Bookish Wednesday: Otherlife Awakenings by William D. Arand

Hey all this week for Bookish Wednesday I’m back with the third book in Runner’s adventures. It’s Otherlife Awakenings by William D. Arand!

Plot Synopsis: Runner and his team managed to bring peace to Tirtius, successfully log the crew out, and have begun settling in to make a home on the isle of Vix. North Wood fort itself. Fate isn’t going to let them go that easily though. She clearly hasn’t decided on what to do with him. Plots are in motion. Threats local, outside of the ship, divine, and abroad in game scheme to exterminate Runner and the threat he represents. The possibility of what he could become. To top it all off, the server is clearly ramping up towards a full awakening. What does one do with an entire world of “living” beings who are aware? It all comes to a head when an assassin attempts to take his life in his own home. Now comes the true test. What is he willing to wager to build the future he wants, both in game and out? Or rather, who?

Plot: The plot is awesome, with plenty of revelations all around about the world Runner has come to inhabit. It also deals with Runner’s severe depression after the events of the last book, which I won’t spoil. There’s more “idiot plans” and new additions to Runners group of close followers.

Characters: Of all the new characters I found Satomi to be the best, though that may be slightly affected by the soft spot I have for the name as that was one of my teacher’s names in my Japanese High School class. That said Runner still was great to live the world through, even if Scott and Linda weren’t as present in this book as I would have liked. The rest of the cast was great, but truly the female leads were awesome in this entry with plenty of screen time for Grace, Sparky, Minxie, Brighteyes, Angel, and Bell.

Overall: An excellent ending to the trilogy, but not the end of the series apparently. The series will continue in the future, hopefully by the end of the year.

1096 Days!

Hey all I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled Retro Game Friday to write this instead. It’s been three years, or 1096 days, since I started writing daily without missing a single day. I’ve gone through deaths in my family, moving, getting sick for over a month, and various other forms of distraction for the past three years. I’ve had a blast writing and will continue to do so, but I wanted to state some of the new things that I’ve been doing in the past year.

Tor: Last year, shortly after my 2nd year of non stop writing, I received a group email with some of my fellow writers at GiN from Tor the big sci-fi/fantasy American publisher and I’ve since started doing reviews for them in addition to the reviews I’ve been doing with Audible. I alternate between the two formats, with occasional breaks for a indie author’s book. If you haven’t been looking at them I highly suggest you give them a read. I’ve been submitting them nearly weekly for the past year, so there is plenty of content for you to enjoy.

Video Game Reviews: I’ve been continuing to receive various video games to review, most of them indie games. Some of them have been great, most haven’t been. I also get some AAA games, like Destiny’s “expansions” and various JRPG/Anime related games. I hope to continue doing these, and you’ll be able to read them at gameindustry.com as well. Just so long as they don’t make me vomit like Coffin Dodgers did. Ugh…

That’s it for this post, next week it’ll be back to Retro Game Friday!

Bookish Wednesday: An Ending

Hi everyone, I’m going to interrupt your regular Bookish Wednesday with a quick announcement regarding future audiobook reviews. It’s about an ending, but not all things are ending.

What’s changing?: I won’t be reviewing any more audiobooks for Graphic Audio, the details aren’t important and we ended our arrangement with no hard feelings between us. If they change their mind in the future and wish to have me review for them once again I’ll gladly do so, but for now I won’t be doing anything for them from now on.

What about your Audible reviews?: Nothing is changing there, and I hope to continue writing reviews for Audible for a long time. If I can keep up my current pace of going through their books, I’ll be able to have a review out every week. This may change if the book is longer than 15 hours, and it may take two weeks instead. However for the moment continue to look forward to my weekly reviews of Audible Studio’s productions every Tuesday at Game Industry News under the Book Review section!

That’s it for this week’s Bookish Wednesday, I’ll be back to reviewing books like usual next week!

Book Series Wednesday: My thoughts on E-readers

 

For this week’s Book Series Wednesday I’m covering a topic that I though I should cover at least once. It’s all about those nifty, or not so nifty to you, E-readers!

What is an E-reader?: In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 7 years or so, an E-reader is a device that holds lots of books that have been digitized into a slim package. The two main competitors at the moment are Apple with their iPads and Amazon with their Kindles, there are other companies that sell tablets, but if you are talking purely about e-books then those are the two front runners.

What I think about them: For the longest time I scoffed at the notion, thinking it was sort of a fad. However after really taking a look at all the benefits of an e-reader I realized that the benefits outweigh the cons quite a bit. Let’s get the cons out of the way first. There is no paper moving through your hands, and that can never be recreated with our current e-reader technology; although I look at sci-fi series like Sword Art Online and drool at the prospect of virtual libraries I could visit to just read quietly in and still feel the paper under my hand. That weight of a heavy book in your bag, or whatever you are using to carry them, even if it’s just your arms. I enjoyed carrying a book to read at school in my free time, which I had a lot of in earlier years because once you are done eating lunch and it was raining outside you could go to the library or sit and look at the school yard under the concrete porch.

The Benefits: First off their is the environmental benefit of saving tons of paper each year by not making as many printed books and selling them instead as e-books. The other big one is the fact that it is often cheaper to buy an e-book than a paperback edition, and definitely cheaper than a hardcover edition. The other benefit is the fact that you can carry so many books in a such small format. If I wanted to read the 500+ Light Novels i’ve got on my iPad in a paper format I’d have to push around a pallet loader to carry them all.

Final Thoughts: I miss the feeling of paper under fingers using an e-reader, but I love that I can carry around so many books all in one place with barely any weight. Would I buy everything I could in paper format if money was no issue? Absolutely, as I prefer reading a book over reading it on an iPad or Kindle, but I love listening to them even more.

That’s it for this week’s Book Series Wednesday!

Book Series Wednesday: The Joys of Audiobooks

For this Book Series Wednesday I’m going to talk about why I enjoy audiobooks so much.

The Length: For myself I read much faster than the average person, I’m able to read a 1,000 page book in a day if I put the effort into it. However some people aren’t nearly as fast as me, or even the average reader, and lose out on good stories and expanding their knowledge. An audiobook allows everyone to enjoy a story no matter how fast or slow they personally read. Myself personally I’m able on average to enjoy an audiobook for at least three times as long as I would be able to enjoy it if I read it in a physical or digital format. For me this is a great thing, but others can shorten their time if they are slow readers.

The Reader: Often they get amazingly talented people to read the books, some of my favorites are Scott Brick, Michael Kramer, Kate Reading and James Marsters (The person who played Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). When I think of their voices I can imagine them as the characters I loved listening to. Sometimes they even get celebrities to read books. A more comical version of this is the Go The F*@$ To Sleep reading by Samuel L. Jackson, which you can find on Youtube very easily.

Consistency: Often authors will use specific readers for their series, for example Michael Kramer and Kate Reading are the people who read the Wheel of Time and The Stormlight Archives series. Michael Kramer also did an excellent job with the Mistborn series.

The Extreme Version: Recently a company, Graphic Audio, has released versions of audiobooks that are above and beyond the standard audiobook. Graphic Audio’s tagline is “A movie in your mind.” and they add sound effects, and multiple voice actors to their works. Granted that these versions are more expensive, and may be split into multiple parts if they are really long.

The Cost: Audiobooks are more expensive than their physical and digital counterparts. However in recent years public libraries have started to lend out digital versions of audiobooks via their website, or a secondary website.  You can also find the CD versions of the audiobooks at libraries and borrow them as well and copy them to your MP3 player.

That is it for this week’s Book Series Wednesday!