Ok, so my lovely little library in NEPA had this as an audiobook too! That’s apparently my new thing for CBR9. I will let other people read me books at times where it is unsafe for me to read them to myself (whilst driving, in the shower, treadmilling, etc.). I use the Overdrive app on my phone, so my books travel with me always. It’s rad. I believe I’ve raved about it for earlier books (The Stand, which was 47 hours would’ve been unreadable for me in a timely manner without this!). Anyway, it also has this cool feature (maybe I’m in the dark ages and this is like a standard thing) where you can speed up the recording to 1.2x as fast, 1.4x as fast, and 1.6x as fast. Books you don’t like, or parts of books you don’t like can be sped up. Oh yeah, I definitely talked about this in another review, because I posted a picture of the Micro Machine man. I also need to say that this is the most amount of parentheses I’ve ever put into an introduction (yay me)!
Anyway, I loved the beginning of this book up through the beginning of the middle. I also loved the last like ten minutes. The other sections (probably like 4 hours worth), I could’ve done without. The beginning is super intriguing. It pulls you right in, and there’s immediately a sense of foreboding. I live for that stuff. So the blurb: Jason is a physicist, and a family man. He’s thinking about how much he loves his life as he walks to see an old friend at a bar for one drink. Of course chaos ensues. Otherwise, it’d be a pretty boring story. This book involves alternate worlds (not future, not past, just different versions of our world where we made different choices). Blake Crouch is super into talking about these alternate worlds. I’m just not super into listening about them! It’s a cool story, so if you can, buy or borrow the audiobook. Listen to the first like 4 or 5 hours regular speed. Then bump it up to like 1.2x for the next few hours, and 1.6x for the last couple. Listen to the last ten minutes on regular speed though. The ending is actually pretty cool.
I’m piggybacking everyone these days…this is moved up on my list. Hopefully I’ll survive the middle!
I loved this book five stars worth and only got more into it the longer it went on, but I just wanted to say YAY TO AUDIOBOOKS. Especially free ones from the library!
I try not to speed up audiobooks unless I really just want the book to be over, though. It creeps me out how they get all chipmunky.