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The Lives of Tao
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
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When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it.
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A powerful international organization wants to tip the balance of global power by infiltrating the White House. At the direction of its mastermind, alias Pecos Bill, presidential candidates have become unwitting targets of a world-class sharpshooter. A martial arts expert, a greedy corporate attorney, and a self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist form a shaky alliance initially intent on solving a missing persons case, only to get caught up in a bigger political plot in which they must uncover the assassin’s identity....
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unlistenable
- By itinerant on 11-28-17
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Dark Run
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The Keiko is a ship of smugglers, soldiers of fortune and adventurers, travelling Earth's colony planets, searching for the next job. And nobody talks about their past. But when a face from Captain Ichabod Drift's former life sends them on a run to Old Earth, all the rules change. Trust will be broken, and blood will be spilled.
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Fun sf in a familiar setting *cough Firefly cough*
- By John on 06-12-16
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Ripple Effect
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One shot. One kill. A simple plan. A simple operation. But it doesn't take much to throw off the assassination of a corrupt US senator in a foreign country. Not once the cartel gets involved. Can Riley "Bear" Logan and Jack Noble fight through the waves before a traitor gets to them first?
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Disappointing narration and weak plot!
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By: L.T. Ryan
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Children of the Deterrent
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The new novel by the author of the best-selling The World Walker series. 'My name is Daniel Harbin, and I'm a child of The Deterrent.' What if a superhuman turned out not to be so super...or even human? Britain's superhero, The Deterrent, was unveiled to the world in 1979 and disappeared two years later. The truth about his origins has never been revealed. The rumours about his children - those that survived - and their mysterious abilities have never been confirmed. Until now....
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Everything Backstory Until Last Few Chapters
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By: Ian W. Sainsbury
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Poe
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After losing her mother to a terrorist attack, Alexandra Poe was devastated when her father - disgraced and accused of treason - disappeared from the face of the earth. Now, over ten years and a stint in Iraq later, Alex is approached by a man who has information about her father and wants to help her find him. But there's a catch.
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Female version of Jack Reacher
- By Victor @ theAudiobookBlog dot com on 03-04-16
By: Brett Battles, and others
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The world had become used to the metahumans - people sometimes perfectly ordinary, but sometimes quite extraordinary in appearance - who mostly worked with their governments as high-powered peace officers, fighting crime, and sometimes fighting rogue metahumans who had become super-criminals. Then that comfortable world ended in just one terrifying day.
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It's ...okay.
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By: Mercedes Lackey, and others
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The Atlantis Code
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A thrill-seeking Harvard linguistics professor and an ultrasecret branch of the Catholic Church go head-to-head in a race to uncover the secrets of the lost city of Atlantis. The ruins of the technologically advanced, eerily enigmatic ancient civilization promise their discoverer fame, fortune, and power...but hold earth-shattering secrets about the origin of man. While world-famous linguist and archaeologist, Thomas Lourds, is shooting a film that dramatizes his flamboyant life and scientific achievements, satellites spot impossibly ancient ruins along the Spanish coast.
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Atlantis-Still lost.
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Meet Joe Ledger, Baltimore PD, attached to a Homeland task force … who’s about to get a serious promotion.
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Unnecessary
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Alex McKenna is the new Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office of the Bureau of Preternatural Investigations - the division tasked with investigating crimes involving shades. Or vampires, as they're more widely known. Children have been going missing, and agents are routinely being slaughtered. It's up to McKenna, and some unlikely allies, to get to the bottom of the problem, and find the kids before it's too late.
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Fun, with enough novelty to be interesting
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The Kid Sensation Series: Books 1-3
- By: Kevin Hardman
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 20 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Get the first three books in the Kid Sensation series. Like millions of other kids, Jim grew up wanting to be a superhero. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, Jim actually had the goods: a plethora of super powers that would have been the envy of any meta on the planet. But when his tryout with the Alpha League - the world's premiere group of supers - goes disastrously wrong, Jim basically becomes an outcast.
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Puberty and Superpowers
- By LITRPG Audiobook Reviews on 03-06-18
By: Kevin Hardman
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The Hunters
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The Team: Financed by a billionaire philanthropist, this elite team - a soldier, an historian, a computer whiz, a weapons expert, and a thief - is tasked with finding the world's most legendary treasures. The Mission: Fearing a German victory in WWI, the Romanian government signed a deal with Russia to protect the country's treasures. In 1916, two trains full of gold and the most precious possessions of the Romanian state - paintings, jewelry, and ancient artifacts - were sent to the underground vaults of the Kremlin....
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Horrible narration
- By Deirdre on 04-11-18
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Cloak of the Light
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Tragedy and heartache seem to be waiting for Drew Carter at every turn, but college offers Drew a chance to start over - until an accident during a physics experiment leaves him blind and his genius friend, Benjamin Berg, missing. As his sight miraculously returns, Drew discovers that the accident has heightened his neuron activity, giving him skills and sight beyond the normal man. When he begins to observe fierce invaders that no one else can see, he questions his own sanity, and so do others. But is he insane or do the invaders truly exist?
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Absolutely fantastic !!!!
- By Shirley Carson on 07-23-15
By: Chuck Black
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What listeners say about The Lives of Tao
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Julie W. Capell
- 09-19-15
Not funny, just a lot of fighting
Somehow I got the idea that this book was going to be funny, and it wasn’t. It was really pretty tedious, too much detail about how an out-of-shape IT guy has to go through a personal training regime in order to be an adequate “host” for an alien who has decided to co-habitate in his body with him. There are glimmers of an interesting, millennia-long backstory of how these aliens have meddled in human affairs, but it is told, not shown, and basically amounts to a bunch of supposedly “advanced” beings who cannot figure out how to make peace with each other. The bad guys are cardboard, and the good guys are not much better, they are a bunch of power hungry, vengeful kids fighting in a playground, only their playground is all of human history.
If you like endless descriptions of workouts, handgun training, martial arts training, and fights between people who spend all their time learning to shoot guns and throw kicks, this book is for you.
If you like complex stories with characters you actually care about, move along to the next book on your “to read” list.
[I listened to this as an audio book read by Mikael Naramore. I wish the reader would have differentiated more between the voices. Since a lot of the dialog happens inside the characters’ heads as they discuss things telepathically with the aliens who are inside them, it was frequently difficult to tell whether they were talking with their “inside” voices or their “outside” voices. Presumably this was done in different fonts in the print version, which would have made some passages clearer but ultimately would not have improved the book, in my opinion.]
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14 people found this helpful
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- Nathan
- 08-16-13
Realistic take on secret agent with aliens
Stereotypical overweight programmer gets to live out dream of being trained as a secret agent. Only it's a realistic version of a secret agent with all the boring parts and there's an alien voice inside his head. I was worried it would be too similar to The Host but it's completely different.
Funny and was refreshing to read something with modern day pop culture & geeky references. First half should be used for workout motivation showing the large amount of work involved in getting an overweight couch nerd into shape.
I think it went too far with the amount of influence aliens had on human evolution. According to it every single historical event or person was influenced by the aliens. Has a somewhat surprising ending and written with intention of a sequel.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-01-16
Not complex enough for me
For me it wasn't as complex as I'd like. Characters were pretty basic without too much depth. The main character was okay but toward the end he just didn't have the growth and depth I usually enjoy. The narrator was good but his British accents weren't very good. His females were okay and didn't annoy me. Also toward the end the writers subconscious sexism came through a bit. A lot of basic questions weren't answered like if the aliens can reproduce and the hosts didn't seem concerned with their lack of privacy during intimate moments. Luckily there weren't very many intimate moments so it didn't occur to me for a while. Also the action didn't really make feel anything. I didn't feel on the edge of my seat. A main character's death barely bothered me probably because I saw it coming. I probably won't listen to the next in the series.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Sharell
- 05-08-14
Awful, I couldnt get past the first chapter
I couldn't listen to this. The narration is terrible and all the characters sound the same so I don't know who is speaking. Audible please take this horrible book back.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Steph
- 09-11-13
I loved it! I need the next book in the series!
I loved this book! I just finished it and I can not wait for the next book. I am so glad this will be a series. The book is fun. You have a protagonist that you can not help love because he is overweight, unhappy at his job, fruitlessly going to clubs to try and meet someone and absolutely enduring. It is good enough I am listening to it a second time currently
The story is about an alien that inhabits the human body of our protagonist. He wasn't exactly our aliens first choice but beggars can not be choosers. You follow the transition of our protagonist learning of his alien inhabitant, figuring out he is not crazy, and developing a positive relationship. Roan gets involved in a war between two different factions of aliens who have been influencing human evolution for years. Our host has been Ghengis Khan, Laffayette, and several other notables.
Wesley Chu is extremely funny and utilizes multiple pop culture and historical references. This is a book you will enjoy and feel good after reading. Sci fi lovers, spy novel lovers, and anyone who ever wanted an escape from a boring job to become a secret agent will enjoy it. Even better we get the complaining of not getting to eat pizza and being forced to run until you fall down from complete exhaustion. There is no magical transition. Mikael Naramore does a great job. His interpretation of Roan and Tao are perfect. He has some difficulties with some accents and interpretation of women but it is not enough to rate him low for the narration. I find his narration very enjoyable.
Read this!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Meeseeks
- 02-10-17
It's OK
It starts with an engaging premise, and decent characters. However, as it proceeds it feels as though the plot relies on cliche plot devices. If you have seen Hollywood movies you have a good idea of what is going to happen, and how. I found the book enjoyable at times, until some of the fight scenes. The fight scenes are redundant and cliche, and with the book down. When one arose it was tough to slog through. I do not anticipate reading this again.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Philip Weiss
- 11-14-16
so many clichés
Sometimes a book is so awful you keep listening just to see how awful it gets. this is a series of clichéd secret agent tropes layered on run of the mill body snatcher alien tropes mixed with a mid 20s protagonist who still has not passed nerd teen development stage. and every character is uninteresting and zero dimensional.
decent narration however.
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2 people found this helpful
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- girorv
- 08-15-14
An underrated listen !
I urge to listen to this story...if... you like action, sci-fi . Those are not uncommon combinations. However, I find that many times the action overwhelms the characters in a story. This is not the case with "The lives of Tao". Wesley Chu takes the time to develop his main characters and we care about them. We also feel the conflict he is dragged into. This story works on many levels. The reader added to the pleasure by making sure we knew who was involved when and giving them their voice. I was sad when we got to the end and am looking forward to book 2.
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- Ryland H Garnett
- 07-10-14
Something
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
Overall, yes. The vast majority of the book was enjoyable, only beginning to wear as the main character continued to use the same tired lines of thought and worn out phrases to express himself. There was the sense that the author was trying to poke fun at or reference cheesy spy and action classic tropes, but being boring for the sake of being cute is still being boring.
I will say that I became swept up in the world he created of secret behind-the-scenes alien warfare throughout history, and loved the basic concept of the book. Would even be interested to see more stories set in this universe, but perhaps with a different tone.
The core problem was perhaps one of target audience. The further I got into the book, the more I felt that this would have made an excellent teen or young adult book, even though it was clearly not trying to be. It felt too toothless, the main character almost impossibly immature after a point, to be about adults. Perhaps if I had started it viewing it as a book for teens I would have been lenient.
Would you ever listen to anything by Wesley Chu again?
Probably. This felt like a sophomore attempt, a talented and imaginative writer still trying to break free of the bounds of convention and, for lack of a better term, self-doubt. Many times he began down a good path only to fall back on the same outcomes, situations, and phrases. The bulk of the work, however, was fine.
Would you listen to another book narrated by Mikael Naramore?
Yes. Naramore's narration was overall good, his inability to deliver an English accent not withstanding. HIs characters were clearly defined and consistent, which is important in a book that contains multiple simultaneous conversations occurring on different levels.
Could you see The Lives of Tao being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
Yes, but it would accused of being something of a "Chuck" rip-off. I think it would make a fairly good TV series. It could be fun to cast the voices of impressive older actors (Patrick Stewart springs to mind) as the disembodied aliens giving advice, with young up-and-coming TV talents in the leads.
Any additional comments?
I would recommend saving your money and hoping for a sequel. It's a great world, but the characters don't live up to it. Centuries of military wisdom and experience consistently give way to blind, short-sighted action, and the main character pretty stubbornly refuses to mature, think, or grow. Until a sudden last act change where he becomes a collected yet bloodthirsty freedom fighter without any real expectation.
The book tries for high mindedness, but ends up feeling like it was written for 14 year old boys. I look forward to seeing whether this author can bring his visions in line with his talent in the future.
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- Andrew Barnett
- 08-13-13
Interesting Premise
Any additional comments?
This book has an interesting premise, and Wesley Chu delivers a good story to back it up. I enjoyed the book from start to finish, and look forward to the sequel.
My only quibble is the "training montage" part of the story does seem to have a bit of a gap somewhere. In other words there's a hole where the hero jumps from fat lazy oaf to super bad ass secret agent without adequate explanation.
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