Book You've Ever Narrated?"

Posted on 2011-08-26 at 15:29 by Sam

Link: Audible.com asks some of the industry’s best narrators: “What’s the Best Book You’ve Ever Narrated?”

Wow, there’s a great new (at least to me!) feature page at Audible.com today, “The Best Book I Ever Narrated”. This page lists some of my favorite narrators describing, well, their pick for the best book they ever narrated, and as a narrator junkie this is just a great feature. Some highlights:

Glimpses by Lewis Shiner narrated by Stefan Rudnicki:

This is an audiobook which is very dear to my heart, a transformative experience. I’ve written both Shiner and Rudnicki about this book before, reviewed the audiobook on Audible.com, picked it as the best Audible.com SF/F release in March 2011, and it’s just great to watch and listen to Rudnicki explaining exactly why he loved the book. It’s one I’ve used Audible.com’s “gift” feature to send to people, just to spread the book further and wider in the hopes that more and more people can hear about it and read it or listen to it. Yeah… it’s wonderful. Considering that Rudnicki’s long, stellar career has included Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx, Ben Bova, David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers, Nabokov, … it’s high praise indeed.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl narrated by Oliver Wyman with an introduction by Robert J. Sawyer:


No, fair, Mr. Wyman. OK, he’s one of my favorite narrators, and he did do an absolutely amazing job capturing Robinette and the “Dr.” for this great book, but he takes a few liberties here. One, he picks a total of four “best” books, including How Sex Works by Sharon Moalem, Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia, and Atomic Lobster: A Novel by Tim Dorsey. Two, despite this first transgression he doesn’t list Finch by Jeff VanderMeer, which he absolutely nailed and is right up there with Gateway for my favorite of Wyman’s many excellent narrations. For shame! (I kid, you can’t really argue against Gateway or Wyman’s performance on it.) And getting a narrator to express that their “first love” was science fiction… a good thing. He describes begging to narrate Pohl’s Gateway, and I’m glad he got his wish.

The Prestige by Christopher Priest narrated by Simon Vance:


I loved what Vance had to say here, going behind the scenes a bit to talk about re-recording the first half of the novel after a conversation with the author, and how the experience of recording the book turned into a friendship with Priest.

Scott Brick also bends the rules a bit, picking several books, including (among others…):

The last one I want to single out is The Road From Chapel Hill by Joanna Catherine Scott narrated by Karen White. From one of the smaller independent audiobook publishers I follow, CrossRoad Press, it covers the ground quite near my own stomping grounds:

Whew. Great feature, I enjoyed checking out the video and audio recollections from these great narrators, talking about some great books. I hope you do, too.

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Just added at Audible.com: Simon Morden's Equations of Life

Posted on 2011-08-25 at 16:33 by Sam

Link: Just added at Audible.com: Simon Morden’s Equations of Life

Published by Orbit on April 1 earlier this year, Equations of Life by Simon Morden has just been added to Audible.com courtesy a Recorded Books production, narrated by Toby Leonard Moore:

If this cover doesn’t look familiar, well, the book cover looks like this:


And the trilogy continued in May and June:

Anyway, I was intrigued by the book description way back when:

Samuil Petrovitch is a survivor. He survived the nuclear fallout in St. Petersburg and hid in the London Metrozone – the last city in England. He’s lived this long because he’s a man of rules and logic. For example: GETTING INVOLVED = A BAD IDEA.

But when he stumbles into a kidnapping in progress, he acts without even thinking. Before he can stop himself, he’s saved the daughter of the most dangerous man in London. And clearly: SAVING THE GIRL = GETTING INVOLVED.

Now, the equation of Petrovitch’s life is looking increasingly complex:

RUSSIAN MOBSTERS + YAKUZA + SOMETHING CALLED THE NEW MACHINE JIHAD = ONE DEAD PETROVITCH.

But Petrovitch has a plan – he always has a plan – he’s just not sure it’s a good one.

The audiobook sample audio certainly sounds well done, and am hoping to pick up the first book in audio when I get a chance.

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Audible.com's "New Day, New Deal" through the end of August continues with Richard Adams's Watership Down

Posted on 2011-08-24 at 19:23 by Sam

Link: Audible.com’s “New Day, New Deal” through the end of August continues with Richard Adams’s Watership Down

Audible.com’s “New Day, New Deal” promotion has a solid week to go, as every day at 10 AM ET they are unveiling another $7.95 audiobook to be on sale until August 31. Today’s is Watership Down by Richard Adams narrated by Ralph Cosham:

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Audible.com August 2011 Customer Favorites: Ready Player One, The Magician King, and more

Posted on 2011-08-24 at 19:12 by Sam

Link: Audible.com August 2011 Customer Favorites: Ready Player One, The Magician King, and more

In a week where the NY Times hardcover fiction bestseller list has 5 of its top 10 slots occupied by science fiction and fantasy novels, Audible.com’s monthly customer favorites has Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One at the top of its list:


Narrated by Wil Wheaton, this audiobook received a glowing A+ review from The Guilded Earlobe (the first review on the site to crack 1000 hits!) and I’m still letting my thoughts about the book distill and swirl around.

A bit further down the list is The Magician King: A Novel by Lev Grossman narrated by Mark Bramhall, which I already reviewed on Audible but hope to expand a bit on the 2000-character limit, as not everything I wanted to say could fit into that restriction:

That said… this all seems a bit premature, as there’s still a full week of August left, with a few serious contenders coming early next week. That said, what were your favorites?

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Audiobook release day: The White City: Book 3 of the Clockwork Dark by John Claude Bemis

Posted on 2011-08-23 at 16:39 by Sam

Link: Audiobook release day: The White City: Book 3 of the Clockwork Dark by John Claude Bemis

With The White City: Book 3 of The Clockwork Dark, Hillsborough, NC author John Claude Bemis completes his trilogy for young readers which combines American folklore, Steampunk, and just the right amount of mountain magic:

Once again narrated by John H. Mayer and out from Listening Library (in print from Random House Books for Young Readers), the book continues the story which began in The Nine Pound Hammer: The Clockwork Dark, Book 1 and kept building in The Wolf Tree: Book 2 of The Clockwork Dark. Here’s the publisher description:

In The Nine Pound Hammer, John Bemis introduced middle-grade readers to a whole new approach to epic fantasy, founded on characters and themes from American mythology and lore, including the legend of John Henry. Now, in the third and final book, the heroes come together at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago for a final confrontation with a businessman and tycoon who is in fact an ageless evil known as the Gog.

With his Dark Machine, he intends to bend the world to his ruthless vision of progress and efficiency. It’s man versus machine all over again, fighting for the soul of humanity in front of Ferris’s Wheel. For fans of adventure fantasy like Percy Jackson and Peter and the Starcatchers.

ALSO OUT:

NOTE: It looks like The Measure of the Magic: Legends of Shannara by Terry Brooks has slipped to next week.

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Audible.com's "New Day, New Deal" through the end of August begins with Yann Martel's Life of Pi

Posted on 2011-08-22 at 17:40 by Sam

Link: Audible.com’s “New Day, New Deal” through the end of August begins with Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

With “New Day, New Deal” launching today, Audible.com promises to “reveal a top listener favorite on sale each day for just $7.95 every weekday at 10 AM ET until the end of the month”. The promotion begins with Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi:


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The Guilded Earlobe reviews Ernest Cline's Ready Player One

Posted on 2011-08-19 at 20:05 by Sam

Link: The Guilded Earlobe reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

Wow, he really loved it. I might be a bit less “A+ …  I think that Ready Player One has the potential to be more than just a great book, but a true cultural Icon. Ready Player One is the Stranger in a Strange Land of the Atari generation, the Hitchhikers Guide for those who wished the Keatons were their family.” but that’s not too over the top. There was definitely something of a geek criticality event listening to Wil Wheaton produce the beeps and boops from Pac-Man.

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Fantasy Literature reviews the new audiobook for William Gibson's Neuromancer

Posted on 2011-08-19 at 14:53 by Sam

Link: Fantasy Literature reviews the new audiobook for William Gibson’s Neuromancer

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Currently listening to: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline narrated by Wil Wheaton

Posted on 2011-08-18 at 00:41 by Sam

Link: Currently listening to: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline narrated by Wil Wheaton

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Audiobook release day: Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs (and a whole lot more)

Posted on 2011-08-16 at 15:42 by Sam

Link: Audiobook release day: Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs (and a whole lot more)

With front cover praise from David Drake (“Southern Gods is scary, smart, and effective both as Lovecraftian fiction and as a Southern Regional novel set in 1951”) and a recent “Big Idea” feature on Scalzi’s Whatever blog, Southern Gods is John Hornor Jacobs’s debut novel from Night Shade Books. Out in print late last month, Brilliance Audio has produced an Eric G Dove narration of the novel which is out today.

Brilliance Audio cover

It’s not showing up in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy section (it’s slotted into Fiction/Horror), which, well, whatever, OK. Also out today:

And added yesterday, both an anticipated non-fiction title (Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon narrated by Ray Porter) and and anthology: The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 3 which collects short stories by Damien Broderick, Yoon Ha Lee, Ian R MacLeod, Sean McMullen, Allen M Steele, Robert Reed, and Peter Watts and is narrated by Tom Dheere, Nicola Barber, and Kate Baker:

I’ve heard Kate Baker’s reading of “The Things” and the others are a list of some of the stories I’ve been looking forward to hearing for a long time — particularly Rajaniemi’s Elegy for a Young Elk, the Aliete de Bodard story, the Yoon Ha Lee story, … OK, OK. All of them.

Whew. What a packed mid-August audiobook calendar. A bit of a meta update: now a week into its release, Lev Grossman’s The Magician King (2009’s The Magicians) are topping the Audible.com SF/F bestseller list, displacing George R.R. Martin’s epics at long last. Perhaps more interestingly, they’re also climbing the overall Audible charts, passing “Go the F to Sleep”, “Full Black”, “Mockingjay”, and Tina Fey’s “Bossypants”. Though “The Help” will take some moving.

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