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A solid addition

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 12-22-22

It’s a pleasure to be enveloped in the world of Strike again and what was most enjoyable about “The Ink Black Heart” was not just Robin and Strike’s relationship, but the broader canvas of their lives in, as ever, a fantastically drawn London. While the book is long, it never dragged.

The plot itself though was good, but to Galbraith’s standards, perhaps the weakest so far. The narration of the in-game chat and Tweets is initially jarring but people have said the same of the printed versions, and Robert Glenister does an excellent job of keeping the voices separated, and you soon get used to it. Rowling knows all about this, of course, though she says what she has experienced post-dates writing this book. The characters are well-drawn, and the language chilling, and yet even a adding familiarity with Twitter shows it to be extremely believable. However the red herrings don’t sit as comfortably as they might, and the motive that ends up being revealed seems stated more than an “aha!”, because as Galbraith she’s done such a good job of covering the tracks that the identity makes sense, but only because by then we’ve run out of alternatives.

This is to find fault with the very good, because this is very good. “Troubled Blood” was so excellent that it is unfair to say this fails to reach those heights, but it is also true. Galbraith however remains a master of the form, and an astonishingly sharp writer regardless of the genre s/he chooses to write in, and ends on a pleasing note of leaving things unfinished, not for the book, but for the characters.

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Gerard Doyle's narration makes this hard work

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
1 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 10-04-22

This is not unfamiliar ground for a certain kind of British spy novel, and it is well-plotted, although the fundamental premise of an office of B-grade people—the eponymous slow horses, as contrasted to the thoroughbreds—is an interesting plot device but not hugely believable, even allowing for the civil service's bureaucratic impulses. The villains are good and the descriptions of fear chilling. The story arc eerily forecasts some real-world developments in UK politics, and so that adds an almost worrying layer of realism.

However, as others note, the story does jump a lot between the characters and scenes, and the narration does not clearly differentiate between these jumps. In addition, Gerard Doyle has a soft voice with indistinct narration—I see he narrates quite a few books, and he does not have a voice for this. In addition, the audio quality itself seems off: you hear it with S, which is so soft as to get close to a lisp; it reminds me of how Mandarin-speakers pronounce "Xie", kind of half-way between "see" and "she". I don't think this is the narrator's voice; I think it is either poor mics, or over-compression, or both. When it is an effort actually to listen, it makes frequent scene changes difficult, and I had to go back and re-listen to sections frequently.

In short, as a book it was fine. As an audiobook specifically, it was poor.

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Narration: yes Audible, it is “exclusive”—extraordinarily ill-judged

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
1 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-13-22

This is a good book that will make you very angry although the conclusions are always not as obvious as Lewis implies: but that cavils against a much more obvious broader point of bureaucratic incompetence. The CDC and FDA come out of this poorly—as well they should.

But, you can’t help feeling this is an expanded New Yorker or Atlantic essay—and I say that thinking of the Vanity Fair article that was expanded into a book. We keep circling around the same people—and Lewis has to some extent done himself a disservice by being very active on the interview circuit, such that he’d already shared many of the anecdotes.

And then we get to the real issue: the extraordinary choice of narrator. First, Lewis has a podcast and has recently re-recorded one of his own books, so it is disappointing that something so clearly written in his voice, doesn’t use his voice.

But it’s worse than that. Adenrele Ojon has a very stylized form of reading that might suit poetry, or a form of classical oratory. To say it does not suit Michael Lewis’ style of writing that comes close to being conversational is understatement. It’s *awful.* it’s like she’s trying to force everything into an iambic pentameter, with up inflection, almost without regard to the words, sentiment, and never mind the sentence as written. The Audible notes don’t detail the production crew: and they *should*, so we know not just to avoid a narrator who may simply be poorly cast, but the producers who made that choose, and stuck with it despite its obvious unsuitability. It’s not COVID or a pandemic choice, but willful blindness from Audible as to how *obviously* bad this is, is ironic given the subject matter.

Audible: do better. Low bar because this was such a poor choice that the only way you could have made an audio book worse was to get someone to do it in sign language.

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Silva’s on form, but it’s time for George Guidall to retire

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-28-20

Silva is on form with this outing for Gabriel Alon, with only one notable scene of plot recapping in roughly the middle of the book. His fans know the form, but I wish some of the dialogue had slightly less exposition between people highly unlikely to need it. However, the characters are as well-drawn as ever, and the locations evocative. Silva is on firm footing with the Italian setting and Roman Catholic intriguing.

One point which may be more controversial on the Audible version: George Guidall has been there since nearly the beginning, but there were quite a few points where I needed to go back as he had swallowed the word. This isn’t just my ears: there were numerous points with obvious ADR where the voice sounded completely different, that had obviously been overlaid. Guidall is Alon to many of us… but like Ari Shamron, it might be time for him to retire to a villa overlooking Lake Tiberias and let someone else take over.

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On Her Majesty's Secret Service Audiobook By Ian Fleming cover art

Strong story but narration volume highly variable

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
2 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-21-20

The plot of this James Bond book is strong and the character sketches more fully realised than in some of Fleming’s earlier works: it is definitely one of the better Bonds.

As an audio book specifically though, the narration was not ideal. David Tennant is an excellent actor but I would not ask him to narrate audio books again for the reason that he modulated the volume of his voice too much. On numerous occasions I had to go back and listen to a passage again because I had missed what he was saying. Other narrators seem better able to convey the nuance of quiet speech without also lowering the volume at which they are speaking. This may seem picky as he conveyed accent and pace very well, but if you can’t hear him, then at a certain basic technical level, that’s not ideal.

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Not always clear structure, *terrible* narration

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
1 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 09-03-18

This is one of Ferguson's longer works, and much if it is very interesting: the networks of the Illuminati, Freemasonry in the Revolutionary War period, and his return to Kissinger are very well-handled. The over-arching thread between hierarchy and network is not always clear, and the earlier parts feel like a book report of work Ferguson has read on network theory, and are labored. However, even when not at his best, Ferguson writes extremely well, and that introduction to network theory notwithstanding, he is sharp and not boring. The book is particularly helped by its strong conclusions, leaving a satisfying finish.

The narration by Elliot Hill however is terrible. He is British, as of course is Ferguson, but perhaps feels that for his audience "Moscow" to rhyme with "cow" is less jarring, though I would prefer that people pronounce things in a way that is consistent with their accent. If that were the only one, I would not pile on, as it is both minor and a matter of preference. But his repeated pronunciation errors - in any accent in English - were so annoying that when I could remember them, I noted down these, which were either wrong, or spoken as if in Italian:
Robert Burns' poetry
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Keiretsu
Modena
Westphalia / Westphalian
Copenhagen
Canton
Buccleuch
Kirkcaldy
(Mario) Puzo
Consigliere
Apulia
Omerta
Youths
Che Guevara
Hegemony

What was worse was that every time a word our phrase came up that was consequential, I think in his view, you could hear the metaphorical quotation marks being put around it with a little pause beforehand: cod solemnity, somewhat reminiscent of local news readers switching gear to talk about a fatal accident - every time. Taken with the mispronunciations it was only the fact that the material was interesting that got me through this. If you are on the fence, honestly I would say it is worth reading, but unless you are very patient skip the audio version and pick it up on Kindle or on paper.

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It gets better

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 08-06-17

Roughly the second half of the diaries is when this goes from good to great: we meet more of the characters and experiences we have become familiar with, in new settings, or with expanded stories. His description of feeding his spiders is particularly funny, as are the stories around his book tours and signings. His experience of 9/11 is also very moving.

Sedaris references his drug-taking years in his prologue and even with his edits, the period before his move to Chicago and particularly New York does move at a slow pace. It has many interesting moments, but you find yourself wanting him to stop wasting his life and get on with it. While he is to be commended for his candour I found many of these parts to be unusually unengaging and he is not always a terribly sympathetic figure. Thankfully for his many fans, he did.

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29 people found this helpful

The good is great but a lot is recycled

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 06-25-17

Some of this, including the classic story of Sedaris as a Macy's elf, is fantastic, and it includes a good mix of some of his darker work.

However, much of the second half of this audiobook is recycled from his other work. This includes "Six to Eight Black Men," and a story from his childhood in North Carolina. I don't fault David Sedaris for this, but I think the publisher was a little greedy.

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A mostly self-congratulatory walk down memory lane

Overall
2 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 05-06-16

Is there anything you would change about this book?

This is a book that purports to be about behavioral economics, and about its discovery, but which is really a memoir, and not a particularly well-written one. Apart from a couple of clearly identified foes and villains, colleagues are universally brilliant, funny, and modest - and that goes for the author. What I would change is make it a history, or make it an introduction to the subject - what I thought I was getting - but if Mr. Thaler wants to write a memoir, his publishers should sell it as such.

Has Misbehaving turned you off from other books in this genre?

I will be more careful! Having enjoyed the work of Dan Ariely, Tim Harford, and Matt Ridley to name but three this is the first I really haven't for some time - and I came to it via the Freakonomics podcast where Mr. Thaler was very entertaining - and used many of the same jokes.

What three words best describe L. J. Ganser’s performance?

It was a perfectly good performance. It didn't grab me but it was not annoying or replete with pronunciation errors.

What did you take away from Misbehaving that you can apply to your work?

The section on framing was particularly useful.

Any additional comments?

Probably, I should have read Nudge - but then would have missed the section on the Nudge Unit towards the end in which I was particularly interested (as it came from politicians having read that earlier book). Indeed, I would say the closer you get towards the end of this book, the closer it gets to approximating what I thought the whole book would be like.

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