Jesse Sharpe

I Cried for This One

Reviewed: 05-27-23

Brilliantly performed historical drama retelling the tragic and beautiful story of the first Korean woman to visit Europe at the end of the Joseon Dynasty's 500 year reign. I wanted more at the end but the story is based on a real life person and giving me the ending I want would have required too strong a distortion of history.

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Great Classic sci-fi

Reviewed: 03-27-23

After recently relistening to The Disposessed, The Lathe of Heaven was my next cure to that La Guin itch. This lacks the long philosophical diatribes of The Disposessed and the detailed world building of The Earthsea Chronicles. Instead, this book feels more like the classic sci-fi style of Bradbury or Philip K Dick but with La Guin's unique and enthralling world consciousness behind it.

The premise is simple and the plot straightforward, but I found myself pausing often to consider the many thought provoking passages described herein. It is one of those books that could end many different ways and keeps the reader (or listener) coming up with different ways the knot could be untied.

La Guin has proven herself over the past fifty years to be one of the most versatile and thought provoking authors of speculative fiction in the past century and this work is just another example of that.

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One of America's Greatest Novel

Reviewed: 12-14-22

When I first started listening, I struggled a little with the soft tone of Kenerly's reading but as the story unfolded, I realized the narration of the audiobook perfectly matched the melancholic reminiscing of the story's narrator. Kenerly masterfully captures each cast member in the story with previous distinction.

The story itself, like all of Baldwin's novels deserves to outlive the nation it paints and should be essential reading for anyone attempting to gain an understanding of the long struggle of Black America.

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Best Earthsea so far

Reviewed: 06-02-22

Sterlin brings to life the book that really brought Le Guin's brilliant world of Earthsea into maturity. Taking apart and examining the truth of the world she created 20 years ago and examining it with an even more masterful eye and deeper wisdom than any of the books that preceded it.

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Far from my favorite Murakami but still masterful

Reviewed: 05-21-22

I enjoyed this book. Compared to the other Murakami I've read and listened to, this book lacks a little bit of the profundity I felt in stuff like Windup Bird Chronicals and Kafka on the Shore but still shines with masterful prose, weirdness, and dispersed uncomfortable sexual narrative.

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Not my favorite Moore

Reviewed: 11-08-21

I love Alan Moore's story telling and writing style but this book didn't stand out. Some of the stories were compelling and the underlying story of North Hampton is captivating. Nonetheless, this feels like a drafted attempt at what he accomplished with much better continuity through Jerusalem. I think this book just fails to finish what it started out and the final chapter seems self aware of that point, seeming more the end to an essay describing why each chapter was included rather than allowing them to stand on their own.

I would still recommend this book but only to people who are already Moore fans. After reading Jerusalem, it reads like a welcome addition to the later work but not much more. The book is not lazy or poorly written but overly ambitious and it just fell short of those lofty goals for me.

On the other hand, with the exception of a couple chapters, the performances are wonderful and the addition of sound effects adds significantly to the effect. However, there are a few points that feel a little over-engineered.

All in all, the brilliance of Alan Moore mostly comes through in this book but without the quality of story telling and consistency which he maintains both in Jerusalem and most of his comic books.

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3 people found this helpful

A mythology memorializing a neighborhood

Reviewed: 09-24-21

one of the most memorable works of epic fiction I've ever read, Jerusalem is less a novel and more a mythology built to memorialize The Burroughs at a moment when, like so many "poor" neighborhoods, it faces gentrification and modernization.

Rather than decry the loss, Alan Moore has managed to draw a fantastical and beautiful picture of the neighborhood, moving around through its incomprehensibly long history from the ancient Celtic myth and Roman occupation to the present day and into the future, even venturing beyond the death of the sun.

Simon Vance does an extraordinary job capturing this oversized epic, maintaining an engaging performance throughout. Around the mid section there are a few bits of shoddy editing with repeated takes but who can blame them? It's 50 hours of editing.

Expect long trails of consciousness and unanswered questions. The hardest parts for me were the explicit descriptions of sexual assault which occur later in the book. Moments that I wouldn't remove from the book but that were extremely difficult to listen to.

You need to be patient to listen to the book and it doesn't end with a finali that will be satisfying to the questions the book raises but taken in its totality, the work is an enormous accomplishment that I hope will be immortalized as a portrait of the loss so many are feeling right now.

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1 person found this helpful