HAYDEN'S WORLD: VOLUME 1 (audiobook) by S.D. Falchetti

 

Book published in 2018.
Audiobook published in 2023 by S.D. Falchetti.
Read by Shamaan Casey.
Duration: 7 hours, 59 minutes.
Unabridged.

Hayden's World: Volume 1 is a collection of 5 short stories in a single "universe" centering around a corporation that is in the forefront in the exploration of our solar system. 

Roughly the first half of the book is about top executives of the company and their new drive system that will push a ship to nearly light speed. There are a lot of high-minded speeches about mankind and the need to keep pushing boundaries. When I say speeches, I mean literal speeches lifted from testimony to some sort of U.N. body. 

Speeches are not the best way to introduce a book, in my opinion. The first part is just slow. I nearly quit listening to the audiobook multiple times in the first hour or so. The first story has an exciting, game-changing twist at the end that is simply dropped.

The last two stories are great examples of hard science fiction involving a pirate and a little bit of romance in orbit around Uranus and Saturn. I liked the fact that rather than having true space warships, war is waged with tools and work equipment because space is a place for resource extraction, not a place for interstellar fleets to duke it out.

When you listen to an audiobook, sometimes you notice the overuse of a word or a phrase that you might not notice reading. In this case, the author really likes the word "scintillating" when combined with lasers. Turns out that there was a lot of laser shooting in one story and they all seemed to be "scintillating," not brilliant, shimmering, gleaming, dazzling or any other word that means shiny.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HAYDEN'S WORLD: VOLUME 1 by S.D. Falchetti.

THE ENIGMA AFFAIR: A NOVEL (audiobook) by Charlie Lovett

 

Published by Blackstone Publishing in September of 2022.

Read by Nicole Zanzerella.
Duration: 12 hours, 6 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

An Enigma Machine from World
War II.

Patton Harcourt is a very small town librarian in North Carolina. One morning, while cooking in the kitchen, a sniper round comes through her window and nearly hits her. She reacts well (thanks to her previous career in the military) and finds a stranger at her door. 

He is not the sniper, but he is an assassin that was hired to kill another person in town. Against her better judgment, she joins with the assassin to elude the sniper team.

All of that happens in the first 10 minutes or so of this audiobook.

From there, they discover a handmade copy of World War II Enigma machine (the British machine that broke the German secret codes) and are off to confront modern-day Neo-Nazis...

My Review:

This book was certainly action-packed, extremely fast-paced ,and had some good moments. But, it also had some practical issues that just didn't jive with reality. For example, one of the main plot points is that they cannot access the internet because they will be detected and tracked down. This completely ignores the existence of proxy servers. A professional assassin should have been familiar with this technology as a way to hide his location when communicating with clients.

Later, the characters are speaking German and passing off as native speakers (this is a vitally important point more than once). Granted, it is not complicated German, but very few untrained people can pass themselves off as native speakers in a second language. I've been speaking Spanish as a second language for years and I would never be confused for a native speaker.

This is not a bad book. The quick pace was fun, the bad guys are truly bad, and the flashbacks to World War II were well-done. But, the end result was 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE ENIGMA AFFAIR: A NOVEL by Charlie Lovett.

THE GREAT GATSBY (audiobook) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Originally published in 1925.
This audiobook version was published by HarperAudio in 2004.

Read by Tim Robbins.
Duration: 5 hours, 3 minutes.
Unabridged.
 
Way back in the 1980s, I read The Great Gatsby. I remembered very little about it except that a rich guy was pining over a woman throughout the book. I also misremembered a few plot points. For example, I remembered Gatsby's car being dumped in a swimming pool or maybe in the bay.

I have been reminded of the book on a regular basis because I teach in a high school and the book is read yearly by some English class or another. I usually ask a student if they like the book and tell them that I read it in high school. If they ask them if I liked it, I usually respond that I barely remember the plot except for "rich man - sad."

When my daughter read it in her high school English class, I decided that it was time to re-visit the book. 

Synopsis:

Nick Carraway is newly arrived in New York City. He is a World War I veteran and is trying a career as a bond seller. He is renting a small place on Long Island nestled in among mansions of the rich and trendy set.

His neighbor is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious young single millionaire. Everyone knows of him, but no one seems to know much about him. He hosts massive blow-out parties but always hangs out on the edge. He is polite, but does not participate. 

Gatsby takes an interest in Nick and Nick ends up with a front row seat to a deadly drama...

My review:

The book is a lot better than I remembered. Class is a major theme and readers who are high school aged or older can clearly see that one.

Older readers know from experience that timing is as important as anything in relationships and the Gatsby/Daisy relationship is a victim of bad timing as it is a victim of class prejudice. We've all met people that we know we could be good friends with - but events and prior commitments pull us apart. The timing is just bad.

The audiobook was read by Tim Robbins. I am not a big Tim Robbins fan, but I am a big audiobook listener and I have never heard of Tim Robbins read any audiobook. I figured that if he is reading this audiobook, he must have some sort of special affinity for it and he will pull out all of the stops. 

Turns out, I was right. After a slow monotone start, Robbins lets loose with a variety of voices that are so good that you can listen to the conversations without paying attention to all of the "he saids" and "she saids."

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Note: The Great Gatsby was part of a group of 56 books that a school board in Alaska wanted to ban in 2023. They listed Great Gatsby as a problem due to sexual content. A group of parents and the ACLU went to court to fight it and the school board lost - story here.

PLAYER PIANO by Kurt Vonnegut

Originally published in 1952.

Synopsis:

Paul Proteus is the director of the Ilium Works in New York State in an alternate timeline to our current one. It is roughly the 1950's after yet another World War. 

That war taught the engineers to trust mechanization and the government to continue the central planning model that won the war (a more extreme model of the system the real United States used during World War II.)

In the Ilium works there are multiple factory buildings full of machines, but there are no people because the whole thing is automated. Proteus and the other engineers replaced all of the people with machines in the name of efficiency. Even the best human workers make mistakes or get an illness and miss work or, eventually, die. 

The machines don't have that problem. They work and work and work until the day they are replaced with even faster machines.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
in 1952

This is the source of the title, Player Piano. A player piano plays itself thanks to a roll that is inserted. In the town across the river from Ilium Works, there is a player piano in the bar where all of the unemployed factory workers drink their days away.

The major theme of the book is that it is not good for humans to have no work, no skills to master and no sense that they have put in a good day's work, even if it is more efficient for machines to do it all.

And...Paul Proteus is starting to come around to that way of thinking.

My Review:

This is Vonnegut's first novel. It follows a more normal narrative form than his later, more famous novels. It's too long. It has too many characters. I has too many side plots that don't really go anywhere.

But, it is amazingly prophetic. Vonnegut was working in the public relations department of General Electric when he wrote this novel. He was constantly being exposed to miraculous "labor-saving" devices and his imagination took him to a world where so much labor has been saved with labor-saving devices that there is practically nothing for anyone to do anymore because a person with nothing to do has no reason to be here at all.

Just look at all of the jobs that have been replaced by technology - Line workers in factories, print setters, cashiers, most farm labor and on and on and on. Everyone thinks all of the jobs have gone oversees, but 85% of them have actually been lost to technology. So it goes.

The book gets better as it goes along and has a bittersweet ending.  

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut.

JOURNEY to STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS: SHATTERED EMPIRE (graphic novel) by Greg Rucka and James Robinson

 

Published in 2016 by Marvel Enterprises.
Illustrated by Marco Checchetto, Angel Unzueta, Emilio Laiso, and Tony Harris

This is an attempt to bridge some of the space in the Star Wars story line between Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It starts (oddly, in my mind) at the beginning of the last big battle over the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi and introduces Poe Dameron's parents. His mother is a pilot who flew in the attack on the second Death Star and his father was in the ground forces that fought alongside Han Solo. 

There is plenty of action, but I found the art did a "meh" job of conveying the action of a space battle and there were lots and lots of them. The story really depended a lot on space fighting action and was pretty shallow.

I did enjoy the last story. It was done by a different artist, written by a different author, and is not connected to the main story line. It features C-3P0 and is actually touching. 

I rate this collection 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: JOURNEY to STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS: SHATTERED EMPIRE by Greg Rucka and James Robinson.

THE LAST SAXON KING: A JUMP in TIME NOVEL, BOOK ONE (audiobook) by Andrew Varga

 

Published by Imbrifex Books in March of 2023.
Read by Mark Sanderlin.
Duration: 8 hours, 49 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Dan Renfrew is a self-described homeschooled nerd and his life has been turned upside down. He watched his father get stabbed by a stranger who invaded their house and he has no idea if he is even alive. 

Now, thanks to a magical device, Dan is in Medieval England and caught up in an army on the move. He learns that his father is a "time jumper" - men tasked to fix glitches in time and make sure the timeline plays out the way it is supposed to.

The year is 1066 - just a few days before King Harold Godwinson meets and defeats one of the last Viking invasions of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Even more importantly, King Harold will be forced to meet the forces of William, the Duke of Normandy in just a few days and will be defeated at the Battle of Hastings.

But, something is wrong and even though Dan has almost no idea what to do, he has to make sure that history isn't manipulated by sinister forces that can also travel in time...

My review:

Harold Godwinson from the Bayeux Tapestry

I liked this book quite a bit. The history is gritty and full of gore thanks to Dan being plunked in the middle of (arguably) the two most important battles of the  English medieval era. Limbs get hacked off, blood sprays in people's faces and intestines spill out onto the ground. None of this glorified in the book - in fact, Dan is horrified over and over again at the brutality of it all. 

The addition of the evil "time jumpers" adds a level of danger and intensity to the experience, especially when the reader finds out more about them in the last part of the book. And, it turns out that Dan is not the only good "time jumper" back in 1066, which lets the reader learn more about what is going on bit by bit as Dan learns.

The epilogue at the end of the story fleshes out the history that Dan just went through a bit more to give the reader some additional context. 

Since this book is the start of a series, the most important questions is "Would you read book 2 in the series?"

The answer is yes, I think this series looks like it could be quite strong. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST SAXON KING: A JUMP in TIME NOVEL, BOOK ONE by Andrew Varga.

STORM WATCH (Joe Pickett #23) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

 

Published by Recorded Books in February of 2023.
Read by David Chandler.
Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Game Warden Joe Pickett is out in a snowstorm chasing down an elk with a broken leg. An out of state driver plowed into an elk herd while consulting the GPS app on his phone and an injured elk somehow limped away. 

Joe and his dog Daisy are on a big ranch owned by an out of state multi-millionaire trying to track down the elk to put it out of its misery. Joe finds the elk, an SUV from a different part of the state, a metal building that is very out of place in this out of the way valley, and a dead man. 

Joe starts to nose around and gets shot at twice by snowmobilers at the top of the valley and that's just the beginning of his troubles...

My review:

For the past 13 years I have been happily reviewing C.J. Box's novels. I went back and looked at those reviews and bit-time politics has been a part of them since almost the beginning. His early books featured eco-terrorists, an EPA ruling about water rights, wind turbines, and more. 

Warning: ***spoilers***

But lately, the books are just getting more and more over the top. There is a running commentary by the lazy sheriff in the last few books that Joe Pickett keeps finding trouble. In the last two books Joe found a man who had been burned to death by Hungarian Nazis. He found his old lady neighbor was killed by the same Nazis. In this book, he discovered a Chinese communist spy who had been killed by meth-heads (actually he discovered it twice because the body was moved). He discovered a dead meth addict, and was nearly assassinated (don't worry - the bad guy was killed.) Joe's friend and self-appointed body guard Nate Romanowski along with Geronimo Jones (Geronimo is Nate Romanowski's Nate Romanowski) kill 6 more men. That's a body count of over a dozen in a county in America's least populated state (576,000 people) in just a few months. In the book before that 5 or 6 people died as well! 18 people dead in this one county in less than a year!

It seems to me that this lazy sheriff has a really good point. In 2020, Wyoming only had 25 murders and that was up quite a bit from previous years. 

I love the Joe Pickett game warden stories with Joe being out in the wild doing game warden stuff. He has fought terrorists with a missile, Nazis, dirty FBI agents, Mexican drug cartel hit teams, uncovered a Chinese Communist plot, fought Antifa extremists (extreme even for Antifa), and found body after body after body. There's a point where it gets to be too much. Who else can you take down after you have taken down Nazis, Communists, and the FBI?

***End Spoilers***

All of the griping being said, the book does move along quite well and, if you have read all of the books, is full of a lot of satisfying moments. 

This book wraps up so many loose ends that it may very well be close to the end of the Joe Pickett series. There are hints of another set of adventures with his daughter or Geronimo Jones or even with a Wyoming state trooper. 

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: STORM WATCH (Joe Pickett #23) by C.J. Box.