STAR WARS: DARTH PLAGUEIS (audiobook) by James Luceno


Published by Random House Audio in 2012.
Read by Daniel Davis.
Duration: 14 hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged.

Star Wars: Darth Plagueis came HIGHLY recommended to me from a massive Star Wars fan that I work with who has told me on multiple occasions that this was an amazing book.

If you loved the political intrigue of The Phantom Menace and loved the fact that it was basically the story of a trade dispute that got out of hand, you will LOVE this book.

Let's face it, the problem with this book is that it is very similar to The Phantom Menace - the book actually overlaps with the movie. The problem with this book is that Episode I is generally considered to be the worst of the 11 Star Wars movies and doesn't compare well with the TV shows, either. It's probably better than the Star Wars Holiday Special, but I haven't seen that since it first aired so I can't trust my judgment as a ten-year old viewer.

This book fills in all of the questions that you probably didn't have when you watched The Phantom Menace. Did you wonder why Naboo has a little yellow space fleet? Well, you get to hear all about it anyway. Or, did you want to hear about exactly how the podracing track on Tatooine was financed? Did you ever wonder why Chancellor Valorum of the Senate looked so defeated and tired when he was trying to get things worked out to help Naboo? Well, you will get to hear all about the dirty backroom politics of the leading families of the Republic.

Don't care about the finances of a race track? Well, too bad - you'll hear all about it and how taxation of tax-free trade routes made a lot of people mad. Turns out Darth Plagueis was a banker and he liked to finance race tracks in his bid to take over the galaxy and Palpatine was a politician and he liked to talk about tax policy - so you get to hear about both of them. Also, Plagueis trained Palpatine to be a Sith Lord, but you hear precious little about the actual training and much about their busy schedules as they try to work in training times.

The problem with the book, specifically, is this: a Star Wars book full of spaceships and Sith carrying light sabers gets bogged down in detailed discussion of political and financial intrigues. I liken the experience that are like being forced to watch a Senate hearing on trade policy on C-Span in a Disney Resort hotel room rather than actually leaving the room and going to see Disney World. This is a Star Wars book - turn off the C-Span and bring on the cool Star Wars stuff! This isn't a John Grisham book - and if it were, it would have been a very boring one.
Christopher Lee as Count Dooku.

 The only reason this books gets 2 stars from me instead of 1 is because it does go and backfill a giant plot hole from Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones. In Episode 2, Count Dooku just shows up out of nowhere and starts breaking apart the Republic. This book gives the background for Count Dooku, at least. He is by far the most interesting character. It made me wish I had been listening to a Count Dooku book instead. 

Dry exposition. No real antagonist or struggle in this book. It reads more like a super-detailed Wookiepedia entry about Palpatine rather than an actual story. The author goes out of his way to name off as many characters, places and organizations as he can in the Star Wars universe in ridiculously long sentences. I felt bad for the reader who had to just keep reading run-on sentence after run-on sentence filled with the most obscure English vocabulary words. It's like the author was typing away with a thesaurus open on his desk while trying to get in as many obscure character mentions as possible.

The reader, Daniel Davis, did a good job. He did a good job with all of the accents and established character voices from the movies. But, an excellent reading does not make up for a poor text.

Note: the audiobook does include music from Episdode IV. The music is generally used well. It also includes sound effects, but they are used less judiciously. Often the same sound effect is played over and over again in the background - just a little too loud.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: STAR WARS: DARTH PLAGUEIS (audiobook) by James Luceno.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

THE BOYS: A MEMOIR of HOLLYWOOD and FAMILY (audiobook) by Ron Howard and Clint Howard

Image
Highly Recommended. Published in 2021 by HarperAudio. Read by Ron Howard, Clint Howard, and Bryce Dallas Howard. Duration: 13 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Ron Howard and his brother Clint Howard practically grew up on America's television screens. Ron Howard starred in the  The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days for a combined 15 years of his early life. Ron has since gone on to become a prolific director. His credits include Cocoon , Willow , Cinderella Man , and Solo: A Star Wars Movie . His movies have won 9 Academy Awards. Clint Howard starred in the TV show Gentle Ben when was a little kid and has since gone on to become the quintessential model of a working actor. He has more than 200 acting credits, including the original Star Trek series, Austin Powers , The Waterboy , and a recurring role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful . The Howard brothers are the sons of a working Hollywood actor named Rance Howard. Rance's credits look a lot like his son Clint'
Read more

GHOSTED: AN AMERICAN STORY (audiobook) by Nancy French

Image
Published by Zondervan in April of 2024. Read by the author, Nancy French. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Ghosted is an autobiography of Nancy French. Nancy French had a career as a Conservative political columnist and ghost-writing for people in Conservative circles. She helped Conservative politicians write opinion pieces, helped them come up with clever lines for radio and TV interviews, and even books. She worked with such Conservative stars as Sarah Palin and Ben Sasse. She even worked with the Romney campaign.  The book starts with her childhood in Kentucky, including an awful story of sexual abuse at the hands of a manipulative youth pastor and how that sent her life into a spiral into she met her future husband while she was in college. Nancy French is married to David French, a well-known Conservative political columnist, commentator, and attorney. He worked for two organizations that defended the rights of Christian groups and Conservatives on colleg
Read more

THE WAITING (Ballard and Bosch book 6)(audiobook) by Michael Connelly

Image
Published in October of 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by Christine Lakin, Titus Welliver, and Madison Lintz. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. LAPD Detective Harry Bosch first showed up in a novel in 1992. The Waiting is the 25th book in the series, but he has appeared in more than 30 books and short stories. Bosch is aging. He has aged right along with the series. He would be about 74 years old in this book and he is no longer the detective that goes out and finds the bad guys, but he does contribute from time to time. His protégé Renee Ballard is in charge of the cold case unit of LAPD.  Her unit is almost entirely made up of volunteers and they go through unsolved serious crimes and see if modern technology (like DNA comparison) can help to solve them. This book is mostly a Ballard novel, but Bosch does play a critical role in one of the three mysteries that are dealt with in this novel. I have a feeling that the "Bosch" in the Ballard and Bosch books
Read more

COST of MALICE by H. Mitchell Caldwell

Image
Published in 2024 by Nine Innings Press. Cost of Malice is the third novel featuring attorney Jake Clearwater. Jake is an on-again off-again law professor who is often tempted to trade the classroom for the courtroom.   Clearwater is offered a chance to sit on an informal council of leaders in the prosecutor's office. Cases that may be tough to win are brought to this council and they brainstorm possible strategies and determine if they are even worth the effort. The book deals with three of these cases.  Case one is a murder case in which the two primary witnesses are jailhouse snitches. Case two is a horrific child abuse case in which one spouse literally beat a child to death at the direction of the other spouse. Clearwater wants to convict them both equally despite the fact that one of them literally never laid a finger on the victim. Case three is a school shooting case modeled heavily on the Oxford, Michigan case that ended in April of 2024. It feels right that Clearwater g
Read more

SAINT PETER: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in 2021 by Hourly History. Hourly History has a series of short histories and biographies. As the name implies, they are designed to be read in about an hour. Some of the best offerings in this series are the biographies and this biography of Saint Peter was no exception. Saint Peter, of course, is one of the main figures in the New Testament, probably tied with Saint Paul for the second most important after Jesus himself. But, he's kind of a mystery in many ways because the references to Peter are scattered. This biography gathers together all of those scattered references and puts them in a narrative format so that it reads like a traditional biography. It takes care to note when stories are from the Bible and when they come from tradition (the description of how Peter was executed comes to mind.) The general outlines of Peter's life are laid out with only a token discussion of the implications of his theology, such as the decision to not require converts to Christ
Read more

MALAYAN CAMPAIGN: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History writes short histories and biographies that take the average reader about an hour to read. Sometimes they try to explain too much in a short book (such as the Mayan Civilization, for example.) But, an hour is plenty of time to explain the basics of a military campaign that lasted 2 months and 8 days. When the Japanese Navy attacked the American naval forces at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 it was actually part of a much larger, highly coordinated push against all Western forces in the Pacific and in East Asia. American forces were also attacked in the Philippines, for example. This push also included the British-held Malay Peninsula and Singapore that started on December 8. Britain had not provided much of a defense for this area, which was understandable considering the dire threat Britain itself faced from Nazi forces in Europe. The Japanese landed with a slightly smaller force than the British had, but the British w
Read more

COST of ARROGANCE (Jake Clearwater #1) by H. Mitchell Caldwell

Image
Published in October of 2021 by Nine Innings Press. Cost of Arrogance features Jake Clearwater who used to be a prosecutor. However, rough and tumble office politics encouraged him to take a job as a law professor. He is happy with his choice, but he decides to take on long shot death penalty appeal after being asked by an organization called Death Penalty Project. The argument in the appeal is that the man on death row is there because of an incompetent defense lawyer in the original trial. The trial was for the murder of a married couple.  The client knew that his lawyer was not doing a good job so he made a spectacle of himself - cursing, yelling and more in front of the jury. Considering that he had already served serious prison time in the past, the jury was only too happy to put this angry felon on death row - after all, if he's this crazy during the trail, it's not hard to imagine that he killed two people.  Clearwater successfully argues that the defense was incompeten
Read more

THE BROKEN GUN (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Image
Originally published in 1966. Audiobook published in 2011 by Random House Audio. Read by Jason Culp. Duration: 4 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: The Broken Gun is the story of a writer named Dan Sheridan. Sheridan is kind of a stand-in for Louis L'Amour himself. L'Amour was a prolific author, but he before he was a writer he skinned cattle, worked in mines and lumber camps, was a professional boxer, and was a merchant seaman. Later, he served in World War II in Europe. His character Dan Sheridan worked on ranches, lumber camps, and served in the Korean War where he was captured and escaped back to the American lines. Later, he was trained in guerilla warfare, served as an advisor in South Vietnam where he was captured again and escaped again. Sheridan researches a topic thoroughly before he writes. It is the early 1960s and his latest interest is a large cattle drive in the 1870s that was led by two brothers named Toomey from Texas to Arizona. They were looking for
Read more

A MAN CALLED OVE by Fredrik Backman

Image
Published by Dreamscape Media in 2014. Read by George Newbern. Duration: 9 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Ove (pronounced ooo-vah) is a 59 year old grump in Sweden. His wife has passed away, he has no children, no pets and no job since he has been forced to retire. He keeps himself busy by keeping an eye on the neighborhood - he yells at the neighbor lady that lets her dog pee in front of his house, he yells at people who drive through the neighborhood (it has a parking area so that the entire area is pedestrian friendly), he yells at bureaucrats, bad drivers, hipsters, immigrants and...well, he just yells. Ove has determined that the best thing about his life left when his wife passed away. He was filling in that hole in his life, at least a bit, with his work. But, since his forced retirement, he has nothing. So, he is planning his suicide to join his wife. Then, a tough old homeless cat shows up. After that, a hipster father with an immigrant wife and two little girls moves in acr
Read more

BALKAN WARS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in September of 2024 by Hourly History. I consider myself pretty well-versed in modern history, but I literally knew almost nothing about the wars that ran rampant through the Balkans just prior to World War I. I knew the area was all in an uproar, but I had no idea that the region had seen multiple all out wars rage throughout in just a few years. Those wars set up the scenario that directly led to World War I. Hourly History specializes in writing histories and biographies that can be read in about an hour. That was enough time for this little history. The reader learns of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and how that created a power vacuum in the Balkans. Then, the reader learns how various ethnic groups in the region fought for their independence and earned it only to fight among themselves over the borders of disputed regions.  Finally, the reader sees how the intervention of the great powers led more fighting and eventually to World War I. This is a very readable hist
Read more