My Audiobook Wishlist

Ahoy! Hail! Salutations!

I’ve been remiss in updating AzureScape lately. I’ve been writing reviews over at SFFaudio, and I’ll be posting those here in the coming days.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m legally blind, and consume most of my fiction through audible format. The term “legally blind” sounds so bland and sterile, but it’s hard to describe my ocular status in a meaningful way. It’s easiest to describe it in terms of what I can and can’t do. I can see colors and shapes, light and shadow, and most importantly for the purposes of this blog, read text if it’s big enough. But I can’t drive a car, read street signs, recognize people with any semblance of accuracy, and I have trouble scrying things from afar.

Even though I can read text, I find it rather taxing to read for any length of time. For a long time I wouldn’t really admit this to myself or others, and I’d carry around mass market paperbacks and bury my nose in them, face all scrunched up, until I’d plowed my way through. This is how I got my start in reading fantasy; I made it through David Eddings’s entire corpus, the first several Wheel of Time novels by Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, and most impressively George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

In the last couple years, I’ve become honest with myself and realized that, although I can rea in this manner, it’s tiring and the return on my investment of effort is much lower. So I’ve made the switch to audiobooks. I still do a lot of print reading, for both business and pleasure, but I’m certainly most comfortable with a nice human voice reading me my Jim Butcher or Ken Scholes.

Which brings me, finally, to my point. There are some contemporary fantasy novels that just aren’t available in audio. Since I’m now a “real” reviewer of science fiction and fantasy in the blogosphere, I keep track of recent publications and the buzz surrounding them. There are some books I’m very anxious to read, but haven’t yet done so because they aren’t available in audio.

So, without further ado, here’s my shortlist of books I’d really like to listen to.

Gardens of the Moon, by Steven Erikson is the first in his multi-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I was first recommended this series by a fellow medievalist at Oxford, and have since followed the release of subsequent novels with great interest. Erikson has received much praise, and some criticism, for crafting a rich, complex world with incredible depth.

The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie opens the First Law trilogy. From what I’ve heard, Abercrombie’s writing is dark, cynical, yet intimate on a personal level. I’d really like to sink my teeth into this series.

I’ve yet to find anything in audio by Tad Williams. I began reading The Dragonbone Chair, the first in his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, but never finished it. I constantly hear wonderful things about Williams’s writing, and I really feel I should experience it. I know some of his work has been performed as an audio drama, but I’ve yet to track this down.

R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy strikes me as very intriguing, and what little I’ve seen in the way of reviews has been encouraging.

I’m sure there are many more that I’m forgetting, but this is a “shortlist” after all. It’s possible that some of these are in fact available and I’ve simply overlooked them. It’s also possible that audio publishers will pick these up for production at some point. Here’s hoping!