Read by Wayne June
Publisher: AudioBookCase.com

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe has a penchant for murder, insanity and boarding up bodies under floorboards and behind walls. These were my ponderings on my stuffy Northern Line journey.

Listening to these exceptionally well read stories of the ‘Macabre’, took me back to Roald Dahl’s ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ - that early eighties TV series.

I was always sent to bed around the time it was on TV, but I remember creeping into my parents bedroom while they were watching it in the living room, and turning their bedroom telly on really carefully (it was one of those twisty knob ones that made a 'clcking' sound when you turned it on). I never got the whole story with the sound turned off...but i felt rebillious anyhoo!

Wayne June has a timbre to his voice that fits with the spooky, sinister content of Poe’s poetry and short stories. He captures Poe’s rhythmic beats in The Raven, for example, and carry’s us in its gravitational pull to the bitter end.

Poe was a master of selecting words that created mood, and Wayne June underlines this with his reading. The spooky music at the introduction and end of each tale (although even more ‘Tales of the Unexpected’) also create a mournful mood.

Forgiving the ‘old’ language of the 1800s his stories still capture the imagination.  Insantiy is a regular theme, and in, "The Tell-Tale Heart," a man betrays his crime when he thinks he hears the beating heart of the man he has murdered.

I think my favourite tale (or, worst tale? Or, best worst tale…??) is "The Black Cat". Poe loved making his readers very uncomfortable in their skin. Our narrator becomes an alcoholic and thus begins his descent into insanity. He describes himself as an animal lover at the beginning of the tale; thus his describtion of his abuse of the cat and subsequent murder jarred with me. We hear our narrators obvious embarrassment as he describes the alcoholic madness that took over whilst torturing and murdering the poor thing! Even worse, in a rage, he does the same thing to his wife…

If you like a spooky tale, and don’t mind the olde worlde language – you’ll love these audiobooks.

Audiogeist.com



Published by: TheHeavenfield.com

Price: 0

Following on from audiogeist.com’s post last week on The Heavenfield, the gripping sci-fi thriller podiobook  i stumbled across on twitter…

A team of researchers are trialing ‘The Standing point’, a technology rather like Star Trek’s teleporting technology (‘beam me up Scotty), although, it seems to beam them to a place they really have no concept of. One minute it’s a place similar to ‘Heaven’…then, for reasons we’re still trying to figure out, it’s complete Hell, topped with grotesque and very fast moving demons.

Let me first say that the listening experience of this podio was spot on. I G Hume took on personas (yes, even the women), delivering well rounded characters that I could easily imagine. I liked the quirkiness of the sharply spoken Grace Palmer, Head of Research. She’s am eccentric chain smoker, heavy drinker and keeps calling her newbie team member Tim. His name is Thomas.

Thomas Sullivan is a genuine geek, straight out of college. He’d caught the Base Commander’s attention with academic papers that pointed to genius. He stumbles into the fray of espionage, enlisted as a Theoretician, blushing and stuttering…we never really get to see the outcome of his true potential.

Hume is good at suspense. The team gets stranded in The Heavenfield after an attack on their base. Low on air, and with the hellish red (Eeooww! Dried blood!) dust eating away at their suits – they have to wait until Maunsworth house is back online before they can be ‘teleported’ home. It seems the demons and specters of The Heavenfield want to keep them there though…

When I first started listening to the Heavenfield, I envisaged a guy in his living room reading and recording his own novel (a little like Daniel Bedingfield of the literary world). So saying, I’m sure I caught birds tweeting in the first episode…but this could almost be intentional, as the following episodes resulted in subtle but relevant periphery sounds that underlined the whole experience as a professional one.

On a different note, I did find the story line hard to follow. It took me a while to figure out who Alexi was, and who he was working for. Although, this could be the point of the tale if the ending is anything to go by. Um…sequel perhaps Mr. Hume?

The people he’s working for already have the technology that our team at Maunsworth house is testing, and he sets out to sabotage Standing Point, on a mission to kill Grace Palmer and especially Thomas Sullivan.

I downloaded via iTunes, and got a little confused with which version to download. I imagine the podiobooks recently been updated and spit into Book One and Book Two.

The interactive website is also well worth a visit – treats galore with artwork and t-shirts available to buy, plus biogs of all the characters.

BBC Worldwide has two thirds of its audiobook division to AudioGo Ltd, a company set up by a former Polygram executive.

BBC Worldwide which publishes titles including John Peel Remembered and Lynne Truss’ Certain Age reviewed on Audiogeist, as well as bestseller, Richard Burton's Under Milk Wood. The deal, understood to be worth at least £10m, is likely to be the first of several disposals of assets considered non-core by BBC Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm. The sale of a stake in BBC Magazines which publishes titles including the Radio Times and Top Gear, is expected to form part of this process.

AudioGo Ltd is a new, private company owned by film producer Michael Kuhn. The  announcement to audiobook fans via Twitter last week was; @BBCAudiobooks 'We've been making the news this week: we've got a new name! From now on BBC Audiobooks will be known as AudioGo...'

 Audiogeist.com

If you're not already an Audible.com subscriber, they've included seven teaser excerpts to convince you of how good they truely are.

BONUS: Create a new, free Audible account in the app and receive a free excerpt of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.

Audible for iPhone features the best audiobook listening experience:
• Chapter Navigation, Bookmarking, Sleep Mode, Button Free Mode, and Play as you Download
• Wireless transfer of your books from My Library to your device over Wi-Fi
• Multitasking for background audio playback and background downloading (iOS 4 and compatible device required)

And the fun extras you’ve been waiting for:
• Earn badges and check your personal listening habits
• Get insider information about author events and more with the Audible Newsfeed
• Connect to Facebook and Twitter and let your friends know what you’re listening to and more

Note: This version of the application only accepts audible.com accounts. Audible.co.uk, .de, and .fr are coming soon. Let's hope they hurry up!

audiogeist.com

In it's second year running, a panel of experts have selected the best 20 new audiobooks of 2010 for you to vote on. If you have a listen and vote for your favourite, you'll have a chance to win £50 of Audiobook Store vouchers. (Winner will be notified by email)

So, heard any good books lately?

Wanting to get back to audio, but narked by the thought of the stack of CDs i have to download to my laptop to put onto my iPod, i've downloaded The Heavenfield a free (yes, free) audiobook from I G Hume.

It's a complicated tale about a team of researchers who teleport to another world to study a 'field', so beautiful they dubbed it 'The Heavenfield'.

I'm currently on the third episode - and things are starting to go a little pear shaped. 'Heaven' has disintegrated on par with a terrorist attack on the scientist's lab. Who's attacking them? Who's the Eastern European guy?

I'll tell you later...

     

Written by: Sadie Jones

Read by: Dan Stevens

Published by: Random House Audiobooks

Price: £16.63

The lump in my throat announced itself when Lewis Aldridge was being questioned by the Coroner about the death of his mother. I don’t think it left throughout the rest of the book. If Sadie Jone’s beautifully written novel had been set today – Lewis’ tragic life would never have played out. He would have been healed, maybe a week or so after his mother’s death. And I’d like to think that people listen to children now. But I guess that’s why Sadie delivered a story set in the 1950’s...with no psychiatrists of today, and no social care..’else there wouldn’t be such a superbly moving story! (plus i’m an eternal optimist)

We meet Lewis as he returns home after a spell in prison in 1957 aged 19 – we’ve no clues as to why he was there – other than a cold relationship with his father and stepmother, and a silent drive to a refurbished church.

Sadie Jones takes us back then, to when Lewis was 10 – a year which changes him to a quiet, withdrawn little boy who becomes an angry alien to everyone.

Gilbert Aldridge, Lewis’ father had just returned from the war, and although he is cold and aloof with Lewis, we have sympathy with him for the trauma of his own past. Sadie Jones cleverly weaves Gilbert’s oppressive character into Lewis’ own fabric of despair. For, although Elizabeth, Lewis’ mother, is hardly mentioned between the two - her name rings throughout the whole story. Lewis is 10 years old when she dies.

Gilbert marries Alice within a year. She’s young and embarrassingly green. She hides her shortcomings in alcohol; which later leads to her having clothes ripping sex with Lewis at the top of their stairs. Gilbert had told Lewis to look after her, seeing the state she was in.

From the moment Gilbert returns to from the war, he’s determined to appear within the right social circles. He looks to the Carmichaels, the major neighbouring family for this. Lewis has known their daughters Kit and Tamsin, since they were very young.

Dan Stevens is able to bring an air of menace from the outset with Dicky Carmichaels’ character. It’s the more menacing because we see behind closed doors – and his violence towards his wife and daughter Kit. He never intends to touch Tamsin for a reason we never find out. The scenes echo those of Lewis’ own turmoil – and thus the two are brought together.

Kit Carmichaels is the only person who sees through Lewis’ black shroud of despair. She had always been wise beyond her years. In return, Lewis is the only person to see Kit’s own damaged soul. Their story entwines amidst the social hypocrisy..

I couldn't put this audio down - and found the ending bitterly sweet. Bitter, because it had finished. Sweet - because it left it's remains of brilliance with me.

Read by: Trevor White and Lorelei King

Published by: John Murray

Price: £10.49 from Audible

This audiobook reads like a script..a theatrical performance with Trevor White reading the ‘he said’s’ and ‘she said’s’ with a versatile candour.

There’s nothing uplifting about its choppy tale. Yes it reflects the city’s diversity; punctuating the dialogue of its varied characters with equally thought provoking historical snapshots read by Lorelei King.

Lorelei opens with a statement that sends me hunting for Google mobile; “On September 4, 1781 a group of 44 men, women and children who call themselves the Pobladores… I’m guessing that some of these snippets are fact – but some are fiction.

The distance this puts between reader and listener means that I never warmed to a single character.

This could, of course be the point; Old Man Joe, a homeless Chardonnay drinker who lives on the Venice boardwalk; Esperanza, a Mexican American post graduate who pretends to be an illegal immigrant so she can work as an abused maid; Amberton, a rich, handsome and successful movie star with a wife and children, who is charged with harassing his gay lover...

Another point may be that these are all characters that have come to Los Angeles to fulfil their dreams; they all want to become something they are not. And isn’t that a stereotype of LA? Every waitress and hairdresser is a would-be actor?

I found this a difficult book to listen to. Because of its disjointed feel, too many characters and themes..but i also had to listen to the bitter end. (which wasn’t a happy one!)

There..and I didn’t mention the ‘Million Little Pieces’ debacle once…(Doh! Dammit!)

Read by: Sian Thomas and Jeff Rawle

Published by: Random House Audiobooks

Pushing play on my CD player, my grip on my stearing wheel loosened as we were introduced to Roza. A Serbian ex prostitute, she's standing on a dark street in Archway near her derelict house. She’s not really waiting for a ‘client’, she’s having a laugh; a fact that made me immediately cynical of her ingenuous personality from the off. Her need to tell stories is compelling; i was constantly waiting for the ‘truth’.

The unfortunate who drives past Roza that night is the dull, shy Chris, a travelling salesman in his mid-forties and married to ‘the great white loaf’. He propositions Roza in a moment of madness, and begins a snowball of unrequited love.

I must add that my disquiet was further stirred by the smooth, Audrey Hepburn-esq voice of actress Sian Thomas, I was expecting a Serbian lilt. What’s more, the first-person narrative of Roza is fluent, very different from the broken English of her initial dialogue.

Jeff Rawles’ voice filled my car with the heavy tedium that was Chris. His was a voice that would be unremarkable say, in a short conversation in a pub over the advantages of blackcurrant in Guinness. But for the short time that he was mulling over his Balkan anomaly (we don’t even know if Roza is her real name) I sympathised with Chris and his bland ‘Englishness’.

Roza spends her days drinking coffee, smoking, and telling stories from her past to shock Chris. Her tale of sleeping with her father, her time at a hostess bar where she was abducted and gang-raped for days by a rogue client and his friend seemed specifically told to hurt Chris.

He’s a bland and dogged character in comparison, and he complains of her obliviousness to his feelings. Although it wasn’t the story of Roza’s upbringing as the daughter of a decorated partisan in Tito's Yugoslavia that intrigued, it was her telling of it. But, why does Roza need to read up on Yugoslavian history at the library?

Chris’s visits become less about the prospect of sex (her quote was £500 which he saves throughout the months in a brown envelope) and more about his infatuation. He wants to sit and listen to her tales, because he needs an excuse to be near her.

The question I put to my car stereo was; is she repelling him so that he never asks her for sex? And although Louis De Berniere’s artful tale kept me riveted, I’ve not drawn a conclusion from the ending; just a sense of pointless loss.

Nicely done.

Price from: $34.27

‘Flight’ is subtitled a ‘Quantum Fiction’ novel, of which the idea of there being an alternative universe has always intrigued me. “Geek!” I hear you mutter, but I loved Quantum Leap when it was running on TV, and the film, Sliding Doors with Gwenyth Paltrow; so when I stumbled across Vanna Bonta's 'Flight' profile on MySpace, I was intrigued.

Vanna Bonta is both a writer and a voice-over actor, and she narrates her novel brilliantly. Her characters are distinctive, thus brings alive the little asides and underlying humour that is Sandra, Mendle’s neurotic ex-girlfriend for example.

I’ll admit the beginning of the novel set me on edge a little; Bonta's language is very flamboyant and scientific. But, once you get used to the scientific jargon and beautiful imagery you realise that a lot of it is in fact food for thought. I became absorbed in the narrative and beautiful descriptions.

Aira Flight is a being that travels the stars. To begin with, she’s not made of any physical form as we know it, rather a light being of emotive thought. She’s travelling through space and time and we realise she’s searching for Jorian, the one she, ‘thought reaches’ to, her lover, the one she has a pure affinity with. Jorian is missing, absent from the stars. Absent from her.

She’s very close to her mini dragon, Onx, and both are tricked into the Z-Zone where they’re made to ‘forget’ who they are, what they are and what they know of the universe – they’re changed into organic beings and sent to earth!

We soon realise that we are hearing the words pounded out on the computer keyboard of award winning author, Mendle J. Orion. The tap tapping sound effects give the listener a solid transition between Mendle’s prose and what’s happening in his ‘real’ life. This is needed, as a lot of his novel has 'earthly' parallels and coincidences. There’s also a nice transition between chapters, with the ticking of a clock. I’m going to re-listen to Aira’s song I’m still not sure if I’m keen on it. I think I’d have preferred it if it were a poem she’d written.

Mendle is writing the story of Aira, his ‘Dream Lover’ (there was a little too much repetition of this song, I thought), a fictitious woman he’s longed for, who understands him. The thing with quantum entanglements is that the mysterious woman he’s writing about turns up, soaking wet, in his hotel bathroom during a science fiction convention. She has amnesia, and cannot immediately remember who she is, where she is or how she got there.

Aira is intriguing, and on meeting Mendle’s ex-girlfriend, Sandra, we realise how different she is. She highlights the vagaries of human interaction; the normally unobserved wrestling of ego. She is sometimes nauseatingly naïve, being ‘born’ into this world totally ignorant. But this Is in fact endearing, and we learn from her discoveries.

I was hooked on this story, the tale is ingenious. Although, i felt that by the end there were a couple of instances where the story could have ended before it actually did. The narrative became a little tired.

I’ll update this blog entry once I have info on a UK retailer for the audio. At the moment, you can buy from:

Audible.com, $34.27