Soundbites About Interview With the Vampire

Title: Interview With the Vampire
Author: Anne Rice
Narrator: Simon Vance
Rating (Story): ★★★★☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★★

First I absolutely must thank Kim at Reflections of a Book Addict for recommending I pick up anything narrated by Simon Vance. The narration was awesome! He was fairly easy to understand, but what really blew me away were the great accents and the amount of emotion he put into the characters’ voices.  Simply amazing.

Soundbites: Digital Fortress

Title: Digital Fortress
Author: Dan Brown
Narrator: Paul Michael
Rating (Story): ★★☆☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★☆

As a fast paced spy thriller that won’t require much thinking, Digital Fortress will feel familiar to any one who has read Dan Brown’s other books.  When I read it several years ago I enjoyed it as a bit of junk food for my brain. However, as an audiobook I found its little foibles far more annoying.

Soundbites: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards

Title: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards
Author: Lilian Jackson Braun
Narrator: George Guidall
Rating (Story): ★★☆☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★☆

Although I started listening to the Cat Who series with The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is actually the first in this series of cozy mysteries. The narration was just as good as in the other book. Sadly, I couldn’t say the same for the story itself.

Soundbites: The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern

Title: The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern
Author: Lilian Jackson Braun
Narrator: George Guidall
Rating (Story): ★★★☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★☆

Like Tom Clancy, Lilian Jackson Braun is an author I rely on to basically write the same book over and over. It’s like comfort food for the brain 🙂 And as such, it made for nice easy listening. This was an adorable, cozy mystery. The plot is fairly simple and it lacked the Agatha Christie sense of challenging you to solve the crime. Instead you sit back and join our main character as the mystery unfolds, often helped along by his cat, Koko.

Soundbites: Dead or Alive

Title: Dead or Alive
Author: Tom Clancy
Narrator: Lou Diamond Phillips
Rating (Story): ★☆☆☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★☆☆

I picked Dead or Alive as my first audiobook because I figured it wouldn’t take much attention to listen too. That expectation was based on my opinion that all Tom Clancy books are basically the same and I was mostly right. However, I either haven’t read the earlier books that included torture or they weren’t as horrifying in print. Either way, the last few chapters of this book were actually stressful to listen to they were so violent. The rest of the book was just another Tom Clancy story, with a lot of action, a few political statements, and no character development. Usually I could enjoy this as mindless fun, but the torture scenes made that impossible.