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I listened to an audiobook edition of Kindred by Octavia Butler. It is fucking brilliant, and really disturbing because it is about slavery and abusive relationships. It is also depressing because it's about unpleasant parts of US history. But that's not the whole story.
( lots of spoilers, and if you haven't read it, you don't want to be spoiled about some of them )

I just gobbled up another Walter Mosley audiobook, The Tempest Tales. This book is a tightly woven collection of short stories (not quite a novel, but not really independent stories either).

( general spoilers )

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Seeker by Jack McDevitt (audiobook ( Read more... )

Whipping Star by Frank Herbert rating: 4 of 5 stars
Superbly narrated by Scott Brick.

What I like best about Whipping Star are the conversations between McKie and the Caleban, and I like them for the same reasons that I like reading philosophy - they explore the difficulty of communicating about abstract concepts and the grounds of existence and ( Read more... )

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Children of the Night by Dan SimmonsCompetently narrated. Entertaining. Possibly somewhat educational -- set in just-post-Ceausescu Romania; the historical details and sense of place seem plausible. The historical details about the career of Vlad the Impaler seem less plausible but an afterword insists they are meticulously researched and true. Hm ( Read more... )

(Links are to the Goodreads site.)

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This is a sequel to When Gravity Fails, which is a long-time favorite. The style is cyberpunk / noir / hard-boiled. The setting is a future Middle-East city (although actually it's based on the New Orleans French Quarter). The first-person protagonist is a street punk who's been picked out (for reasons unknown to him) by one of the local bosses for ( Read more... )