J. E. JORDAN

There's nothing "literary" about this novel, just excellent storytelling. And the narrator does an amazing number of voices exceedingly well. I had a great time listening to this one. I'm kind of sorry it's over.

I'll let others who know the genre tell you about how it squares up against its competitors. I really know nothing about the world of skaters/hackers. It didn't make a difference though; the story was very easy to follow.

I would not hesitate to listen to another book by Neal Stephenson or to anything narrated by Jonathan Davis.

I really enjoyed this audio book a lot more than I'd expected. I couldn't really get through the book's description, but it keep appearing in my recommendations and people were saying it was good. Boy, were they right! I'm glad I took their suggestion.

I think all you need to know is that the book opens with a young American actress arriving in a small fishing village in Italy in the early 1960s but be prepared to be taken far away from that core story as you move toward finding out what finally happened.

There's much to like about this tale, full of completely believable but unforeseeable twists and turns, as well as well-drawn, complex characters.

Hager traces the development of nitrogen as an industrial product first from the mines of Chile and Peru in the early 19th century through all the way through the Third Reich and tells the tales of the people involved all the way. The book is lively and worth hearing/reading as a way of improving one's general knowledge of history and the world we live in.

I'm not sure about the subtitle of the book. I think the story deals with many characters over the course of centuries. Although the story comes to a natural conclusion with the demise of the Third Reich, the Saltpeter Wars and WWI are probably more important to the whole book. Alas, maybe it's just that anything claiming to be about Hitler's rise to power is guaranteed to sell more copies.

The reader makes a surprising number of mistakes with people's names (e.g. is it Le, La or Les Rossignole?) and place names (e.g. Auschwitz, not Aus-witch), not to mention with some ordinary words (e.g. "soldering.") He does a good job of reading generally. I liked listening to him. But mispronouncing things that are easy to look up is unfortunate.

I'm sorry to say that this is a book that thoughtful people would be well advised to discreetly pass over. If Rohr were not already a popular author, I doubt it would have been published. The style of the reader is entirely inappropriate for the contents of the book. My specific complaints with the whole selection are really too numerous to list.

No, probably not, unless they told me they enjoyed one of her articles.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

I felt like Moran was trying to hard to be funny. I often thought that if I were reading the pieces, they would be funnier. I admire humor writers, but they aren't always as funny off the page.

Ach. Not really. I chuckled a few times, but it was not as good as I'd expected.

Humor is extremely personal. The person who recommended this to me was over the moon about it.

The way Atwood drew me into life in small-town Canada before the Second World War.

The ending. I didn't see it coming.

When Iris finally stands up to Freddie and tells her she shouldn't wear that shade of green because it make a woman her age look bilious.

When Iris described what it would be like if her estranged granddaughter would forgive her and come visit.

Iris is the kind of woman who, if you met in person, would probably not tell you about the details of her life. Two things that make this novel compelling: getting to hear her story before she dies and the way Atwood tells the story. It's not easy to keep track of what's going on, but if you just go with it, it all makes sense in the end.