I have an older article about the intensely bad UX of Audible.com but as a paying member I’m not encountering any problems. I think it has more to do with the passage of time than me subscribing to one of their plans as opposed to a trial membership, but none the less I use Audible.co.uk a lot. There’s no Swedish variant of Audible and even if there was I wouldn’t be 100% keen on it. Looking at a Swedish equivalent of Audible I see higher prices and many missing parts of the Vorkosigan saga. Philistines!
That was a joke by the way, but one which hinges on the reader simultaneously being familiar with the lengthy Vorkosigan-saga book series and also aware of how it’s low-brow space opera. I’ve read the bulk of the series as ebooks like 12 years ago and have now made my way through the audio book versions of Falling Free(3/5), Shards of Honor(5/5), Barrayar(5/5), The Warrior’s Apprentice(3/5), The Vor Game(4/5), Cetaganda(4/5), Borders of Infinity(4/5), Brothers in Arms(3/5). I couldn’t get very far with Mirror Mirror so let’s mark that a 1/5 and move on.
I don’t quite understand how Audible can label Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds as space opera. Vorkosigan saga? That’s epic, unapologetic space opera. Kind of like Star Wars but with depth… Revelation Space isn’t necessarily the hardest science fiction I’ve ever encountered but it’s hardly space opera. It’s also hardly good… Sure, the narrator who made all 7 of 12 characters with a French accent sound exactly the same didn’t help – I’ll grant that. But it didn’t make very good use of time telling a story. 2/5 seems like a reasonable score. Not continuing that book series…
I’m currently listening to Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War about Stalin’s move leading up to the second world war and how various other countries played nice with the Soviet Union despite numerous red flags. Metaphorical red flags I mean! The literal red flags were of course also there but I don’t really see a country’s flag being red as a strong indicator that it will invade neighboring countries. Anyway, this actually show up at Bokus but again, higher price and it’s the same English language version that Audible sells. So I’m not going with Swedish audiobook retailers is my point. So far the book is good but the author doesn’t do a good job hiding his hostility to Stalin. I don’t mind people holding a grudge against Stalin per se, but if you’re trying to convince people that the Soviet Union’s role in the second world war should be re-evaluated it doesn’t help that you are obviously cherry-picking whatever makes Stalin look bad. Still, the author is providing insight into documents not mentioned in most history books so a score of 3/5 is reasonable.
Then there’s Midnight in Chernobyl: The Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. I adore this book and have now listened to it like 3 times. It’s a low-key telling of the background to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, it operations, the accident and the aftermath and I’d give it a 5/5. Note that I have watched numerous documentaries on Chernobyl and even rummaged through the IAEA reports about it so it’s not like this is some novelty that I’ve come across. On that note I’d recommend the Surviving Disaster-episode about it. I have a pretty good copy myself but can only find this 360p-variant on YouTube when I look around now. It tells the story from the perspective of Valery Legasov for whom the Chernobyl accident must have seemed like a cruel joke the universe played on him, in the vein of The Twilight Zone.
Now for something completely different: Warhammer 40K. I’ve enjoyed Leutin’s lore-series about Warhammer 40000 on YouTube and thought I’d read one of the many books from the same storyline. Starting with a book about the Mechanicus: Priests of Mars: Forge of Mars: Warhammer 40,000, Book 1. No… Nope. Not my cup of tea. Luetin on YouTube recounts the lore in a way that highlights interesting phenomena and dynamics but this book was just wallowing in athmosphere(no pun intended). I’d give it a 1/5. So the other 12 000 books about Warhammer 40K have not been added to my reading list.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is the first book in the Bobiverse series and starts out fairly interesting but kind of loses steam towards the end. I’d give it a 3/5 maybe, and don’t intend to continue with that book series.
I was hyped for The Fall of Hyperion because I have listened to the original book two or three times. But it didn’t hold up… I’d maybe go as far as giving it a 4/5 but it feels very much like the author wrote Hyperion without any thoughts about a sequel and then when he got an offer to write more books in the same series he was low on creativity. Towards the end the author was pushing the deus ex machina-button like a starving lab-rat trying to make a machine dispense cheese, so I won’t continue this series. But I can still recommend it as a good use of 21 hours.
The author of Project Hail Mary seems to be well attuned to the sensibilities of certain types of dorks. It hits soo many spots just right. 5/5 I’d say. But I have spent hundreds of hours playing Factorio. I’ve written an essay on quantum mechanics and the multiverse-interpretation thereof. So please note that this isn’t some general score that I think everyone will give the book. You probably have to be a pretty hard core dork to enjoy this book as much as I did.
I sometimes buy books precisely because they are boring. Or at least not exciting. Like the series The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. Each book is about 30-60 hours and there are 11 books. I’d give The Age of Faith (book 4), The Reformation (book 6) and The Age of Voltaire (book 9) glowing reviews but a big part of that would be the fact that they predictably put me to sleep. So it’s maybe not for everyone.
The DEDA Files is a series by games-reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw but even if you’re not a fan of his Zero Punctuation series you may like these books. Both Differently Morphous and Existentially Challenged are witty and keeps you curious about where it’s all going. Both are a strong 4/5.
Sleeping Giants: Themis Files I’d also rank at 4/5. It uses an interview-type format which is perfect for audiobooks. It has some minor annoying sidetracks to a story that hampers it but nothing major. Authors of the world, please don’t try to tack on tepid “human interest stories” to a story about the world being one decision away from complete destruction. A book about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis does well to not include a sub-plot about how an American fighter pilot carrying out dangerous espionage-missions over Cuba has a troubled marriage, for instance. That’s my two cents.
The Silver Ships, Book 1 is quite meh… 2/5? Something like that. I already own the second book in the series by way of some sale or it’s included in my membership or something but I’m not sure I will continue it anyway. I’ve been a renegade space cop jetting around the Milky Way galaxy. I’ve exterminated the Rachnii on Noveria with the push of a button. I’ve died in space and escaped from the medical facility that reanimated me as it was attacked by drones. Two groups of humans who have settled different planets meeting by accident and calmly discussing how nice their respective planets are? Not very exciting to Commander Shepard, *cough cough* I mean to me.
Ten Days That Shook the World I think I have to give a 5/5. An American reporter in Russia was smack-in-the-middle of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 and locked himself in a hotel room afterward and in a state of mania churned out all that he saw in the form of a book. He was a big fan of the Bolsheviks but I don’t get the impression he is tweaking the story to their benefit. Mr Reed recounts the decisions and arguments of many different parties in the chaos, from reactionary nationalists to middle-of-the-road social democrats all the way over to the extreme left of Lenin. It can also be noted that he died quite shortly after the book was published so he wasn’t in a position to update the book in 1937 with a foreword about how Lenin and Stalin maybe killed just a few too many hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens to have their political movement count as a win for the progress of the proletariat.
Speaking of which, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 is really good. 4/5. The show-trials and establishment of the cult of personality is rarely explained in detail. But this book covers that well. I’m still looking for a book about how the Soviet Union stagnated after Chrustchev. Because things were distinctly not great when Gorbachev took over.
Columbus Day: Expeditionary Force, Book 1 is a book I’ve tried to get into but without luck.
Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War is good to fall asleep to. Not a lot of new information. Not sure why I expected new information to be honest…
And the band played on, is a fantastic write-up of the AIDS epidemic starting with a Danish woman in central Africa and going through the first cases of immune-deficiency in young men in San Fransisco. It’s not objective or neutral. It would have been hard for the author – a gay man living in San Fransisco who later died from AIDS-related complications – to be objective or neutral. I argue that it wouldn’t have been good for him to be objective or neutral either. Everyone had an angle. Those who wanted to save lives were well served by being opinionated and critical. The book is much like Ten Days That Shook the World, another great window into a period that changed the world.
Collapse is a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok. It’s interesting to hear the backstory of Perestroika and other reform. I disagree with the author about Gorbachev having authoritarian rule as a fallback at all times though. He had excessive faith in reforms but introducing direct presidential rule would at best have bough him some time. But it would have made sense to get economic reforms to work well before doing any political reforms. Once the republics introduced their own central banks or stopped paying taxes to the union the gig was up. The coup could have reversed some reforms but foreign loans were not going to extended after a coup(which the author acknowledges) so they really would have had less time than Gorbachev. I’d give the book 3/5.