Just published, [The Prophecy Con](/link/audible-loch-the-prophecy-con) is the sequel to my favorite book last year, [The Palace Job](/link/audible-loch-the-palace-job).
My favorite audiobook I listened to all last year was The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes. I wrote more about it in Recommended: The Palace Job, but the summary is it was fun, funny, and clever, with characters I just loved.
The sequel is out today. The Prophecy Con returns to the same world and characters, and makes it officially a series, “Rogues of the Republic”.
I haven’t listened to it yet, though I did buy and download it about 15 minutes after the audiobook was released. Instead, I started The Palace Job … for the third time. Did I mention I like this book? I’ll listen to The Prophecy Con this weekend, with the first book fresh in my head.
[The Palace Job](/link/audible-loch-the-palace-job) is, by far, the best audiobook I’ve listened to in at least a year. Think [Leverage](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1103987/) meets [Firefly](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303461/) meets [The Wizard of Oz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz). The book is fun, funny, and thrilling from start to finish.
First, the novel itself is terrific, with a great cast of characters, very-good-occasionally-awesome dialog, and lots of clever ideas. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, and it’s one of those books you power through, and then re-read sections, just to re-live the fun. I re-listened to the second half of the book (~5 hours) the day after finishing it, and found lots of neat, tight-fitting details that I had missed the first time.
Second, the narrator, Justine Eyre, is awesome. I pretty much never give a narrator the “golden voice” badge after just one book, but this performance was so strong, I was awarding it before the novel was half finished. Indeed, it was her voice on the 5 minute sample that convinced me I wanted to purchase and listen to the book sooner rather than later. She easily handles the two dozen or so distinct characters, with clear differences in tone and accent that make it easy to tell who’s speaking at any given time. And her performance really takes the humor to the next level, particularly with the dialog.
Who This Book is For
The book feels, in the best possible way, more like Firefly than anything I’ve come across. The characters, their relationships with each other, and a captain who never set out to be the good guy, but kind of ends up being one anyway. If you loved Firefly, as I did, you will love this novel.
My wife is a fan of Leverage, which I absorb by osmosis, and it has a bit of that feel, too. Action, capers, revenge, and humor. If you like Leverage, you’ll like this book.
Someone, maybe Greg Rucka, described the book as Ocean’s Eleven with a unicorn. That works, too, and if you like Ocean’s Eleven, or (forgive me) horny unicorns, you might like this book, too.
At any rate, the author is already working on a second book, in what I hope will be a long series. This first book stands alone, but I’m very excited to know there will be more.
Highly recommended.
Update: Here’s another review of The Palace Job, from Sigrid Ellis. He notes the same qualities I did, even down to the Leverage comparison. And writes “If you are the audience for this book, you will ab-so-freakin-lute-ly love it to pieces” — which I absolutely am, and did. :-)
I currently own four AppleTVs. I bought a 1st generation AppleTV used, years ago. I hooked it up and played with it for an hour. Disconnected it, and put it in my pile of tech to get rid of. Not useful.
I bought a 2nd generation AppleTV shortly after they were released, and liked it well enough. It’s a great Netflix client, and we used it regularly. AppleTV is still the best way to watch Netflix that I’ve used.1 If you have a streaming Netflix subscription, that alone makes AppleTV worth getting.
When the 3rd generation AppleTV came out, I got one of those for full HD (1080p) on the large TV, and moved the older AppleTV to the small television we have above our treadmill. And there, it found its calling. Continue reading “Recommended: AppleTV (3rd generation)”
If you’re an audiobook fan, I recommend heading over to Downpour.com and signing up for their newsletter. The weekly deals have been terrific, with free or inexpensive unabridged audiobooks offered regularly.
If you’re an audiobook fan, I recommend heading over to Downpour.com and signing up for their newsletter. The weekly deals have been terrific, with free or inexpensive unabridged audiobooks offered regularly. The current promotion is “Huck for a buck”.
The books are all “classics”, which is another way to say that the copyright is expired and the text is in the public domain. (I.e., no author royalties to pay.) That’s OK, these are still cool books. I’ve picked up Frankenstein,Treasure Island,Robinson Crusoe, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the grand total of $1.1
Downpour.com also has a terrific library of best sellers and new releases, including a few series that are on my list of recommended audiobooks, like the Vorkosigan Saga, the Harry Bosch series, and the Sookie Stackhouse books that inspired the HBO series True Blood. Their prices are competitive with Audible.com, they have a subscription plan that’s even cheaper, and they have apps for both iPhone (iOS) and Android.
These guys are great, I recommend you check them out. The newsletter sign-up form is at the bottom of every page.
Before you say “I can get all those same books at LibriVox, and more besides, for FREE”, no, you can’t. The Downpour.com versions have terrific production values, recorded by professional voice talent in a professional recording studio. LibraVox, while a neat service, is amateurs of varying levels of talent reading into microphones of varying levels of quality in environments with varying levels of extra noise. There’s no comparison. ↩
Since the last time I updated my hardware recommendations I’ve purchased:
An iPhone 5
An iPod Touch, 5th generation (first with Lightening connector)
An iPod Nano, 7th generation (first with Lightening connector)
A Nexus 4 (yes, I’m giving Android a serious look)
I’m going to be updating my hardware recommendations soon, but in the meantime, here’s some quick thoughts.
I don’t get the new Nano. It’s very nice, and it would have been a great way to go before the tiny square 5-6th generation Nano, but it’s…I dunno. I don’t get it. The tiny square Nano was perfect for clipping on for workouts, very capable. The new one is a little more functionality, but also bigger. If you’re going bigger, why not go all the way and get an iPhone or iPod Touch, and have a real touch device, that can run apps and everything that comes with that?
In fact, I don’t get the entire iPod line. I would have dropped the Shuffle, made the square Nano (upgraded to Lightening) cheaper to fill that spot in the line, and upgraded the iPod Touch to the new version, but keeping the old screen size. Make the taller screen an iPhone 5 exclusive, while keeping the iPod line more affordable.
I definitely would have discontinued the old iPod Touch product. Leaving that on the market is just confusing.
All that said, the new Nano and Touch are really nice devices. And the old iPod Touch is now a bargain way to get onto iOS. Just because the product line is confusing doesn’t mean the hardware isn’t nice.
Still, I recommend the iPhone 5, because it is freakin’ awesome. Truly the best piece of computing hardware I’ve ever owned.
The Nexus 4 is very nice, seems to run the Audible app pretty well (if not quite as smoothly as on the iPhone), and has a pretty broad range of other spoken word apps available. My favorite podcast app, Pocket Casts, is available for Android, and is even “Android first” (h/t Daring Fireball). My survey is far from complete, but it’s clear that as far as spoken word entertainment goes, Android is at least very good, and has no gaps.
Just a quick note to congratulate the winners for this year’s Audie awards, the Grammy Awards of the audiobook world. (Yes, I know there is an actual Grammy for audiobooks, but the Audie is the real award to win.)
Audible.com’s Memorial Day sale is celebrating the three day weekend (in the US) with three different series on sale. Every book in each series is available, and priced at $7.95, a serious savings. Get a book for the price of a decent six pack, or a Summer’s worth of listening for half what you spent on that new Weber grill.
I own all of the audiobooks twice over, and several of the printed books, but the eBooks represent something new: the chance to read the British version of the novels. Alas, due to insanely complicated–and stupid–international publication rights and restrictions, and my credit card’s USA billing address, the Pottermore.com store did not want to allow me to buy the UK version of the books.
So I bought a first-generation iPad, Rochelle got an iPad 2 as a “spousal patience” present, and we both got “the new iPad (3rd generation)” when it came out in March.
Obviously if we’re still buying them, we must like them. But, how about some details? What do we use them for? Why is the iPad useful, or cool? Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order:
The retina display is amazing. Truly spectacular. Once you’ve used it, you will find it hard to go back to any other screen. Indeed, I used my original iPad less and less as I got more used to the retina display on my iPhone 4. I am already reading far more than I have in months, due to the crisp perfection of text on the screen. Both Apple’s iBooks and Amazon.com’s Kindle app are great for reading. When I can’t get DRM-free ebooks I tend to shop at Amazon.com first, simply for the selection, even though I probably prefer the UI for iBooks, marginally.
It’s not just text that’s spectacular on the screen, either. I’ve…uh, checked out some of the comic book apps on the new screen, and it’s pretty much as good as holding a printed book. Spectacular. I’ve only used the Comics app from comiXology and the Dark Horse Comics app, but both have really delivered incredible on-screen quality.
The original iPad was really heavy, for a device you’re going to hold in a reading or viewing position for long stretches of time. Reading a book, watching a movie, browsing the web–all great “lean back” activities on the iPad, but the weight, it was a killer. The new iPad is a little heavier than the iPad 2, but quite a bit less weight than the original. It’s still not light enough, but it’s an improvement.
The new iPad does not get hot. No matter what you’ve read. It does get slightly warmer in a particular spot than the earlier models, but barely. You have to want to feel it to notice it.
The new iPad does indeed take almost twice as long to charge. On the one hand, the battery has almost twice the capacity, so this is not a surprise. On the other hand, it’s a genuine limitation, in that it becomes much more important to remember to plug it in to charge overnight if you’re planning on using it heavily the next day.
I used two iPads during March Madness, using the March Madness On Demand app to watch three games at once. The quality of the video, if not as good as my HDTV, was as good as my old standard definition TV set. Kind of amazing.
The Netflix app is even better than that. Damn near HDTV quality. The combination of Netflix streaming for under $10/month and an iPad may let you kiss a $100+/month cable bill goodbye. (We haven’t subscribed to cable in 4+ years.) That’ll pay for an iPad right there, in less than a year.
Rochelle is the master of replacing cable with iPad apps to watch her shows. Here’s a list to the apps she uses regularly:
When we want to watch something that’s not available from those services (Justified, The Walking Dead), it’s not hard to justify renting or purchasing in the iTunes Store, given that we don’t spend anything on cable. Not available there, either? Patience is a virtue…we wait for it to be on Netflix’s regular old disc service.
So, nutshell, worth it? As an upgrade from the original iPad, absolutely. The first generation iPad was interesting, even compelling as a vision of the future of computing, but for most people, I think it was easy to say “I’m going to wait for the version where they work out the bugs”.
That wait is over. I don’t know what will come in future generations of the iPad, beyond more processing power and more storage, but this third-generation hardware is “fully baked”. The high definition screen delivers an experience that you do have to see and touch to fully appreciate, but once you do, you’ll want it, too.
Only for the next two days, and only for Audible.com members, but the deal is so good, I feel compelled to share this collection of three hard-edged science fiction novels, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. I really enjoyed all three novels, and hope the author will return to the Envoy universe and write more of Kovacs’s story.
All three novels, unabridged, 55+ hours of audiobook, for $25 — less than $9 per novel, under 50¢ per hour! (Even when the sale ends on June 14th, this bundle will still be a nice deal.)
I don’t know that I’d want to use this on every book, but for those without interesting or meaningful chapter names (or if you’re just not as anal retentive as I am), this can be a nice time savings to make your chapter titles look neat and regular. This is especially useful if you’re creating a separate track for every chapter, and want to keep chapters in the right order. (I recommend a different approach, but it’s up to you.)
Other new features include additional metadata support, something that’s very welcome. All in all, a great update — and free to registered users!
