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Nostalgic, romantic, chilling

Jake and Sadie. Either of them without the other is only half a character

Actually, I found Wasson's narration to be uneven. Some characters he did remarkably well, the main character's especially. Some character voices sounded too affected. I kept thinking of what my college speech class instructor said about oral interpretations. You need to be careful to not substitute impersonation for interpretation. The voice of the FBI agent was particularly irritating. I nearly fast forwarded through that portion. But overall, I think Wasson has a nice voice and his reading is pretty good.

How many realities does your life touch?

I hadn't read a Stephen King novel for a long time. They started to get predictable. You knew there was going to be a crunching bone and brains moment created by heavy moving objects. But out of desperation for something that wasn't another supernatural witch based fantasy set in a mythical world involving a young man or woman with secret powers that gets them ejected from the only community they've ever known to go on a quest for a maguffin that will {save the world, save a person, restore someone else's power, lead to some deep insights}, I turned to this new King book. My expectations were not high. King exceeded them. I was drawn into this book because of the well developed characters and the way King can invoke a period of time so vividly I can almost have an aftertaste of rootbeer in the back of my mouth. Who knew that it would also end up being a book about the supernatural where a young person with secret "powers" is ejected from his community to go on a quest for a maguffin that will {save the world, save a person, restore someone else's, etc}. The ending is exceedingly touching but not maudlin. Some things are worth waiting for.

condemned by infertility

Thomas Cromwell remains my favorite character because in him we see the makings of a statesman who held his own with royalty. Indeed, Henry VIII does not understand yet just how valuable Cromwell is. Cromwell is one of the few common men of humble birth who has ever been able to ascend to the pinnacle of power without having to be born into it or win it by combat. He is an everyman, a bureaucrat and a bit of a polymath. Kind to his servants, intuitive about what motivates people and skillful at using that motivation to benefit his king and country. He behaves humbly around those who think they are his betters but his humility is just a ruse. He subtly asserts himself and no one puts Cromwell in a corner.

The scene where Henry is knocked unconscious during a jousting tourney is my favorite. Suddenly, everyone's ambitions are revealed. But Cromwell puts his state and country first by defending the body of the king and he does this because he knows how close the country still is to a civil war. This scene is particularly well written and one can only imagine what Cromwell saw in the eyes of the dukes and other high level courtiers when the chance to sieze the throne was only a breath away.
One can only imagine what the courtiers saw in Cromwell's eyes and whether this was the moment of realization that lead to his eventual downfall. It was a moment when ancient feudal rite met modernity and for a moment, the feudalists blinked.

Jane Seymour comes across as a very clever girl. Maybe it wasn't always her goal to become queen, like Anne Boleyn, but Jane was someone who took advantage of opportunity and used her naturally reserved demeanor to promote her family. She's more like a cunning fox than a wolf.

My biggest problem with this book is that it hold up well in comparison to Wolf Hall. I realize that some listeners may have had problems with Wolf Hall because it is written in a non-linear style, part historical fiction, part biography. It tended to meander a bit with parts of Cromwell's domestic and inner life juxtaposing with current events in a not altogether easy to follow manner. But these are minor quibbles for a listener. Hilary Mantel is an author of extraordinarily lovely and powerful language. I was completely swept away by Wolf Hall because I had such a clear picture of what made Cromwell tick.
But Bring Up The Bodies seems to have "benefitted" from a more rigorous editing step. Someone slashed the size of this book down to an more manageable size but left a lot of material on the cutting room floor. Virtually nothing is said of the histories of the men who went to the scaffold with Anne. Some information comes through in their interviews with Cromwell but this is quick and not well fleshed out. We still don't know why Henry cut Anne off after her last miscarriage. I thought miscarriages were more common back then so there had to be another reason, perhaps medical, why Henry didn't think Anne would ever produce a son. There's no insight from doctors where they are saying, "Ah, yes, we've seen this kind of thing before. The first child is healthy but no other children live. No one knows why but we have seen that some families are plagued with it."
And then there is the motivation of Cromwell himself. It sounds like a combination of just serving the king and the desire to wreck revenge on the courtiers who continually pushed their social superiority in his face. I am unconvinced. It could be the lack of documentation but if anything, the earlier parts of Cromwell's life were more sparsely documented while this part was historic. Where Mantel allowed her mind to wander in Cromwell's in the first book, making for a coherent and consistent picture of this complex man, she pulls back in the second leaving Cromwell's personal feelings and motivations more mysterious and inscrutable. He comes across as more Iago than a Renaissance man, leaving us to continue to puzzle over the Anne Boleyn incident and his role in it. What a shame. She needn't have hurried the second book. Some things take time and need to develop at their own rate. I hope she reverts to form with the third book.

As a pharma researcher, I can tell that Patchett's background research into the pharma industry was spent at a bar one evening with a couple of labrats who were playing a practical joke on her. There is absolutely nothing in this book that even remotely resembles the drug discovery process in real life. Patchett does the public and researchers a disservice by not being more accurate.
Some of her descriptions of the Amazon river basin are vivid and lyrical. But the plot is ridiculous and her portrayal of an driven female scientist in the deepest, darkest jungle borders on misogynism. That plus the stereotype of women in science being awkward geeks or eccentric hardasses made this book very difficult to enjoy.
And it took about 3/4 of the book before something even happens to advance the plot.
But if you have already decided that drug companies are evil exploiters of gentle native people, that women scientists are cold-hearted and unpleasant, and you are content to suffer through a story that wallows in its own inertia, this book is for you.

The premise was interesting. I like stories about the Black Death. But something about this book didn't come together for me. For one thing, it seemed wildly improbable. No, I don't mean the time machine aspect. I mean sending a single person into the past without company. Who in their right mind would do such a thing, unless they're publications obsessed academics who want to be the only names on the paper. But I digress.
The characters feel a little thin. There's not enough background on them. Colin is a pain, sort of like Jar-Jar Binks. He's a bit too cheery for the dire circumstances.
But my biggest complaint is that the narration seems repetitive. The characters repeat themselves in the same scenes. And the reader seem to go so slowly that momentum is lost while the listener ponders, "Didn't Agnes already say that two sentences ago?"
The epidemic in real time doesn't seem as interesting as the one in 1348. It's really hard to make connections between the two groups. I would like to be less picky in my review but there you are, I'm a stickler.
It's not a bad book. I just doubt it deserved all of the accolades.

This book is well researched, full of historical minutiae and a satisfying plunge into the life and times of Henry V's superb English longbowmen. The character development is only briefly sketched and the characters themselves only serve to propel the action towards the final battle at Agincourt. But the narration is excellent and while the characters will not keep you engaged, what they do certainly will.