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Indiscriminate Reader

Member Since 2010

  • 215 reviews
  • 219 ratings
  • 1 titles in library
  • 17 purchased in 2014

  • From Russia with Love

    • UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 52 mins)
    • By Ian Fleming
    • Narrated By Simon Vance
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready

    Every major foreign government organization has a file on British secret agent James Bond. Now, Russia's lethal SMERSH organization has targeted him for elimination. SMERSH is the Soviet organ of vengeance, interrogation, torture, and death. James Bond is dedicated to the destruction of its agents wherever he finds them.

    Pork C. Fish says: "The Best of Them All"
    "A guilty pleasure from the Cold War"

    Ian Fleming should get more credit than he does for writing fast-paced tightly-plotted thrillers. The James Bond of the books is nothing like the superhero of the movies. This is adventure fiction that stays within the bounds of reason, and it's full of (almost) believable heroes and villains and not nearly as many outrageous gadgets as in the movies either. (Bond is actually given a cynanide pill dispenser in this book; he laughs and washes them down the drain.)

    The plot is basically "Get Bond!" SMERSH wants to kill a prominent rival agent to send a message to all the other intelligence agencies, intimidate double agents, and impress the Kremlin. We get lots of Russian political machinations and the background of all the villains (and the love interest, Tatiana Romanova) before Bond is even introduced. Then to the story: SMERSH lures Bond to Turkey in what's an obvious trap, baited with Romanova and a Russian decoding device, but MI6 sends Bond anyway because the potential payoff is too good to pass up. Bond meets Romanova, is completely taken in by her, and makes several other blunders that will surprise anyone who's used to the cold, flawless cinematic Bond, before he confronts the real enemy, a psychopathic Irish defector who is now SMERSH's top assassin.

    The original Bond stories are fun despite being so dated. The literary 007 is a much more interesting character than he ever was on-screen. He's still a sexist pig, though, and the books are full of racist, sexist stereotypes. But if you can embrace them as the guilty pleasure they are, this book is a taut little thriller with a naked gypsy catfight, a lesbian Soviet interrogation specialist and her poisoned knitting needles, an asexual pseudo-lycanthropic serial killer, an Istanbul dungeon crawl, and a Turkish spice merchant who tells Bond how he used his harem to grow his own personal spy ring.

    1 of 1 people found this review helpful
  • The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

    • UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 39 mins)
    • By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • Narrated By Kirsten Potter
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready


    "Feminist literature or Lovecratian horror?"







    Seriously, read it that way and it totally works.


    0 of 0 people found this review helpful
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    • UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 6 mins)
    • By Oscar Wilde
    • Narrated By Simon Prebble
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready


    Daniel says: "Beautifully written, brilliantly read."
    "Satire of aestheticism"







    2 of 2 people found this review helpful
  • Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

    • UNABRIDGED (21 hrs and 9 mins)
    • By James Wesley Rawles
    • Narrated By Dick Hill
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready


    Hugh says: "Accidentally Good"
    "An exhortation to live in an Idaho compound"










    1 of 1 people found this review helpful
  • Life of Pi

    • UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 41 mins)
    • By Yann Martel
    • Narrated By Jeff Woodman
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready


    Theresa says: "Best audio of the year for me"
    "A good listen despite the agnostic-bashing"








    1 of 1 people found this review helpful
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

    • UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 49 mins)
    • By L. Frank Baum
    • Narrated By Anne Hathaway


    ""Why, you're just a great humbug!""






    1 of 1 people found this review helpful
  • The Currents of Space

    • UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 54 mins)
    • By Isaac Asimov
    • Narrated By Kevin T. Collins
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready


    thomas says: "Good Solid Asimov"
    "One of Asimov's better ones"









    0 of 0 people found this review helpful
  • The Postman

    • UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 24 mins)
    • By David Brin
    • Narrated By David LeDoux


    Delbert Ealy says: "Excellent!!"
    "Mail-carrier of the Apocalypse"

    The Postman does not feature zombies, killer plagues, or EMPs. The "Doom War" that ended civilization was set off by the rise of fanatics in the East and the West, leaving the U.S. (and all other countries) broken and depopulated. The depopulation happened not so much in the initial nuclear attack, but in the aftermath as civilization collapsed and millions starved or froze.

    Years later, a survivor named Gordon Krantz, who refers to himself, sometimes ironically and sometimes bitterly, as "the last surviving 20th century idealist," is traveling alone in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest when, fleeing from a band of brigands, he finds an old U.S. Postal Service truck, with the corpse of the mail carrier and his undelivered mail inside. Since he's freezing (thanks to the brigands taking his clothes), he dons the corpse's uniform.

    When he shows up at the next town, he declares himself a Postal Inspector of the "Reconstituted United States of America," which is supposedly rebuilding back East, and will be sending men and supplies and technology any day now.

    It's a con to get him a bed and a hot meal, but it quickly grows all out of proportion, until Gordon finds himself not only carrying the torch for a non-existent nation, but rallying troops in its name.

    Post-apocalyptic Oregon is a fairly realistic post-nuclear holocaust region - most people live in hardscrabble settlements, there has been minimal organization, but a few small enclaves of relative civilization. Of course they are all threatened by the "Survivalists" - remnants of the original survivalist movement, who have now become the warlords and orcs of post-apocalyptic North America.

    Most post-apocalyptic novels tend towards grimdark, for obvious reasons. The Postman has its share of violence and grit, but it is at heart an optimistic novel about the triumph of idealism and ethics over pure savagery.

    It's easy to see why The Postman was made into a movie. It's the sort of story intended to make you cheer at the end. While it didn't really present a new post-apocalyptic story per se, keep in mind it was written in 1985, before the current trend and all those YA imitators.

    A smartly plotted novel with bits of political and scientific philosophy sprinkled into the story, it's a recommended listen.

    0 of 0 people found this review helpful
  • Romeo and Juliet (Dramatized)

    • ORIGINAL (2 hrs and 53 mins)
    • By William Shakespeare


    Darrel says: "Shakespeare by way of mush mouth"
    "Oh, those crazy kids"

    Shakespeare's most famous play. Even people who failed out of high school know the story. But here's the summary:

    A pair of emo thirteen-year-old virgins fall in love at first sight, have the Truest and Most Special Love EVER in the History of Love!!!!, and kill themselves when their ill-thought elopement turns into a suicide pact. Boy do their families, the feuding Montagues and Capulets, feel bad then.

    I have seen the play of course, but it surprised me how fresh and entertaining it was to listen to it once again. If you have forgotten all the lines and the details of the full play, give it another listen. It really is a treasure trove of some of Shakespeare's best lines and characters. Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Benvolio, Balthasar... a bunch of swaggering young hotheads getting into fights with all the senselessness and testosteronic idiocy of gangbangers on the streets of Baltimore. Juliet's nurse is bawdy, gossipy, and hilarious.

    But what really struck me was just how annoying and immature and foolish the two lovebirds are. Everyone thinks of Romeo and Juliet as a timeless love story, two hearts kept apart by cruel, unreasonable parents. Yet like Disney's The Little Mermaid, if you read it with an adult perspective, you realize Dad has a point and the kids are idiots. Who plans the rest of their life based on one kiss at a masked ball?

    Romeo and Juliet's speeches, particularly when performed by actors giving them the proper emo voice, really spell out what silly and self-absorbed teenagers they are.

    For example, Romeo's conversation with their hapless accomplice, Friar Laurence, is delivered in the same flowery Shakespearean English as all the rest of the dialog, but look at the words and it's one long temper tantrum:

    'Tis torture, and not mercy: heaven is here,
    Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog
    And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
    Live here in heaven and may look on her;
    But Romeo may not: more validity,
    More honourable state, more courtship lives
    In carrion-flies than Romeo: they may seize
    On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand
    And steal immortal blessing from her lips,
    Who even in pure and vestal modesty,
    Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin;
    But Romeo may not; he is banished:
    Flies may do this, but I from this must fly:
    They are free men, but I am banished.
    And say'st thou yet that exile is not death?
    Hadst thou no poison mix'd, no sharp-ground knife,
    No sudden mean of death, though ne'er so mean,
    O friar, the damned use that word in hell;
    Howlings attend it: how hast thou the heart,
    Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,
    A sin-absolver, and my friend profess'd,
    To mangle me with that word 'banished'?

    "WAAAA! I can't see Juliet any more! I've been banished because I killed someone! This is a FATE WORSE THAN DEATH!!!!!"

    All the while Friar Laurence is trying to talk sense into him and telling him to get a grip, Romeo keeps going on and on about how he can't live without Juliet.

    Juliet is no better, of course, a lovestruck girl immediately willing to abandon her family and her city for this kid who kissed her on a balcony.

    The moral of the tragic ending seems to be interpreted by modern readers as "Parents shouldn't get in the way of true love, and feuds are stupid." But I tend to think an equally valid reading is "Teenagers are stupid and shouldn't be let out unchaperoned."

    It's a great play, though. Shakespeare still owns the English language, and Romeo and Juliet is perhaps underrated because it's so familiar and timeless that a lot of people who "know" the play have not really experienced the whole thing.

    1 of 1 people found this review helpful
  • Red Mars

    • UNABRIDGED (23 hrs and 52 mins)
    • By Kim Stanley Robinson
    • Narrated By Richard Ferrone
    • Whispersync for Voice-ready



    "The first Mars colony"

    Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is well-regarded by SF fans, but it didn't really live up to the hype for me, though it's an excellent entry in the hard SF genre. Robinson's prose is not as lyrical as Ray Bradbury's, but it's not as dry as Ben Bova's either. Red Mars seems to synthesize elements from all of Robinson's predecessors — it's a Heinleinesque adventure at times, with hard SF infodumps, but actual characters, and shout-outs to every author who's ever touched Mars, including Burroughs.

    Red Mars is the tale of the first Martian colony, and covers a couple of generations of history. The "First Hundred" who established the original settlement become larger-than-life, almost mythical figures to those who follow after them, but as Mars begins to be taken over by political and economic factions bringing old issues of exploitation and oppression (followed by resistance and terrorism) from Earth, the Hundred are just as conflicted and prone to squabbling and working at cross-purposes as all the other settlers.

    Early on, there is a huge debate over terraforming Mars, eventually becoming a conflict between the "Reds" and the "Greens." Eventually other cultures arrive on Mars and have their own ideas of what it means to be a Martian settler. Muslims make up a substantial segment of the population, as do Russians and other nationalities, all wanting to have an equal stake in Martian society.

    The ending shows the surviving members of the Hundred witnessing what happens after decades of emigration and development on Mars, with much of what has been built up brought down by an uprising among the children of Mars.

    If you are a space exploration geek, and especially if you are one of those who still dreams of a Mars expedition in our lifetime, then Red Mars may fire you up with a realistic view of what emigration to Mars might actually look like. It is almost certainly not an accurate picture of what will actually happen, should we ever get that far, but it's a realistic picture of what could happen.

    I give this book 4 stars for being one of the best Mars books out there, but not 5 stars, because the story and the characters just did not grab me enough to wonder, "What happens next?"

    0 of 0 people found this review helpful
  • Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

    • UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 31 mins)
    • By Tamim Ansary
    • Narrated By Tamim Ansary

    Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent, parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the world while ignoring the other. As Europeans colonized the globe, the two world histories intersected and the Western narrative drove the other one under. The West hardly noticed, but the Islamic world found the encounter profoundly disrupting.

    Blake says: "Explains the clash between Islam and the West"
    "A history of the world before the West mattered"

    History books are frequently dry and factual, even when not written as textbooks, and when they're not, they tend to reveal the author's biases or axes to grind. Tamim Ansary, however, sets out to tell the history of Islam through Islamic eyes, not as an apologetic for Islam that ignores its less edifying historical episodes and its troubled present, nor as a Westerner viewing Islam as, at best, an exotically misunderstood Oriental tradition, and at worst, the religion of terrorists and women-in-burkas.

    Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American, suggests that Islam and the West have for much of history existed in two parallel worlds, only rarely intersecting until the violent last few decades. The Dar-al-Islam, or the entire region that Ansary calls the "Middle World," between the European-dominated West and the Chinese-dominated East, grew, expanded, experienced theological and political revolutions, technological and scientific and literary evolution, and several foreign invasions much more significant than those Crusades that everyone today thinks were the most significant East-West interaction before the modern day.

    The vast majority of Muslims, even during the height of the Crusades, simply didn't notice the West, which for most of Islam's early history, was an impoverished backwater land of savage, squabbling kingdoms while the Middle East and North Africa was full of wealth and education and glorious cosmopolitan cities. The Crusaders seized some cities and killed a bunch of people and certainly left some profound historical legacies, but never really materially affected the Islamic world nearly as much as they think they did.

    The Mongols, on the other hand... they messed the Islamic world up.

    Before listening to this, I vaguely remembered the Ummayads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans, the various Caliphates and Sultanates and Emirates that rose and fell from immediately after Mohammad's death until the 20th century when Muslim nation states began to congeal into more or less their present forms. But Destiny Disrupted tells the entire sweeping epic with a historian's accuracy but a storyteller's verve. You will actually get caught up in the rise and fall of dynasties and the shifting epicenters of Islamic scholarship and Arab-African-and-Persian power, the changes in Islam as it goes from populist movement to institutional social paradigm to bureaucratic theocracy. Islam is a complicated religion, like Christianity, with its sects and schisms and interactions with the power of the state. Yes, to Muslims, religion has never been a separate entity from the state, as it came to be in the West, but still, Islam served the interests of rulers, got coopted by those in power, brought down those in power, caused fragmentation and changes in government according to different factions' understanding of how a proper Islamic state should be run, and so conflicts between clerics and kings did play out in their own way in the Middle East too.

    If you want to have more than a superficial understanding of how Sunnis and Shias split off from each other, and why India has been the location of so much Hindu-Muslim conflict, and of course, how the United States went from a modern nation Muslims admired and respected in the early 20th century to the Great Satan it is today (yes, a big part of the reason is Israel, but that's not the whole story, and most of the rest of the reason is oil, but that's still not the whole story), then you will get it here, but as the title indicates, this is a history of the world through Muslim eyes, and so the West really only comes into the picture towards the end. There is a huge amount of history that took place between Europe and China that most Westerners know little or nothing about, and this book will not only tell you about it, but make it interesting.

    The author's style is a great asset to this narrative. Ansary is not above tossing in wry commentary now and then, neither sparing Westerners nor Muslims from apt observations about historical hypocrisy and inconvenient truths. Ansary does not take a religious position — he obviously grew up as a Muslim in Afghanistan, but it's not even clear from his website whether he is a practicing Muslim today. So he doesn't try to "sell" Islam (and specifically calls out the historical revisionism of those liberal Muslims who today insist that "jihad" has never "properly" meant violent struggle against infidels — Ansary points out that yes it has, many times in history), but neither will he satisfy those of an anti-Islamic bent who insist that Islam is fundamentally and inherently a religion of violence and oppression and intolerance of unbelievers. Those who say that Muslims are incapable of peaceful, heterogeneous coexistence in societies that value reason and democratic principles ignore the fact that such Muslim societies existed for centuries.

    If you are a history buff and are interested in this little-served area of history, then I think you could hardly do better than Destiny Disrupted. You will be truly educated about fourteen centuries of history spanning a huge chunk of the world. It's a really good read.

    If you're looking for answers addressing contemporary issues - how Israel came to be and why it's an unending canker sore to Muslims worldwide, the origins of Wahabbism (Osama Bin Laden's brand of Islamic fundamentalism), the roots of the Taliban, how the West came to become the "Great Satan" and what Iran's problem is (and what Afghanistan's problem is, and what Syria's problem is, and what Iraq's problem is, and what Egypt's problem is....) then you'll find those here, mostly in the last few chapters, but this is not primarily a book dissecting modern Islam/Western issues. It's about the whole history of the world that happened before the West was important.

    Excellent book, highly recommended, an unreserved 5 stars.

    I would also like to single out Tamim Ansary's narration. Usually, an author narrating his own book is not a positive for me. Even great writers are rarely good narrators. But Ansary knows his material and puts all the right humorous and serious tones into his reading, and it really does sound like the author simply sitting there telling you this long historical tale, engagingly and interestingly.

    5 of 5 people found this review helpful

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