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Titus Groan
- Volume 1 of the Gormenghast Trilogy
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's summary
In this first volume, the Gormenghast Castle, and the noble family who inhabits it, are introduced, along with the infant firstborn son of the Lord and Countess. Titus Groan is sent away to be raised by a wet nurse, with only a gold ring from his mother, and ordered to not be brought back until the age of six. By his christening, he learns from his much older sisters that epileptic fits are "common at his age." He also learns that they don't like his mother. And then, he is crowned, and called, "Child-inheritor of the rivers, of the Tower of Flints and the dark recesses beneath cold stairways and the sunny summer lawns. Child-inheritor of the spring breeze that blow in from the jarl forests and of the autumn misery in petal, scale, and wing. Winter's white brilliance on a thousand turrets and summer's torpor among walls that crumble..."
In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, vivid; a symbol of dark struggle.
Critic reviews
"[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience." (C.S. Lewis)
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A ghostly twist. Three nights of terror at the house called Edbrook. Three nights in which David Ash, there to investigate a haunting, will be victim of horrifying games. Three nights in which he will face the blood-chilling enigma of his own past. Three hideous nights before Edbrook's dreadful secret will be revealed...And the true nightmare will begin.to the surface, tormenting him, refusing to let him rest. The memory of what he once had been.
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Wait For It-----Wait For It
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 11-09-13
By: James Herbert
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
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A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Pale Blue Eye
- By: Louis Bayard
- Narrated by: Charles Leggett
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When the body of a suicide victim disappears at West Point Military Academy in 1831, only to be discovered hours later missing its heart, the Academy calls on retired detective Gus Landor to investigate. Landor is something of a legend among his peers, noted for an uncanny, Holmesian ability to read people. When Edgar Allan Poe, a new cadet, comes forth with his own cryptic conclusion—that the man Landor is looking for is a poet—Landor is intrigued and enlists Poe as his assistant.
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Could not get through it
- By Amazon Customer on 10-25-15
By: Louis Bayard
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Bloodleaf
- By: Crystal Smith
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Princess Aurelia is a prisoner to her crown and the heir that nobody wants. Surrounded by spirits and banned from using her blood-magic, Aurelia flees her country after a devastating assassination attempt. To escape her fate, Aurelia disguises herself as a commoner in a new land and discovers a happiness her crown has never allowed. As she forges new bonds and perfects her magic, she begins to fall for a man who is forbidden to rule beside her.
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Not Understanding All the Praise
- By GPChlorine on 08-23-19
By: Crystal Smith
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A Strange Scottish Shore
- By: Juliana Gray
- Narrated by: Gemma Massot
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Scotland, 1906. A mysterious object discovered inside an ancient castle calls Maximilian Haywood, the new Duke of Olympia, and his fellow researcher Emmeline Truelove north to the remote Orkney Islands. No stranger to the study of anachronisms in archeological digs, Haywood is nevertheless puzzled by the artifact: a suit of clothing that, according to family legend, once belonged to a selkie who rose from the sea and married the castle's first laird. But Haywood and Truelove soon realize they're not the only ones interested in the selkie's strange hide.
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Time travel escape
- By M M on 11-07-17
By: Juliana Gray
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The Scar
- By: Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko, Elinor Huntington - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Sergey and Marina Dyachenko mix dramatic scenes with romance, action and wit, in a style both direct and lyrical. Written with a sure artistic hand, The Scar is the story of a man driven by his own feverish demons to find redemption and the woman who just might save him. Egert is a brash, confident member of the elite guards and an egotistical philanderer. But after he kills an innocent student in a duel, a mysterious man known as “The Wanderer” challenges Egert and slashes his face with his sword, leaving Egert with a scar that comes to symbolize his cowardice.
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Highly, highly, Highly Recommended
- By Robert on 08-13-12
By: Sergey Dyachenko, and others
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The Book of Magic
- By: Gardner Dozois - editor, Scott Lynch, Elizabeth Bear, and others
- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker, Sile Bermingham, Maxwell Caulfield, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Hot on the heels of Gardner Dozois's acclaimed anthology The Book of Swords comes this companion volume devoted to magic. How could it be otherwise? For every Frodo, there is a Gandalf... and a Saruman. For every Dorothy, a Glinda... and a Wicked Witch of the West. What would Harry Potter be without Albus Dumbledore... and Severus Snape? Figures of wisdom and power, possessing arcane, often forbidden knowledge, wizards and sorcerers are shaped - or misshaped - by the potent magic they seek to wield.
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Very Good, With One Objection
- By Kindle Customer on 05-05-20
By: Gardner Dozois - editor, and others
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Angelique's Descent
- By: Lara Parker
- Narrated by: Lara Parker
- Length: 16 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
The dashing heir of a New England shipping magnate, Barnabas Collins captures the heart of the exquisite, young Angelique amidst the sensual beauty of Martinique, her island home. But Angelique's brief happiness is doomed when Barnabas deserts her and becomes engaged to another. With this one betrayal, Barnabas unleashes an evil that will torment him for all time.
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I loved this!
- By Alabama purchaser on 07-19-15
By: Lara Parker
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A Shadow on the Glass
- The View From the Mirror Quartet, Book 1
- By: Ian Irvine
- Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
- Length: 21 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Once there were three worlds, each with their own human species. Then, fleeing out of the void came a fourth species, the Charon. Desperate, on the edge of extinction, they changed the balance between the worlds forever. Karan, a sensitive with a troubled heritage, is forced to steal an ancient relic in repayment of a debt. It turns out to be the Mirror of Aachan, a twisted, deceitful thing that remembers everything it has ever seen.
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Not quite good enough.
- By Scott S. on 03-13-12
By: Ian Irvine
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Fludd
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin - or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action.
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Small, tight irreverant novel that wryly inverts
- By Darwin8u on 07-21-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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Autumn Castle
- By: Kim Wilkins
- Narrated by: Richard Aspel
- Length: 19 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Berlin in autumn: Christine Starlight lives in an artists' colony with her lover Jude, whose patience and beauty have eased her battle with chronic pain. But Christine begins to be haunted by childhood recollections of a little girl's disappearance and the flapping of a blackbird's wings. Then her world is rocked by the return of a childhood friend... Mayfridh rules over a land where a wolf is the queen's counsellor, fate turns on the fall of an autumn leaf and mortals feel no pain.
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Great Story, Horrible Narration
- By KathyDB on 03-24-15
By: Kim Wilkins
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The Unseen
- A Novel
- By: Katherine Webb
- Narrated by: Clare Wille
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A vicar with a passion for nature, the Reverend Albert Canning leads a happy existence with his naive wife, Hester, in their sleepy Berkshire village in the year 1911. But as the English summer dawns, the Cannings' lives are forever changed by two new arrivals: Cat, their new maid, a disaffected, free-spirited young woman sent down from London after entanglements with the law; and Robin Durrant, a leading expert in the occult, enticed by tales of elemental beings in the water meadows nearby.
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Great book!
- By Dana on 09-03-12
By: Katherine Webb
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Glen Cook novel pays homage to early Elric stories
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Your So Vain, You Probably Think This Book is
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Strange Beasts of China
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In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness - save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self.
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Snooze!
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Throne of the Crescent Moon
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The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, home to djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, are at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious master thief known as the Falcon Prince. In the midst of this brewing rebellion a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes at the heart of the Kingdoms. It is up to a handful of heroes to learn the truth behind these killings: Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, Raseed bas Raseed, Adoulla’s young assistant, and Zamia Badawi, Protector of the Band.
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A welcome new voice in fantasy, read with aplomb
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What listeners say about Titus Groan
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Zachariah
- 08-17-09
A great book ,no cliches, worth the effort
I completely understand why a lot of readers would give this book a low rating. Many readers, and especially readers of fantasy, get very comfortable with the presence of cliches, and this book just doesn't give them any. Titus Groan doesn't have a grand good vs evil narrative, there is no sword play, nor wizards, nor damsels in distress, nor teenager-saves-the-world narrative. You get none of the usual formulas. The action is sparse, the language is thick, and the world is just sort of weird. It's not something that an average teenage fantasy fan will enjoy.
With that said, Titus Groan is a fantasy masterpiece. In its weird way, it's every bit as rich as Tolkien or Rowling. The characters are bizarrely entertaining, and the challenges they face are, if not quite the all-encompassing fight for civilization, nonetheless poignant and intriguing. As strange as the novel is, it feels more real than most fantasy.
Titus Groan is a novel without a contrived road-map, and it is as much high literature as it is fantasy. Good literature is challenging: it forces you to think, and if you engage in it, it is far more rewarding than a thousand sword and sorcerer novels. Readers who think in cliches will either fail to understand the novel or will grow frustrated at the meandering plot. But for those who like a challenge, who enjoy reading about a fantastical world for its own sake, and who have an attention span that hasn't been crippled by frenetic, pop-culture oriented fantasies, this book is well worth it. It's strange and rich and utterly unlike anything you're ever going to see again. It's beautiful.
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76 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Benjamin L. Alpers
- 09-11-07
Count Me Among the Peake Fans
As others have noted, Peake is often spoken of in the same breath as Tolkein. They are undoubtedly two of the greatest English fantasy novelists of the twentieth century. But rather than thinking of Peake as similar to Tolkein, it's perhaps best to think of him as the anti-Tolkein. Both Peake and Tolkein are great at what they do, but they're up to rather different things. If The Lord of the Rings is a basically celebratory series that focuses on plot, Peake's Gormenghast books (not, by design, a trilogy, but the first three books of a longer series cut short by Peake's untimely death) are deeply cynical and are about character and, above all, setting. While Tolkein's world is full of magic, monsters, and a variety of non-human races, Peake's is largely without all these things.
I'm a longtime Tolkein fan who is now also a Peake fan. Plenty of people appreciate the qualities of both authors. But others love one and detest the other. For example, the great British novelist Michael Moorcock is a proponent of Peake and a detractor of Tolkein.
At any rate, this book is a classic that deserves a listen by those prepared for something un-Middle Earth-y. And Robert Whitfield's reading is truly outstanding, as he effectively brings to life the many characters who populate Peake's book.
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- John D. Grote
- 08-10-03
Not your average novel
Titus Groan is unlike most novels that rush to get to the end. Peake treats his story like life, that it is not so much getting to the destination that's the real goal, but the journey itself that's the real fun of it all. And what a journey it is! He writes in silvery images on moonlight that creats a portrait of fine art, not just a story.
The Gormenghast trilogy is (like Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) a satire on British society which is both funny and tragic. It explores a marvelous wonderland of its own behind the endless sprawling walls of the Groan's castle and puts the reader inside the workings of a stuffy upperclass and into the shoes of the working class peasants, all the while making us laugh at ourselves.
The Gormeghast books are a masterpiece of 20th century literature. The environment Peake creats IS the point of the story, a world that can immerse the reader and make you hope that you don't get to the end too quickly or you might miss the roses growing along the way.
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- Jefferson
- 07-17-12
The Pleasures of a Rich & Vivid Baroque Nightmare
Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan (1946) is unique. Dense, funny, sad, hermetic, and epic, it stands alone in the landscape of literature, like the labyrinthine, "umbrageous," and craggy castle Gormenghast, in which the Groan family of earls and their servants and workers are ruled by iron tradition and obscure ritual. The novel begins with the birth of Titus, the unsmiling son of Sepulchrave, the 76th Earl, and with the escape of Steerpike, the amoral, clever, and ambitious kitchen boy. These events initiate "that most unforgivable of all heresies," change. Peake writes the stifled life of the decaying castle and its grotesque inhabitants with humor and empathy. And with intense detail, so that it might be difficult for a first time reader/listener to enter Peake's world of baroque descriptions and bizarre yet apt metaphors.
But the persevering reader drawn more to the strange pleasures of a poet-painter's skewed imagination than to the familiar excitements and moral clarity of Tolkienesque fantasy will discover a strange world full of unforgettable characters, events, and images. A few of my favorites are: a room full of white cats; a field of flagstones framed by clouds; a poem read out of a window by a wedge-headed poet; a gift ruby red "like a lump of anger"; a room tangled by painted roots; a library refuge of row upon row of priceless--and flammable--books; a sinister equestrian statue; a funeral featuring a headless human skeleton, a calf's skull, and a blue ribbon; a one-legged, foul-mouthed dwarf walking back and forth over the dishes of a ceremonial breakfast; a deadly duel featuring a two-handed cleaver, a sword, and a room full of spider webs; a pair of voluminous purple dresses floating on a lake; a serious baby making "a tiny, drunken totter . . . on a sandy beach."
Robert Whitfield (Simon Vance) reads Titus Groan with flawless enunciation, rhythm, and feeling. I often found myself rewinding to enjoy again his enthusiastic reading of Peake's rich language and eccentric characters. Although I was disappointed by his Fuchsia (more simper than passion), his other characters were great, especially his Flay (terse gravel), Swelter (flabby unction), Steerpike (cold, cocky working class), Nannie Slagg (wrinkled querulousness), Dr. Prunesquallor (falsetto trilling "Ha-ha-ha-ha!"), and the twin sisters (vain and venomous monotone).
There is none of the magic or supernatural of typical fantasy novels in Titus Groan. Nevertheless, it is a fantasy novel because it presents a more ugly, beautiful, absurd, sad, and hermetic version of our real world. And the themes of Titus Groan remain relevant: the conflicts between imagination and ambition, emotion and calculation, and new and old; the detrimental effect on human minds and relationships of tradition, ritual, and class; the pain and wonder of artistic creation; and the difficult but vital need to find our own special place where we can be fulfilled.
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- Jane Steen
- 11-20-03
Not for the faint-hearted!
This is not a book for listeners who like their fiction short and snappy. I love the richness of detail and the many-layered complexity of the Gormenghast books, but some listeners may find them slow going. This book, the first in a trilogy, certainly has more description than plot, but rewards the patient listener with subtle humor, pathos and suspense. The reading is excellent, beautifully paced and really brings the characters to life. I couldn't wait to get onto the next book.
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- Cheryl
- 06-20-03
Run For Your Life
Characters that you wish would just go away but never do. Tedious writing. Description of every hair out of place but the plot really never gets anywhere. Maybe I don't have the patience for 10 minutes of garbage till they get to the what the characters are actually doing. Which ends up being NOTHING
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- Pie
- 12-30-08
Very very :)
VERY slow in the start and along the way. It takes four hours to properly introduce everyone in the castle. BUT, if you're not in a hurry AND you like the unusual: this is one of those. Very well written, very thickly textured, very strange characters... and very surreal. A slow paced dip into a dream (world). A medieval circus of royal sorts. Nice.
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- jessica
- 04-28-14
for those who love turns of phrase and Simon Vance
This one is tricky. I like it, I do. I couldn't tell you what actually happens in the story because I am still not sure. The language is glorious. If you enjoyed the language for its own sake in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I bet you would like the language in this.
In a fit of enthusiasm for that very idea I tried listening to The Three Musketeers
and Ivanhoe. Not so much, the language in those didn't draw me in. It was too stiff and put me off.
The problem here, and it IS a problem for me... super lengthy descriptions of every little thing, every thought, every expression, every everything, goes on and on and on and on. You can listen for two hours and its still the same scene in which nothing of note has happened. The rub is, I keep thinking maybe something did happen and I missed it because I was happily lost in some enchanting phrase. It is DELIGHTFULLY irritating. So I will keep playing it over and over until I am sure I have it. Even if it turns out I hate the story I will have gotten more than my money's worth.
Simon Vance is always perfect. He is the only actor of many books who has never ever let me down.
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- Jim
- 05-27-10
Excellent narration
Robert Whitfield brings this story to life. Peake's genius is the description of the eccentric; but his language can heavy and pace slow at times. Whitfield's reading more than makes up for this shortcoming, and completely kept my interest even when Peake's writing by itself may not have.
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- Jason
- 04-02-07
Inane pedantic babbling
One of the major problems that the fantasy and science fiction genres can face is the author falling in love with the world they are creating to the exclusion of character development. Titus Groan is perhaps the worst example I’ve yet seen of this. It’s as though Peake sat down, wrote a short story, and then amused himself for the next two years by attempting to use every synonym in the thesaurus for every verb or adjective in his pitiful plot (“Not enough room in this sentence? I’ll just add eleven more.”).
I’ve given this monstrosity 4 and a half hours to pull it together (I’ve just begun chapter 19) and NOTHING of note has happened yet. Peake’s writing style is frankly painful, providing a plodding description of four or more paragraphs to state that the sky is blue. His story telling is erratic, his timelines and characters confused, and, as of the point of this writing, has provided me with approximately four pages of character information.
The narrator is decent. Though his voice acting appears moderate in this reading, consider what the poor man has to work with: a series of Dorian Gray characters babbling (often incoherently) about nothing. Each character appears to be mentally challenged, and you as the reader are invited to partake of their nonsensical ramblings.
If you’re a description fanatic (not lover, you need to be a FANATIC for this one), you MAY find something appealing in this drivel. If you’re looking for engaging, entertaining fantasy with a PLOT, go elsewhere. This book is utter tripe.
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