Lisa

One of the better audio books that I've listened to in quite some time. Both stories are fast-paced and interesting and both narrators do a great job with the material. Definitely worth the download.

One of the best summaries I've ever seen of this book was provided by a friend of mine: Who remembers what they had for dinner ten years ago? Every character in The Historian!

The reader is presented with an endless list of extraneous detail, lots of travelogue, and very little plot. Dracula isn't remotely scary. The people investigating him are imbeciles. And in the end the thing that bothered me most was that they didn't all die! (Did I mention that Dracula was useless?) And I'd mention how Dracula's grand plan is laughably ridiculous but I wouldn't want to spoil what it is (just that it's laughably ridiculous).

This one isn't worth the credits. Not even a little bit.

The climax of the novel veres into ludicrous territory, but the journey toward that climax is interesting and fast paced. On the whole I ended up as liking the story because most of it was involving. The climax is still ludicrous though.

Good narration, however.

Informative but a bit preachy. I appreciate much of the information provided, but something in the narration makes it seem a bit like the author standing on a soap box. Still, an informative listen if perhaps overly long.

I know that this line of books has become incredibly popular due to the HBO Series True Blood. And I know that this is the signature book of Eric/Sookie fans. But I have to be honest and say that I just don't get it.

By the time I reached the climax of the novel I forgot what the characters were even struggling over. That's not a good sign, is it? I'm not sure what the plot even was. I think maybe it was supposed to be Jason's disappearance, but that actually wasn't given much time in the novel. Was revenge for Eric being mindwiped? Was that it? I'm not sure. It involves a bunch of witches we barely meet whose motivations we hardly know.

And it seemed to me that the whole point of the mindwipe was just to hook up Eric and Sookie in a way that demanded no actual investment in the pairing and no need to explain why the characters would get together other than "he/she is hot," so the 'romance' --such as it is-- fell really flat for me.

Ultimately, it seemed like there was no 'there' there. People run around doing various things and it's over. I didn't find it to be involving. The plot is 'eh' to absent, the 'romance' is vapid and unromantic, and the point of all of it is mostly missing.

Narration-wise, the overthetop southern drawl the narrator adopts makes this a fairly excruciating listen (an I'm actually from the South!)

In the end, if I want a Sookie Stackhouse story, I'll stick to HBO where the writing seems to be aware that this is ridiculous.

One of the best audio books that I've run across in quite some time.

The story is a lighthearted romp with a time-travelling hero suffering 'time lag' (which bears striking resemblance to inebriation) sent back to do something somewhere... but, due to his time lag, he's not entirly sure that he knows what that is and only belatedly realizes that it involves a misplaced housecat, an absent-minded professor, a lost piece of hideous Victorian art, and a few romantic entanglements gone awry. With a hommages to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Jerome K. Jerome along the way, the story is historical, comedy, time travel sci-fi, romance, and a mystery... with a bright heroine, an adorable dog, and a disappearing cat along for the ride.

The narration is good throughout and the plot is lighthearted fun.

It begins as an amusing satire of "Twilight" and of soap operas. And it ends on a fairly emphatic rejection of the "Twilight" phenomenon. Unfortunately, what's between the beginning and the end is a heroine being astonishingly stupid and both male romantic leads being obnoxiously sexist (in entirely different ways).

The narrator is also a bit chirpy in her narration.

There are better contemporary urban fantasy novels out there.

It's almost cliche to say 'this non-fiction reads like fiction', but this non-fiction is as fast-paced as fiction.

It's interesting throughout, exploring not only Teddy Roosevelt, but also Roosevelt's son Kermit, and Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon.

The narrator is unobtrusive and pleasant voiced.

Cline covers a lot of ground, not only the history of the Iliad but also the questions surrounding Homer, the histories of the archeologists and archeological digs that have searched for Troy, and the questions that archeology and study have yet to answer.

Cline is a pleasant, interesting lecturer that makes the subject matter both intriguing and accessible to the listener.

Fast paced. Excellent narration. And Harry Dresden is, as always, an appealing protagonist.

It's possible to appreciate the book as a paranormal mystery stand-alone without a great deal of knowledge of what has gone on before. However, I think it helps to be familiar with the series as a whole since almost all of the characters in the novel were introduced in previous installments of the series.