Here we are at the post-midlife part of “As Jeremy’s World Turns” the audiobook. Over the last 20 years or so, I have had a steady stream of old classics, new classics, fantasy, science fiction, and history lectures from the great courses. They have all molded my free time in the car, airplane rides, as well as the insanely long amount of time you must hang out in terminals and of course the long walks through town. Music gets stuck in my head, but audiobooks get stuck in my heart. It is impossible to cover everyone I have listened to, but these are the ones I hope nobody misses. Most of them are a hand-arounds at work, as there is a dozen of us who are audio book listeners outside of work, and audiobook discussers at work. I will also talk about the readers of the audiobooks as they really do make the book better, or worse.
Brandon Sanderson: Stormlight Archive – Read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading
I wouldn’t have known Brandon Sanderson at all had I not decided to start listening to audiobooks while working out many years back. The long and the short was that when I was a fan of Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” it ended during “Knife of Dreams” in 2005. My love of reading was waning anyway and that book had soured me on the series. Robert Jordan’s death made me think it was basically over anyway, and I forgot about it. When I found that I loved audiobooks I started with all the old classics like Lord of The Rings, Narnia, Foundation etc. Mostly I was a cheap ass and got the audiobooks that were on sale that looked interesting. Amusingly enough the cheap old books had cheap old readers, and they were just good not great. A sale on the Harry Potter books taught me that a reader like Stephen Fry could turn it into an epic listen.
Well, it was a sale on the Wheel of Time Books that got me listening to those, and Michael Kramer and Kate Reading are next-level readers. They aren’t Stephen Fry, Tim Gerard Reynolds or Lorelei King who will come up in later volumes, but they are still a step below epic. My only knock on them is they tend to change the accents and voices of characters throughout a series and that is probably a me problem and not a they problem. I made it all the way through to “Knife of Dreams” and was still confronted with the feeling that the story had gone downhill and the women in the book had gone from American accent to British accent to something sounding South African probably. She’s much better in shorter series where she doesn't have to remember her accents or dialect I think.
I decided to prod along into the last three books that were compiled by Brandon Sanderson out of notes left behind by Robert Jordan. The first thing he did was turn it into three books to not cram so much into an incoherent book which was looming over the last couple of Wheel of Time novels. It was a wise decision. The second thing he did was write it in his style to not insult the legacy of Robert Jordan by just trying to knock him off. This too was a genuinely good idea, and in the end it brought me back into the world of The Wheel of Time. After all of this was said and done, I looked forward to listening to more of Sanderson’s work.
I started with a book called Elantris, which was just “Meh” but it did demonstrate the way his mind works. Fortunately, it wasn’t a book that he created a sequel to, so I considered it a one-off and started with another book that was on sale, “The Way of Kings” which completely opened my eyes to the brilliance that is Brandon Sanderson universe, or as he calls it, “The Cosmere.” It also demonstrated again how horrible sentient beings can actually be when left to their own devices, and I appreciated the mire between good and evil that the book presented. He writes in a way that expects you to just understand all of the fantastic stuff that is being displayed, and without going through insane amounts of retrospective (which I find to be a lazy way of creating content anyway) he just writes and lets you, the reader catch up. It created tons of online content you can go read through between novels as well, so it became an interactive fan-based universe that sends you into so many rabbit holes that it becomes a hobby.
I’m not doing spoilers, but when I went on to go through all the “Mistborn” books because I was originally waiting for book 4 in the Stormlight Archive and then later book 5, I can tell you that you should do all of those before you hit this series up. By the end of the 7 Mistborn novels, you will have enough knowledge to find Easter eggs all through “Wind and Truth” which will be necessary because that book is overly long and may make you need to put it down for periods of time to go onto other things. Those are your only spoilers I give you aside from the fact that the women in the series will undergo a lot of accent changes, which can be confusing. Mistborn was only done by Michael Kramer and is less dialect incomprehensive but it still has it's moments.
While we are here the Skyward series has nothing to do with the Cosmere but they are all damn good books. I have never gotten around to his Alcatraz series which are primarily children’s books but people I trust have said they are excellent. You can’t fail very often with a mind as creative as this one, and I put my reputation as a nobody on the line when I recommend Brandon Sanderson and all his writings to you. I also can attest that Michael Kramer and Kate Reading are top-notch readers despite my foibles, unless they are our foibles too, then you are an epic listener, and it will be our little secret.
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