Home on Folly Farm by Jane Lovering

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook read very nicely by Rose Robinson, about this woman who inherited her grandfather's sheep farm in Yorkshire and has her snotty sister come to stay. It started out great, with some nice snarky humor, but then the tone seemed to change, and it seemed like it lost a lot of its charm, becoming far less amusing and much more irritating.

There seemed to be two reasons for this. The first issue was that the romance part started to become a bit much, with this woman having tingles and spasms whenever this guy was around, and she was not even a teenager. It would still have been annoying even were she in her teens, but she was a mature woman. That's not to say she can't get excited about a potential man in her life, but must it be so pathetic and juvenile a reaction? The other issue was that her sister was so thoroughly and irredeemably obnoxious that I can't believe the farming sister didn't punch her right in the mouth already.

The spoiled-rotten city sister is named Cassandra, and the famer - or more technically the rancher (although they don't call them that in Britain) - is named Pandora. Those names were problematical. They didn't seem to apply, because Pandora was more like the Greek Cassandra in mythology, and conversely, Cassandra was more like a Pandora. Maybe the author intended it this way as irony, or she got the mythology mixed up? I don't know. I really didn't like either of them that much, but Cassandra not at all. Had she been simply irritating, but had a saving grace here and there, that would be one thing, but the author has made her such an extreme, outright selfish bitch, and she had Pandora barely even reacting to her insults and passive aggression, and her privileged behavior and downright abuse. It was far too much.

Pandora "farms" this rare breed of sheep for their fleece which she sells to crafts people. She's been warned by the local police that there's a gang of smugglers operating in the area, kidnapping sheep, yet when she hears a truck (in Britain, a 'lorry') go by, she's not even remotely triggered by it. Now this is a woman who's living on the thin edge of profitability, and who depends entirely on her sheep since her 'farm' does nothing else, and there's not even a mild suspicion in her mind; not even of wondering if that truck might be the smugglers? It made her look stupid and incompetent.

When the smugglers do actually show up, Pandora is slow to react. She doesn't own a gun because this is Britain, and while licensed firearms are permitted, and people on farms are more likely to own one than anyone, I guess, Pandora doesn't. That's fine, but she is armed with a phone to call the cops and she doesn't do that immediately. She does do it, but then she heads down to where the truck is, and without any plan as to what to do. Presumably it's a camera phone since all of them are these days, but she doesn't seem to think of trying to get a picture of the truck, or of the license plate or the men!

This is in northern Britain where there are drystone walls galore and Pandora doesn't even arm herself with some rocks! I hate maidens in distress stories, but in the context of that kind of story, which this really is in many ways, this would have been the perfect time to have the guy step up and do a little bit of heroics, yet he's as clueless as she is. If it were me, I'd have her throwing rocks at the truck to smash windows, or at the guys to chase them off, or I'd have the guy sneaking in the darkness and slashing a tire or two on the truck, but they don't even manage to get the license plate number between them! It was a disaster which made them both look useless. I know not everyone can step up and be heroic, but this is fiction, and I expected a bit more from the tough and seasoned woman that we're led to believe Pandora is supposed to be. It was sad.

When Cassandra arrives at the farm, with her son Hawthorn (I kid you not) who goes by Thaw for short, which in Britain sounds like Thor, she also brings along her son's tutor, who Pandora believes is Leo - the man she had a bad relationship with many years before. She believes Leo doesn't recognize her and then discovers this is Nat, Leo's brother, and learns that Leo died from a drug overdose, but it soon became clear that there is no Nat. This is Leo who is trying to redeem himself. Yawn. At least that's how it seemed to me. I may be wrong and I didn't care by then anyway. This whole thing was tedious and far too drawn-out with ominous and very soon irritating references back to Pandora's 'bad relationship'. It became annoying because it just dragged on and on and on.

So anyway, when the cop arrives, he sits drinking tea and eating cookies instead of getting out in his vehicle to see if he can track down these guys, and the last thing he thinks of doing is putting out an APB on the truck. I know this is a romance and a family problems story, not some sort of heroic action adventure, but seriously? It's not a Miss Marple story either, so a little more realism and depicting the police in a bit less of a lethargic light wouldn't hurt! It was at this point that I decided enough was way too much and I ditched it right there and then. God! I resented wasting my time on this story when I could have been listening to something worthwhile.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

Rating: WARTY!

This is a series of short stories, most of which have very little to do with the sci-fi the author is best known for. I read it a long time ago and had a vaguely fond memory of it, but my renewed acquaintance from listening to the audio version very recently left me really disappointed. I don't know if it's because I've changed significantly (I probably have) or if I just liked one or two stories from my original reading, and kept a favorable impression of those few while forgetting all the other very forgettable ones. That latter, I think, is the most likely explanation, but my current take is that I did not like this overall, and cannot commend it.

Part of the problem was the reader, MacLeod Andrews, which is about as Scots a name as you can get for someone born in Kentucky. I had the erroneous impression from his voice that he was a lot older than he seems to be, but what bothered me is that his voice is overly dramatic, and he's not up to doing female voices at all. Why they even chose a male reader given that so many stories in this collection center around a female character, I cannot for the life of me figure, but there it is. I didn't like his reading. Even had that been perfect though, there were still far too many dislikes in the stories for this to get a favorable rating from me.

The stories are these:

• The Fog Horn This was too much and Bradbury evidently has no idea of evolution, the age of the Earth or of species resilience! Even casting all that aside the story was a bit flat and made little sense.
• The Pedestrian About a guy who walks at night alone since everyone else is home glued to the TV. He's arrested because the dumb cops can't figure out what a writer can possibly write about. They don't seem to get that the TV shows require writers. Dumb.
• The April Witch About Cecy, a witch who can possess humans and influence their choices, and who tries to get a girl named Ann to become involved with a guy, Tom, who the witch actually likes for herself. It felt like Cecy was a bit of a trouble-maker trying to fulfil her own wishes instead of seeking to help Ann or Tom.
• The Wilderness was a whiny, rambling, boring story about a couple embarking on a flight to Mars.
• The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl was a story I liked, about a criminal so obsessed with cleaning every last possible trace of his presence from a murder scene that he's still there cleaning when the police arrive the next morning.
• Invisible Boy I do not remember this story at all!
• The Flying Machine about a paranoid Chinese emperor who is determined not to upset the apple cart when a citizen creates wings he can fly with, and who orders the man and all witnesses to be executed.
• The Murderer I liked this one and can even identify with it since it's more à propos now than ever. A man is so sick of his life being taken over and controlled by machines that he starts sabotaging - in effect, murdering - the machines and is arrested.
• The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind about a war between two Asian villages in the philosophy of city wall building. Not great but not awful.
• I See You Never about illegal immigration. Not very good.
• Embroidery about a woman who unpicks her entire embroidered work because of one small error. Tedious.
• The Big Black and White Game A story of a black team playing baseball with a white team in the annual village game. The way Bradbury fawns and salivates over the black players is downright racist.
• A Sound of Thunder A decent and enjoyable, if dated, story about one panicked dinosaur hunter making a tiny but significant change in the distant past and how it reflected itself into his present when he returns. Nothing like the eponymous movie that was made from this same story.
• The Great Wide World Over There I do not remember this story!
• Powerhouse I think this was about a woman who I couldn't tell if she was old or dying or what because it was so badly told, but who rides to a power generating facility with her husband and inside she gets regenerated by the power. It was ridiculous and made no sense.
• En la Noche don't recall this one at all!
• Sun and Shadow This was a tedious story about a dick named Ricardo who objects to a photographer taking pictures of fashion models not only outside his house, but anywhere in his village. Dumb. I don't know what it is with Bradbury and Mexicans or Bradbury and Chinese, but Ricardo needed a swift kick in the nuts.
• The Meadow Don't recall this one, it may be one of several I skipped.
• The Garbage Collector Don't recall.
• The Great Fire Don't recall.
• Hail and Farewell Don't recall.
• The Golden Apples of the SunI know for a fact this is one of several I skipped.
• R Is for Rocket Don't recall.
• The End of the Beginning Don't recall.
• The Rocket Man dishonestly builds a fake rocket and misleads his kids into thinking they went into space. DNF'd it.
• The Rocket Man Silly story about a dick who abandons his family to fly rockets and hypocritically makes his son promise never to do it. Rip-off of Icarus. He earns a well-deserved fate when his rocket gets sucked into the sun.
• The Long Rain Chinese water torture in which people land on Venus only to find it rains constantly and the rain drives them mad. Barf! Bradbury knew shit about Venus.
• The Exiles tedious story about death.
• Here There Be Tygers A planet with a personality likes to keep people happy, but all of these assholes save one, leave and lie about it. Yawn.
• The Strawberry Window Skipped this one.
• The Dragon idiotic story about two knights aiming to take on a dragon which turns out to be a steam engine, Dumb.
• Frost and Fire Utterly dumb story about people who live for only eight days.
• Uncle Einar So tired of these stories that I skipped this one
• The Time Machine and this one.
• The Sound of Summer Running and this.

This was a waste of my time and money. I don't commend it - I condemn it. It's tedious, and way out of date now.

Ice Blue by Emma Jameson

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook, and it was read poorly by Matthew Lloyd Davis. Since one of the main characters was female and she seemed to be the dominant character, why a female reader wasn't chosen for this book escapes me. Davis doesn't do female voices well. Not that this particular choice would have made any difference to the really bad story itself, which isn't, fortunately, first person, but which is told alternatively from the PoV of the main characters. I have to say that's not a style I particularly enjoy!

Those characters are Anthony Hetheridge, aka Lord Hetheridge, the ninth Baron of Wellegrave, who is also Chief Superintendent for New Scotland Yard. Why he had to be all that escapes me. I guess the author was going for as much chalk-and-cheese as she could get, but all she got was cheesy because his partner is Detective Sergeant Kate Wakefield who is, as the Brits say, 'common as muck'. The book description ticked me off by using the word 'beautiful' before any other quality in the list of her traits. Lord Hetheridge gets: "never married, no children, no pets, no hobbies, and not even an interesting vice, will turn sixty in three weeks." She's larded with "beautiful, willful, and nearly half his age." Seriously? Those are her traits? Why not dispense with that description and just write "I hate women" as the book description?

Apparently the plan is to marry these two off (the author bludgeons the reader over the head with this often) and then write a series about them, but this American author knows squat about Britain. And let's completely forget about how inappropriate it is for a senior officer to have any sort of relations with one of his junior police officers. I'm not going to get into the age difference because I don't buy into that 'half his age' crap. If people love each other it's irrelevant. The question is, do they? I found it hard to believe that these two would, but then I didn't read very far before giving up in disgust.

The first problem in the narrative was that Kate has a senior officer expose himself to her and there are zero consequences for him. There isn't even an investigation, and no one, least of all Detective Kate, is remotely put-out by this. Neither is any other female on the force, apparently. Has this author learned nothing from #MeToo? That's when I quit reading this insensitive and nonsensical attempt at a story.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Rating: WARTY!

This wasn't at all what I expected. Often that's a good thing, but in this case it made zero sense, and I have only myself to blame for making such a bad decision. I had read the description, so I have no excuse. I thought it might be amusing or engaging, but it was boring and silly.

The first problem is first person as usual. The story is told by a sociopath if not a psychopath, who is one of the misfit crew describing his experience of being sent as humanity's joint ambassadors to aliens who apparently don't want to meet us. Why send anyone instead of a drone or two is unexplained and apparently went unconsidered by the author in plotting this, as did the point of sending these people as opposed to trained experts.

What really got me though was the tone of the narrator - the sociopath - which is full of understanding of emotion and which simply could not be there in a sociopath, hence the story was completely unrealistic from the outset, regardless of the characters involved.

This is yet another problem (like it needs any more) with first person - a voice which really ought to come with an 'unrealistic' warning on the book cover. Had I known that this would be first person before I bought it, I would never have spent a penny on it. I gave up on it quickly because it simply wasn't doing it and seemed obsessed with trying to gross out the reader. I can't commend it based on the small portion of it to which I listened.

The Wharton Gothics by Edith Wharton

Rating: WARTY!

Every so often I give one of the classics a try and seem to have little success. I guess they're just not for me, but here goes another one!

Read nicely by Gabrielle de Cuir, I had a problem not with the reader, but with the stories. I started this in conjunction with an ebook of similarly ghostly short stories by a variety of authors and curiously I had the same experience with both of them - the first story started out fine, but the more I listened/read, the less I liked it, and subsequent stories bored me. They were slow to the point of lethargy, unappealing, and difficult to follow at times. Admittedly I listened to the Wharton stories while commuting to and from work, so there were distractions, but even in the quiet of the early morning when there's little to no traffic, I had a hard time finding anything interesting to listen to.

The eight stories are these, in case you want to look them up. Some or all of them may well be public domain by now, and available on the Gutenberg Project or some other similar online platform for free:

• The Fulness of Life
• The Lady's Maid's Bell
• Afterward
• The Letters
• Mr Jones
• A Journey
• The Hermit and the Wild Woman
• The Quicksand

I made it only about halfway through this before giving it up as a bad job. I can't commend it based on the experience I had despite Gabrielle de Cuir's sweet and mellow voice. This is my second experience of this author and my last. I did not like The Age of Innocence either so it's time to move on and give other authors a chance.

Essential Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin

Rating: WARTY!

I misunderstood this one completely. I'd thought it was going to be a collection of her best work read by the author (whose full name is the immense Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell) herself, but instead, it was a very short collection of some random speeches she'd made, usually talking about people I'd never heard of. It was a delight to hear her voice which I never had before, but the speeches were mostly boring to me because they lacked context and were presented with no introduction or background. There was some humor and one or two interesting insights, but for me this simply wasn't really worth the time or the money. Quite honestly I felt rather ripped-off. Fortunately I had this at a discount so it could have been worse! But I can't commend it unless you're truly a Nin-y!

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Rating: WARTY!

Read not well by Claudia Alick. I could not get with her reading style or voice at all, and it sure didn't help that the writing was atrocious: confused, jarring, choppy, and with events and the mechanics of this fictional world very poorly explained.

I was attracted by the PoC on the cover of the book since usually the folks in stories of this nature are white, but once again I proved to myself what an appalling mistake it is to pay any attention to a book cover. The woman inside the book could have been anyone - white, black, tall, short, long-haired, short haired, bald, fat, thin or anywhere in between any of those options for all the description we got. Her appearance is never mentioned - at least not in the portion of this that I could stand to listen to. I'm not one for detailed depictions of every single aspect of a fictional world, but a bit of hinting here and there is nice!

Ideally, it ought to be utterly irrelevant what the character looks like or what color he, she, or they are, unless of course it has some bearing on the story, but realistically, you would expect there to be some sort of mention at some point of her skin color, or hair or something, even if only in passing, but there was nothing - not in the portion I read. It was like she was a blank slate. Since the author is white I can only assume this is a cynical attempt to claim some relevancy in the current climate. Or maybe he wrote this story about a white character and the publisher just slapped a woman of color on the front since he doesn't mention who she is. Maybe the Chinese edition has a Chinese protagonist, and the Latin edition a Hispanic one. I dunno.

The story is that Tara, the main charcter, has graduated from her supernatural academy, but she left dishonorably somehow, so how that worked, I do not know. She's a complete newbie with no experience whatsoever, so why she's chosen to resurrect the deceased fire god of Alt Coulumb is a mystery. The deal here is that people worship gods, which gives the god power, and the god in turn uses that power to care for their worshippers. It's a bit incestuous and weird, but it's really not explained too well, and you have to wonder what's the point, really!

Tara and her supervisor discover that the god, Kos, has been murdered. For me this is where the very idea of the story gets boring because they have to take it to court! I was concerned about the story becoming mired like that, but I was willing to give this audiobook a chance until I began listening. It failed me fairly quickly, so I ditched it and moved onto something hopefully better. Life's far too short to force oneself to read a crappy novel to the end.

The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. This is the first audiobook I've had from Netgalley and it worked flawlessly in their app, playing through my car audio. I shall definitely look for more audiobooks from them.

This was a multi-performer audiobook featuring Scott Brick, Dion Graham, Johnny Heller, JD Jackson, Steven Anthony Jones, Käthe Mazur, Carol Monda, Paula Parker, Maggi-Meg Reed, and Simon Vance. With the exception of Johnny Heller (who I do not like as a narrator) and Simon Vance, who I know is British, I'd never heard of any of these people, but there wasn't a Scot among them at least as judged from the voices. Most sounded American which for me took away from the entire story.

I know Shakespeare himself probably didn't hire Scots to perform this back in the day, but he did not live in an age of #OwnVoices! Neither was there any real Scots music. Normally I'm not a fan of music in audiobooks - unless the book happens to be about music and the audio contributes positively. Otherwise, I'd rather have just the voices. The music is an irritation, especially here where it contributes nothing and does nothing to add atmosphere.

The real tragedy of Macbeth though, is that this play doesn't remotely represent the actual story of this Scot - Duncan, King of Alba - which is a game of thrones all of itself. Macbeth didn't murder Duncan unless you want to loosely label Duncan's death in battle, fighting Macbeth's forces as murder. Macbeth didn't descend into madness but took the throne after defeating the rather paranoid Duncan in battle and he ruled for almost two decades before being killed in battle himself. His wife is barely mentioned in history and certainly didn't pursue the evil path laid out for her in this misogynistic work of Shakespeare's. But let's side-step that somewhat thorny issue and consider this as a work of art.

When looked at in that light, the main problem is that this is a poorly-written play. Its brevity is the only good thing about it. I know Shakespeare is all-but worshipped, but not by me. I do agree that he came up with a nice turn of phrase here and there, but most of his work is ripped-off from others, and is tedious to listen to, and way too flowery. If we today had never heard of these works, and someone wrote his plays now, exactly as he has written them, they wouldn't have become renowned at all. For the most part they would have died the death if not been laughed out of town, and they would never have been heard of again. What does that tell you? I don't really know why he rose to such heights, but I think Shakespeare is way overblown.

Nonetheless I was interested in listening to this since, while I have attended some Shakespeare plays live, and seen others done as movies, my only experience of this one had been via a comic book story, Toil and Trouble by Mairghread Scott, Kelly Matthews, Nichole Matthews. I reviewed that as a worthy read some two or three years ago. I'm sorry to report disappointment in this audio effort, though. The prevalence of American accents rather took away from the suspension of disbelief, especially Heller's which just irritates me, I have to say. But the play's the thing and even the Americanization of this might have been tolerable had the play itself not been so god-awful! I'm sorry, but it was. It was lousy.

The best exemplification of this for me was in a speech at the beginning of Scene 8, wherein Siward learns that his son was killed. Here's the exact quote:

Ross: Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt: He only lived but till he was a man; The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed In the unshrinking station where he fought, But like a man he died.
Siward: Then he is dead?

Seriously? That's just one example. I'm sorry, but I cannot stand that sort of stupid writing unless it's done purposefully in a parody, say, in which case it would have been funny.

The entire play, mercifully short as it is, is one long tedious ramble like this, with florid language over-used and no real poetry at all. It's entirely unrealistic and inauthentic, and it's a chore to get through. The over-acting and Americanization of it did nothing to help. There was a bigger and better story to be told here and Shakespeare missed it, while George RR Martin seems to have had a much better grasp of this sort of thing! I cannot commend this audiobook as a worthy listen.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Rating: WARTY!

This is an 1855 novel about teenager Margaret Hale, who is forced to leave her beloved parsonage when her father rebels against his church. He moves his family north to the fictional county of Darkshire (seriously? LOL!) in the industrial town of Milton, where she is miserable. My next novel will be set in Lightshire in the village of Tilmon and the teenager will be ecstatic! There is actually no reason given (or if there was, I missed it) as to why they move so far. He plans on taking up work as a tutor, but it seems there would be a much better opportunity in the south than in the north for such work.

Anyway, there she meets John Thornton, who owns Marlborough Mills. This is one of those uninventive novels where the main female character takes an immediate dislike to the main male one, and in the end of course, marries him. It's essentially a Pride and Prejudice for the Industrial age with an ending cribbed from Jane Eyre. I came to this through the television mini-series that I saw a while back. There have been several, but the one I watched and considered pretty decent was the 2004 the BBC aired North and South, and so I figured I'd try the novel, but no joy was to be had. There were parts where the quaint way of expressing themselves back then was highly amusing, but that did not make up for the humdrum story - or rather, lack of one.

Set against a background of dire factory conditions and union organizers, the novel could have been a good one, but it was so tedious to listen to. This was an audiobook read decently by Harriet Seed, who was let down by the material and on occasion by her peculiar pronunciation proclivities with some words, such as 'trousseau'. The story was so rambling and pedantic that it took forever to get moving and never really did - not in the quarter of it that I could bear to listen to, anyhow.

I grew rapidly tired of the endlessly meandering perambulations and trivial topics, and just gave up on it. I was going to at least ride out the week listening to this, but by Thursday morning I'd had enough. Perhaps there's a story in there somewhere, but I saw none of it in the first 25% of this novel, and grew bored with waiting for it to show. Can't commend.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Rating: WARTY!

I DNF'd this about halfway through, annoyed by how cavalierly this author treats a young woman she is supposed to be extolling. She does just as bad a job at telling Mary's story in the written word as the movie Ammonite does with motion picture. Ammonite is rooted in this same novel, but tells a completely different story. Neither story is true. The first problem with the novel is first person, worsened by having two different first person voices. First person is a bad choice for the most part; it makes for very limited, very selfish writing, and having two such voices made it twice as bad. Since this was an audio book, I should however commend the readers, Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons who did a decent job with this fiction.

Mary Anning lived less than fifty years, between the turn and the middle of the nineteenth century. It was her older brother Joe who discovered the ichthyosaurus skull, not Mary, but she did uncover the rest of that fossil skeleton, and later she herself discovered a plesiosaur skeleton, along with a host of other fossils, including a pterosaur at places in and around Lyme Regis and Charmouth.

Contrary to the the book description's claim that Mary had "a talent for finding fossils" which makes it seem like she had some sort of magical ability, she had trained herself (under her father and older brother's guidance) from childhood to find these things out of sheer interest and also of desperation to support her family, especially after her father died prematurely. She was good at what she did because she was dedicated and yes, remarkable. Let's not demean her ability by suggesting it involved no work or effort.

William Buckland, a geology professor at the University of Oxford is completely misrepresented in this novel. Many people are. Elizabeth Philpot is likewise misrepresented, but not in that she was friends with Mary Anning - she was. They did collect fossils togther, but Elizabeth's two sisters also collected and were not quite the dilletantes which this work suggests.

The author is so obsessed with setting up a fake competition and antagonism between Philpot and Anning that she makes the same mistake that the Ammonite movie makers did: imbuing charcters with motives and behaviors that were simpy not merited from the facts. Charlotte Murchison, for example was more on par with Elizabeth Philpot's age, not with Mary's, who was barely more than a child (although a necessarily mature one) when they first met. In their desperation to validate this poor girl with a man - or a woman - both story creators neglect to find the real Anning. Perhaps she was a woman who was simply asexual, or more likely, so in need of supporting herself and her family that she didn't even dream of a relationship - hetero or otherwise. She was already and had long been married to her important work. Why deny a woman this?

Another dishonest portrayal in this work of fiction falls with all the delicacy of a landslide. While Mary did indeed survive a lightning strike as a baby, she did not get buried under a landslide like this novel dishonestly depicts. It was her dog which died in the landslide, and this author robs Mary of that grief. Ironically, landslides were Mary's stock in trade for it was the winter weather and the subsequent rockslides on the cliff faces that literally unearthed fossils for Mary's keenly-trained eyes to find.

The author appears to be sadly limited by her lack of imagination in how to approach this and even more constrainted by her refusal to tell the truth, and to fictionalize virtually the whole thing like Mary Anning's reality simply wasn't good enough for the almighty Tracy Chevalier. There is barely a handful of actual events from Mary's depicted life here, and even those are overly-dramatized or otherwise distorted. The rest appears to be the result of a rather despearate and overactive imagination. Instead of venerating a real and heroic historical person who was indeed a remarkable woman, the author cheapens Mary Anning's legacy appallingly. I cannot commend such a hack job and I intend to boycot the movie.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Rating: WARTY!

In Italian, Divina Commedia or originally just Comedia, this is a poetic work describing a descent into hell by Dante, and everything he sees there, but the real hell was actually having to listen to this audiobook. It is sooo boring and so pretentious that I gave up on it after about a quarter of it.

It was not holding my attention. It was saying nothing of interest. The story was stupid and primitive, and tedious. How this can be described as the greatest work in Italian is a complete mystery to me. Note that in Dante's time, the word 'comedy' meant something with a happy ending - it did not necessarily mean it was funny, and there's nothing funny - not even unintentionally, in this work.

The real oddity here though is that all the while that Dante is vaunting the Catholic church, he's also extolling the Greeks who were multi-theists and certainly did not subscribe to Catholicism! The guy is very confused, and his name-dropping is both tedious and laughable. Almost as laughable as his nine circles of hell:

1. Limbo
2. Lust
3. Gluttony
4. Greed
5. Wrath
6. Heresy
7. Violence
8. Fraud
9. Treachery

Heresy isn't the worst thing? Neither is violence? This is the system Dante invented out of whole cloth. He made it all up and people at the time believed it. Many still do. If you're a flatterer, you end up in the eighth circle of hell, but if you're a murderer, you only get sent down to the seventh circle? There's actually no story here, just a litany of offences and vile punishments that no god calling itself merciful would actually countenance - an eternity of suffering and a loving god are irreconcilable. And Dante was a moron.

Gender Rebels by Anneka Harry

Rating: WORTHY!

Promoted as "50 Influential Cross-Dressers, Impersonators, Name-Changers, and Game-Changers", this audio book covered a surprising and sometimes disturbing variety of women who went outside the norm (as it was back then since most of these stories are historical, although some are contemporary) to get the life they wanted. The tongue-in-cheek mini-bio book is narrated by author Anneka Harry, along with Gemma Cairney, Maya Jama, and Suranne Jones, all of whom were eminently listenable. There is an interview section at the end which was hilarious and highly entertaining.

I've seen some negative criticism of this book which talks of it being disrespectful, or employing an inappropriate approach or humor, but I think the problem with those reviewers for the most part is that they simply did not understand the British sense of humor. For me this book could do no wrong. It was outstanding and not only respected the women described here, but also championed them. Many of them I had already heard of, but most I had not, and this is from someone who has gone out of his way to learn more about such women. Another criticism I saw was that some of these women were not nice people. No, they were not, but nowhere does this book promise only to report on angels and goody-two shoes women. It's merely talking about those who broke the mold, and it promises nothing about whether they were good people or bad.

The women featured are (in order of appearance!):

• Hatshepsut
• Hua Mulan
• Saint Marina
• Joanna of Flanders
• Onorata Rodiani
• Joan of Arc
• Elena de Céspedes
• Mary Frith
• Catalina de Erauso
• Queen Kristina of Sweden
• Kit Cavanagh
• Julie d'Aubigny
• Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar
• Mary Read
• Anne Bonny
• Mary East
• Catterina Vizzani
• Margaret Woffington
• Mary Hamilton
• Hannah Snell
• Margaret Ann Bulkley
• Kaúxuma Núpika
• Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin aka George Sand
• Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst
• The Brontë Sisters
• Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot
• Ellen Craft
• Loreta Janeta Velázquez (note that this particular one is disputed)
• Lillie Hitchcock Coit
• Cathay Williams
• Jeanne Bonnet
• Violet Paget
• Mary Anerson
• Clara Mary Lambert
• Qiu Jin
• Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt
• Dorothy Lawrence
• Umm Kulthum
• Florence Pancho Barnes
• Dorothy Tipton
• June Tarpé Mills
• Saraswathi Rajamani
• Dame Stephanie Shirley
• Rena Rusty Kanokogi
• Bobbi Gibb
• Pili Hussein
• Sisa Abauu Dauh El-Nemr
• Tatiana Alvarez
• Maria Toorpakai Wazir
• Sahar Khodayari

Note that this list is from the audiobook, so I make no claims for accurate spelling, although I've tried to get 'em all right. It's the only complete list I know of outside of the book itself.

I really enjoyed this book and highly commend it - unless of course you don't get British humor and/or are not entertained by a playful narrative in which case you might want to opt for something staid - or stay-ed?

Ava and Pip by Carol Weston

Rating: WORTHY!

I am not much of a fan of series, so I have to warn up front that this is the first in a series of (so far) three. All three apparently can be read as standalones, so there's that, but I've read only this one, so I can't comment on the series. This first one was actually well-written, funny, entertaining, and has some good life messages for young readers, perhaps the most important of which, in this Internet age, is that once you put something out there in writing, it's very hard to take it back.

Note that I listened to the audio book version of this which was read brilliantly by Kae Marie Denino. Just as the author evidently did with the writing, this woman really put her heart and soul into the novel in reading it, and it showed; so my favorable review isn't solely over the writing, it's also of this reader's contribution which I loved completely and highly recommend.

There's a lot of wordplay in this book, which may delight some and annoy others. I love wordplay, but even I found it a bit much at times, yet it was quite inventive and entertaining in general, so I had mixed feelings about it. Most of the palindromes I had heard before, but some I had not. There's also other types of wordplay and a smattering of English 101 peppered unobtrusively into the text which makes the book quite educational on that score alone.

Ava is the younger sister, Pip the older. Their parents, who have palindromic names (Bob and Anna) gave their children the same thing: Ava Elle, and Pip Hannah, since mom and dad (also palindromes!) are very much into language. Dad is a playwright, for example. Ava, who is ten and looking forward to her palindromic birthday (when she'll turn 11), thinks she wants to be a writer, but she has several unfinished diaries she's given up on.

She makes a fresh start in a new one and actually finishes it over the course of an eventful story in which she becomes her sister's champion over the queen bee (named Bea) at school, who schedules a party on the same day Pip was going to have one. Ava writes a short story for a competition and makes the Queen Bee the center of the story. She has some success with it, but when the real Bea calls her to complain about the story, things start souring for Ava. The thing is that Bea isn't as bad as Ava has painted her and over the course of the book, the two become friends.

I read some negative reviews of this novel which have labeled Ava with the over-used buzzword 'ableist' and torn her off a strip over her trying to get Pip out of her shell, as though Pip is autistic or a chronic shut-in or something, which is nonsensical because it's untrue. Pip is shy and that's all she is, and there's nothing at all wrong in Ava desiring to help her. What's wrong at times is Ava's approach to helping! None of these knee-jerk alarmists seemed to grasp that. Nor did they seem to have any compassion for poor Ava, who feels neglected because her parents focus a lot of attention on Pip.

So this book is a growth experience and a learning curve for Ava, who while admittedly being somewhat spastic and too full of energy at times, is only ten, yet she's learning and caring, and she deserves a better rep than the "nattering nabobs of negativism" are giving her. Yes, that was awful wasn't it? And William Safire ought to be ashamed of it. But the thing is that Ava is a feisty spirit and young kids can learn a lot from her even as she learns of her own shortcomings and works to fix them.

This is a book about bravery and determination, about friendship and sisterhood, about navigating relationships, and about learning and improving oneself, and it deserves to be read.

Andersen's Fairy Tales vol 1 by Hans Christian Andersen

Rating: WARTY!

This really wasn't worth my time or money despite being a discounted copy. Emma Fenney does a fine job reading it and employing some amusing tones and accents, but that can't improve on fundamentally boring material. There was a male voice at one point, but nowhere can I find whose voice that was, so I can't credit him. But the problem was with the stories which are not really that entertaining. Maybe kids would find more entertainment in them than I did.

The stories are as follows:

• The Emperor's New Clothes Everyone knows this story, so 'nuff said. I didn't find it entertaining.
• The Swineherd is about a prince who disguises himself as a farmhand to stalk a princess, and it turns out she'll sell kisses for baubles and trinkets. That relationship never went anywhere and the moral of the story is the king is a tyrant because rather than try and change this behavior he himself has no doubt inculcated in his daughter, he throws her out, and rather than try to redeem her, the prince abandons her. More like a nightmare than a fairytale!
• The Real Princess More commonly known as The Princess and the Pea this is another tale of spoiled brat royalty. Any princess who was so "sensitive" that she could feel a pea through several layers of bedding would be far too delicate to survive in the real world. This is just another example of how women, according to Andersen, ought to be delicate and subjugated, and put on pedestals and mattresses.
• The Shoes of Fortune also known as 'The Galoshes of Fortune', this story tells of magic shoes that can take the wearer to anywhere, any-when. This truly dickhead Councilor, Justice Knap, having argued that the Middle Ages were a better time, is transported there and takes forever to figure out what happened to him. What a maroon. Someone should have just kicked his dumb ass with the shoes.
• The Fir Tree essentially tells suffragettes they shouldn't whine about not having the vote because they might be worse off with it. It tells people of color they shouldn't agitate against slavery because life as a free person might be worse. It's dumb and ridiculous.
• The Snow Queen is the story of Satan's mirror - designed to reflect the worst in everyone. Taking the mirror up to heaven, an accident occurs and it shatters into gazillions of pieces, two of which enter the eye and heart of a boy who was nice, but soon starts being mean to the girl who's his neighbor. He's then abducted by the snow queen and apparently there's no law enforcement in this neighborhood.
• The Leap-Frog is another story about abusing women, wherein a flea, a grasshopper, and a Leap-frog, which I assume is simply a frog, compete to see who can jump highest, and the idiot king offers his daughter's hand (and presumably the rest of her body) to the winner of the contest even though not a one of the competitors is human. The frog wins. There's no word on if it changed into a prince when the princess kissed it.
• The Elderbush is about a boy who catches cold from getting his feet wet because that's how germs work, and when a suspicious old man inveigles his way into the child's bedroom, an elder bush sprouts from the teapot and the bush contains a woman. From there the story devolves into even more incoherence.
• The Bell is a bizarre and nonsensical story about children trying to learn the origin of a ghostly bell sound coming from beyond the woods near their village.
• The Old House is really about an old man, a young boy and a tin soldier. Very suspicious. And nonsensical.
• The Happy Family is about burdock and snails. I think. Hell, I have no idea.
• The Story of a Mother is about an irresponsible woman who chases after death when he takes her young child and when he offers to give it back she turns him down and lets death carry the child off to who knows where.
• The False Collar is about shaming a woman because she will not talk to an impertinent man. The man is disguised as a shirt collar, the woman as a garter, but the implications are clear: one is high up, the other low down.
• The Shadow is a story about how the lower classes ought to be executed if they try to rise above their station. I am not making this up.
• The Little Match Girl is about how a girl who froze to death from neglect is really better off dead.
• The Dream of Little Tuk is sheer nonsense from start to finish.
• The Naughty Boy is Cupid and this story is about how evil love is. Another story about an old man and a young child.
• The Red Shoes and for something completely different: another story about an old man and a young child. This essentially is a cross between the shoes of fortune and the swineherd. This spoiled-rotten girl gets red shoes and because she wears them to church she's cursed to dance forever in them. Eventually her heart bursts. It was only because she mutilated herself that she got let into heaven.

It seems that you've been living two lives, Mr Andersen. In one of these lives, you're Hans Christian Andersen, purported teller of tall tales; you have a social life, pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. In the other life, you write disgusting stories of old men and young children. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. That, Mr Andersen, is the sound of inevitability.

A Christmas Cruise Murder by Dawn Brookes

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Alex Lee, this audiobook interested me because I published a cruise ship murder mystery myself some months ago and I was curious to know what another author would do with one. This one with a Christmas theme sounded like it might be fun, but I was wrong! My bad! I could not stand this novel and I ran from it after about five chapters. There were two problems. One was the reading voice of Alex Lee which I did not like at all, but even had the voice been magic in my ears, I still would have given up on this because of the writing style.

This is the first book in a series and I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of series as a general rule, but the first problem here for me is the absurdity of the premise - that a female police constable (later a detective constable and presumably later a sergeant and so on) goes on seven cruises and on every one there is a murder! I'm sorry but no. This is just as stupid as the woman who retreats in disarray to her ancestral home, opens a cupcake shop in this tiny village, and then finds it's the murder capital of the world. No! By far the most common crime on cruise ships is sexual assault, and even that is rare. The truth is that there are 25 times fewer crimes on a cruise ship than in your typcial city - at least as far as an American survey indicated. Maybe Britain is just the opposite....

So this Brit police officer, Rachel is looking forward to this cruise to the Canary Islands with her new fiancé. Her old fiancé is long gone, but evidently makes an appearance in a later book. I guess Rachel's life is just improbably brimming with coincidences. Her plans are scuppered when her new fiancé is called away to Italy to solve a hotel crime. I guess the Carabinieri are completely incompetent.

Another improbable coincidence is that, on the bus journey to the dock at Southampton to get on board, Rachel ends up not only speaking with the murder victim (the ship's Maître D) before he's murdered, but also gets her hands on his wallet which he conveniently leaves behind him on the bus, and which, unless I missed it (I listened to this while driving so my attention wasn't always focused on the story), Rachel never turns in and the Maître D never misses!

Another annoyance was the obsession the author seems to have with people's hair. We always get a hair description no matter how irrelevant it is. To me, unless the person's papeparance is critical to furthering the story it really doesn't matter what they look like and a brief sketch is plenty for me. To go into too much detail or worse, to do a Stephen King and deliver a not-so-potted history of the person's life is an annoyance because it brings the story to a screeching halt for no reason at all. I do not like that kind of writing.

The book description itself tells us what's wrong with this: "Rachel can't resist snooping once she suspects an element of foul play" Snooping. That's the operative word, including breaking into a crime scene with no authorization whatsoever. If the cruise people had asked for Rachel's help, that's one thing, but it's not her jurisdiction. It's the jurisdiction of the Hampshire Constabulary, since the murder took place while the ship was docked and is, as far as I could tell, discovered before the ship has even left British territorial waters.

I thought this might be different from your typical 'cozy mystery', which I avoid like SARS-CoV-2, but no! Even though the main character is a police officer, it turns out that she's still an interfering person who withholds evidence and breaks the law in her selfish and crazed pursuit of a murderer. In fact, one could argue here that so many murders take place around her that she's somehow a trigger for them, and in light of this, ought to be banned from cruise ships altogether. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

Rating: WARTY!

This was another waste of money from Chirp with whom I've had some success in garnering audiobooks for my collection. Read less than satisfactorily by Graham Halstead, the book is ostensibly an autiobiographical novel. I'm not sure if that's supposed to reference something Biblical - with the author's name being a twice told 'rock' set in stormy waters - and I really don't care anymore. This is the second novel by this author that I've tried to read and I didn't like the previous one (The Shelter Cycle) either! That novel also contained a creepy character. That was two years ago and unfortunately I'd forgotten I'd disliked his previous effort so much, otherwise I could have saved my money in not buying this one!

The story was set in a wooded area, with cabins, bordering Lake Michigan, but despite that, to me it was boring as hell with the author rambling endlessly into descriptive writing much as he rambled through the woods, but without moving the story forward in inch. He seems obsessed with the word 'shadow', or shadows', or 'shadowy' and after a handful of chapters I gave up on it because I lost all interest in what had sounded, potentially, like an interesting story, but which became an author's obsession with his own love of his own voice. None of the writing interested me in either the characters or the surroundings. It did give me an idea for a story so it was not a total loss, but whether or when that might get written is unclear at this point!

The author tells a story of his stay at the cabins and his other obsession, which was a young widow by the provocative name of Mrs Abel. I immediately suspected her of having murdered her husband (note the name, 'Abel' - another Biblical reference?!), but I lost interest in pursuing the story for the purpose of discovering what actually was going on. Frankly, the way this was written, the narrator (the author if this was indeed autobiographical) comes off as a creep and a stalker. I cannot commend this at all based on what I heard of it.

The PG Wodehouse Collection by PG Wodehouse

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook collection of short stories and a novel. I'd already heard the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, in a separate audiobook and liked it, so while I resented having to buy it again as a part of this collection (come on Chirp, think about what you're doing!), I was interested in the short stories. I now wish I had not been tempted because this was an unpleasant mess. The weird thing is that if I'd bought this first, I might never have made it to the novel because I was so put off by the stories preceding it.

Originally, I had listened to the novel with mixed feelings because on the one hand it featured the most appalling snobbery and privilege, but this was offset on the other by the absurdity and humor which softened those harsh edges. In this collection, there was no absurdity and little humor, so all that was left were the distasteful parts, and that didn't sit well with me.

Neither did it help that while Simon Jones, who read the novel I originally had heard, did a great job, BJ Harrison, who reads this collection, is nowhere near as good. Consequently, I was neither amused nor entertained. The stories included are as follows:

• Leave It To Jeeves (1916)
• Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1919)
• The Aunt and the Sluggard (1919)
• Death at the Excelsior (1976)
• Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (1919)
• Jeeves in the Springtime (1923)
• The Man Upstairs (1914)
• Jeeves and the Chump Cyril (1923)
• Jeeves Takes Charge (1925)
• Deep Waters (1914)
• The Man Who Disliked Cats (1914)
• Extricating Young Gussie (1917)
• Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Why they're in that particular order, I do not know. Clearly it's not chronological. The stories seem to have been randomly tossed in there, so there's no flow of anything. Several were not about Jeeves or Wooster. These included Death at the Excelsior which was a boring detective story, The Man Upstairs another boring story about a man and a woman living in apartments one above the other, Deep Waters about a man who fakes being unable to swim to make time with an attractive woman he sees swimming, and The Man Who Disliked Cats about some dude who seeks to have his girlfriend's cat kill her parrot so she'll get rid of the cat, which he dislikes. Those latter two had the potential to be truly funny, but they were not, neither of them.

I was seriosuly disappointed in this collection and do not commend it at all, unless you're getting it solely for the novel at the end, but I can't speak for that having not listened to it in this version.

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Rating: WARTY!

Written in the baker's dozen years that came at the end of the fifteenth century, Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's unfinished epic the has long outlived him. Unfinished (it's rumored to have been planned as several tales each form some thirty travelers - but it ended up with only about a third of that before he died), it is widely viewed as his greatest work. If this is the greatest, I fele sorry for the rest of his output, because to me this was boring and tedious nonsense.

The tales are as follows. I made it only to The Miller's tale, and then I skipped to the last one which was the most tedious of all, before giving up on this!

• The Knight's Tale - a chivalric romance ripped off from Giovanni Boccaccio.
• The Miller's Tale - the rape of the Miller's wife.
• The Reeve's Tale - the continued rape of the Miller's wife.
• The Cook's Tale - cooking up another story.
• The Man of Law's Tale - a rip-off of John Gower's Tale of Constance which is anti-Islam propaganda.
• The Wife of Bath's Tale - Another tale of rape.
• The Friar's Tale - More advantage taken of women.
• The Summoner's Tale - a gross tale.
• The Clerk's Tale - The evil bastard Marquis of Saluzzo employs appalling and unforgivable cruelty to his wife.
• The Merchant's Tale - Another tale insisting that women are fundamentally evil.
• The Squire's Tale - a rambling, meaningless story.
• The Franklin's Tale - a woman is once more a possession.
• The Physician's Tale - a rip-off of a story by the Roman historian Livy wherein a girl is a possession again.
• The Pardoner's Tale - age old tale of three men and death.
• The Shipman's Tale - deceitful woman.
• The Prioress's Tale - a racist story about 'Jewes'.
• Sir Thopas' Tale - a story of a man's designs upon a woman.
• The Tale of Melibee - an insane debate on what should be the retribution for two men who broke in and badly beat his wife and daughter.
• The Monk's Tale - a collection of tragic stroies about historical figures. Yawn.
• The Nun's Priest's Tale - more rambling.
• The Second Nun's Tale - rambling about faith.
• The Canon's Yeoman's Tale - whining.
• The Manciple's Tale - untrustorthy women - again.
• The Parson's Tale - painful penitence.

Based on what little I could stand to listen to, I can't commend this as a worthy read at all. It's warty. It's one of the, if not the most disgusting, puerile and ridiculous collections I've ever encoutnered. It's a disgrace and not worh a minute of my time, much less what time I did spend on it.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Rating: WARTY!

First published in a single novel in 1848, I listened to this - yet another of my forlorn attempts at the classics - as an apparently abridged audiobook, although I have to say Chirp did not give any indication that it was so shortened. But it was just as well it was otherwise I would have DNF'd it anyway. Curiously this book seemed quite reminiscent of another so-called classic I listened to recently by the title of The Age of Innocence, although the gender roles are reversed in this, as compered with that one.

The story is of a social climbing young girl, recently graduated from an academy, who goes by the name of Rebecca. She's not a nice person. Why Amelia - a fellow graduate - is friends with her is a mystery. Rebecca aims to find a permanent place in a rich family and sets about it at once, finding work with Sir Pitt Crawley, who is quite wealthy.

Unfortunately, Rebecca can't keep it in her pants and rather than wait for Sir Pitt's wife to expire so she can have the master of the house all to herself, she secretly marries his son Rawdon. This proves to be a tragic mistake because Sir Pitt's wife dies prematurely, and Sir Pitt is then peeved that Rebecca isn't available to him. She's screwed in a second way because Sir Pitt's half-sister, who is also wealthy and who was favoring Rawdon for an inheritance, is put out sufficiently by this ill-favored marriage of his, that she disowns him.

As if that isn't bad enough, Rawdon comes home early one evening and discovers Rebecca in the company of the wealthy Marquis of Steyne, who apparently has been giving her money and jewels. What he got in return isn't specified, but after Rawdon assaults him, the latter finds himself sent to Coventry as they say in Britain, but in this case quite literally: he's unexpectedly appointed governor of Coventry Island - a hell hole of a place that no one wants to visit. Rebecca ends up wandering Europe in a downward spiral before she manages to finagle a decent living of sorts, but it's nothing like the one she'd dreamed of.

If I've made my review sound boring, it merely reflects the work that's reviewed, but at least be happy you were not the one who had to listen to it! I can't commend it.

The Vanishing Statue by "Carolyn Keene"

Rating: WARTY!

Keene is the usual pseudonym for these books which are not doing well in their present incarnation as far as I can tell. Carolyn Keene never actually existed - not as an author of Nancy Drew anyways! Having listened to about half of this one, I can understand why. The books are tedious. Nancy is reduced to a fashionista talking about dresses and makeup and showing almost zero interest in the vanishing statue of the title even by halfway through the novel. I grew bored and gave up on it.