Stephen

Good brainless read for those who have brains to follow some of the concepts... The author needs to work on his description of action scenes though. Willing suspension of disbelief is so important to enjoying a good tale, you cannot disrespect it with too much ridiculous description. Once I started questioning the events in the story, I started to question the book's premise, and it ruined it for me.

Yes, but in a year or so, to let the story regain its novelty. Truly a funny book. I snorted my drink out of my nose while driving, because I was laughing.

His delivery was fantastic. He has the sarcastic, self-deprecating voice of David down pat, and he really brought the characters to life. He acted out the characters personalities; David is different from John, in a way that both characters were clearly different people, with different motivations. Their conversations are truly comic. His delivery of some of the jokes could not be better. The plot twists and turns around ridiculous events, but he holds it together so that it is not just entertaining, it is possibly maybe believable that something like this happened and there really are a John and a David in a town called UNDISCLOSED... okay. It wasn't real. I know that. Shut up. Great narrator, though.

Yep

I had previously listened to This Book Is Full of Spiders Dude Seriously Don't Touch it, by David Wong, and I really hoped that I would enjoy John Dies At The End as well as I did the other. Unfortunately, I had been spoiled by the fantastic narrator of the TBIFOSDSDTI, and listening to John Dies At The End was anticlimactic. I have no idea if the JDATE book itself is truly as funny as the other, because the narrators are so different. Perhaps if the Spiders narrator had read it, John Dies would have been hilarious. What I mean to say is this: This narrator just missed the delivery of the witticisms so frequently that I became disinterested in the story.
If you want a great David Wong book: Dude. Seriously listen to the Spiders book instead.

I had read Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos", and enjoyed all of it but the last third that dealt with Theoretical Physics. I enjoyed all of this book by Richard Panek, including the theoretical portion. "The 4% Universe" provides a good history of the different people who have been instrumental in pushing Cosmology forward, and the ideas that they espoused. It looks at some of the rivalries and petty competitions that drove the researchers. Also, it explains theoretical physics in a way that does not make such an endeavor seem so pointless. The book leads me to feel that there is a purpose to the search for dark matter, and that there is a way that we can prove its existence. We haven't found it, but it is there. This book did not leave me with the sense of futility other physics books have left me with. It was enjoyable, it respects the humanity of the science, and it ends somehow full of hope. We are at a place in history where Physics has come to a halt, groping blindly about for the next big thing. Many authors have voiced this. The last third of "Fabric of the Cosmos" frustrated me because Physics anymore seemed like a total waste of effort and money. However, "The 4% Universe" is about Cosmology, not Physics. The author acknowledges that there is a loss of momentum as Physics casts about looking for inspiration. However, a related discipline like Cosmology is freed by the restraints that hold Physics back, because it can ignore them and go back to what it does best: observing the stars and their behavior. Maybe, just maybe, cosmologists will see the next big thing out there in the heavens.

When my dog Mia died last summer, I was devastated. She had to be put to sleep after being run over by a car, and I held her gaze the entire time as she passed away. She never lost the loving, trusting, expression that she always gave me. Her eyes told me she believed that I would make sure everything was alright. Even as we buried her in our side yard in the Pet Sematary (upside down and collarless so she could run freely with our other dogs on the other side), she maintained that expression of faithful love and adoration. This book honors her, by giving true dignity to the life of subservience all well-loved family dogs live. They reside with us, love us, adore us, protect what we hold dear, wrestle and play, suffer illness and infirmity, and they pass on... to the next life? In this marvelous book, a story is told from a dog's eyes, in a way that is not corny. The dog believes in his master and in himself, and as you read it, you will recognize that you believe, too. Believing is what makes all the difference. At the close of the book, I kneeled out in our Sematary with Boo, Cool Hand, Butter, and Mia, and I cried in gratitude for having known them. Ginger and Zoey sat nearby, panting loudly and watching me with trusting eyes.

I read this book based on a recommendation, and midway through it, I thought to myself, "Is this that author who wrote the Old Man's War space novels?" He is an entertaining story teller, but holy smokes he needs to use a thesaurus when tempted to write the word, "said". It becomes distracting to listen to the word "said" repeated over and over again. There are other words like: "Replied", "Queried", "Asked", "Quipped", "Jibed", "Wondered aloud", "Laughed", "Growled", "Whispered", that came to me as I listened to the narrator. I felt bad for him having to read the word "said" over and over. If it were me reading it, I would have taken license to change the word myself. Anyway, it was a great story, and written with a sense fun that Scalzi's fans will appreciate.

Before this, I knew very little about the Civil War. I had no idea how close the North came to losing to the South. I must have slept through that portion of my schooling. My boy needed to do a project on the Civil War for his History class, and this book was a quick listen and learn about the war and this pivotal battle. I was able to listen to it while skiing down the slopes Up North, and come to his aid as he completed his project. The author, James MacPherson, is one of the most respected historians on the Civil War, and the information in this work is encyclopedic, but fascinating. The audiobook narrator kept it interesting and alive for me. No regrets at all.

I had reservations, even superstitious fear about reading this book but, having read Screwtape Letters multiple times, I figured, "Oh what the Hell. Writing a book with sympathy for the Devil was difficult for C.S. Lewis, let's see how Piers Anthony does it with Satan." It was delightful. I even got a little weepy at the end for the guy, and I cheered for him throughout the story. Piers Anthony puts so much thought into each and every character, their motivations and triumphs, that one cannot help but love and admire his work. I've read his books on the incarnations of Death and Time, and this one was just as good or better. The blasphemous themes were less than I expected, even minimal; if I was offended by anything, I trust it will be corrected in the next books as resulting from the characters' misunderstanding of God, Heaven, Holiness, and Faith.

This book is entertainingly written, but packs a wallop of serious thought provoking information. It ranks in my all time great list with Bones for its ground-breaking anthropological ideas, with You and with How We Decide for its medical and physiological insights, and it is just a great adventure. My view of myself as a human animal is different, because I read this book. I have struggled with running for years, but reading this book has provided me with some strategies that I look forward to testing in the next couple of months as I head out on the open road again. Natural scientists, doctors, runners, and lazy out of shape people with intellectual curiosity will get something out of this book. Have fun!

This book is fantastic. I was able to review and wholly comprehend all of the points of physics which Greene chose to elucidate. He reviewed the basics, Newtonian Physics through Einstein and beyond into Quantum Physics and String Theory. The third part of the reading dove into Theoretical Physics. I had originally wanted to gain an understanding of String Theory, and the first two sections more than satisfied my curiosity. They were awesome.
Unfortunately, I was so sated that I became annoyed with the third part of the recording which describes the huge realm of Theoretical Physics. This may be the section that interests you, but it was useless to me, as it is clear from his analysis that there is little we can do to prove any of the answers that are being pursued. It describes a slew of different theories on extra dimensions and possible realities, universes, etcetera, ad nauseum. I developed a very real concern for the people dedicating their lives to these theories, spending days, years, decades, pursuing confirmation of such impractical theories.
If String Theory is correct, the limits of our own dimensional reality assure us that there most likely will never be a way of detecting extra dimensions beyond our own. However, String Theory creates the need for an extra dimensional reality as it cannot exist without eleven dimensions. The circular reasoning made me throw my hands up in disgust. Who pays these guys to research this stuff, anyway?
As I listened on and on to the mental masturbation going on in the current field of Theoretical Physics, I became concerned that I was losing hours of my own life just listening to the last part of this book. It was then that I found God. I decided that I didn't care anymore about this last portion of the book, and I would ask God when I die to let me listen to his version of the Fabric of the Cosmos. With that, I went back to my day to day job as a physician and gentleman farmer.