Booklog 37/2025: Patrick Ness: Monsters of Men – Chaos Walking #3 – Audiobook

Audiobook narrated by Humphrey Bower.

The final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy whicfh follows Todd and Viola, sometimes together, sometimes apart, as they get sucked into the politics of New Prentisstown and a manufactured war with the Spackle. Whether he wishes it or not Todd gets semi-adopted by the mayor (now President) Prentiss, and begins to follow a dark path even though he resists as much as he can. Viola is swept up in a rebellion of sorts as the women healers go on the rampage, using terror tactics against the mayor and his army. Add to that the arrival of a new scout ship with two of Viola’s old friends, and the impending arrival of thousands of settlers with no other option but to make the planet their home. Complicate all this with the mayor’s mental powers, and the ‘noise’ that all men acquire on exposure to the planet, and this is an excellent conclusion to the trilogy. Humphrey Bower’s reading is excellent. He switches accents and voices seamlessly. There’s a bonus short story, Snowscape, tagged on to the end of this recording.

Booklog 38/2025: John Scalzi: When the Moon Hits Your Eye – Audiobook

Narrated by Wil Wheaton
Fantasy, science fiction or pure absurdist literature? You’ll need to make your own mind up about that. It’s probably all three. The premise is that the moon, all of a sudden, turns to cheese. What kind of cheese? Not sure, but because cheese is less dense than rock and because the moon’s mass has not altered, it’s suddenly bigger and brighter and everyone notices. Rather than following one main character this book works as a series of interspersed stories as people from different walks of life react differently. First we meet the staff of a museum which holds a piece of moon rock; rock until it isn’t. Then there’s an academic turned pop-science author, a bunch of NASA astronauts whose dreams have been shattered, three retirees who meet in a diner to put the world to rights, a young girl who simply wants to write her great fantasy novel, and a tech-bro billionaire who manages to stowaway on his own rocket -- not to mention the American top-brass and the president of the United States. This is quirky and absurd. Wil Wheaton’s reading is at once serious and funny. Maybe this isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the listen.