Adam Shields

Audible.com often has free shorts or prequels and occationally longer books.  Here are three that I have run across lately.  (I have not listened to any of them.)

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

257 pages or 8 hrs and 9 mins, 66 of 77 reviews are 4 or 5-star

Bookwi.se Note: You must purchase the free kindle book first and then the audiobook will also be available for free.

10-year-old Sarah Crue lives life like a princess until tragedy strikes, taking away her fine clothes and privileges. Without her velvet and silk and French maids, she’s no longer the envy of all the girls at Miss Minchin’s London boarding school, and even has to live in the school’s attic, working for the students who were once her friends. Will Sarah’s spirit remain unbowed? Follow her through her trials and triumphs in this unforgettable tale beloved by children the world over.

Jump Start Your Business

6 hrs and 5 mins, 49 of 82 reviews are 4 or 5-star

From the ABC hit show “Shark Tank,” this book – filled with practical advice and introductions from the Sharks themselves – will be the ultimate resource for anyone thinking about starting a business or growing the one they have. Full of tips for navigating the confusing world of entrepreneurship, the book will intersperse words of wisdom with inspirational stories from the show.

The Jester by Michael Sullivan

54 minutes pages, 53 of 66 reviews are 4 or 5-stars

WHO WILL HAVE THE LAST LAUGH?

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Takeaway: Reading classic children’s books as an adult is an odd experience.

The first time I heard A Wrinkle in Time was from my 3rd grade teacher. I think his name was Mr Bohanna.  I know he spent more time reading out loud to us than any other teacher I remember.

I have no idea how much of the book I really understood. I know that I read or re-read many of the books he read to us and he has some responsibility for my love of reading. I must have read A Wrinkle in time again on my own at least a couple more times before the end of high school. But I never attached to A Wrinkle in Time like I did to the third book in the series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I probably have read the third book at least a half dozen times and could have given you a pretty close summary even after more than 20 years.

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Summary: Third book in a series about a minor British royal that is also an accidental detective.

The Royal Spyness series is a fun light hearted mystery series.  In the first two books, Georgie, the 34th in line to the throne in 1930s England, has found herself an accidental detective.  What makes the series work, is the mix of humor, a dash of romance good character development and some mystery to move the plot along.  Georgie’s family is penniless after her father gambled away most of the money and lost the rest in the stock market.  Georgie has decided that it is better to try to make her own way rather than live under the rules and obligations of her sister-in-law (and henpecked brother) back in Scotland.

Making her own way in depression era London is not easy.  Georgie tried to start a business of opening homes for wealthy homeowners that are coming from their country estates to their London homes,  but no one comes to London in the middle of the summer and she has to find another way to make money.

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Summary: Who knows how to summarize this book?

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Orson Scott Card.  I love many of his books (and hate a few as well.)  After listening to the Audioplay version of Ender’s Game and then re-reading Ender’s Game as well, I decided to go back and re-read Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

It has been a couple months but I finally finished Children of the Mind.  And I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as I remembered.  Part of it is the lowered expectations of previous memory.  But I also can catch a glimpse of what Card was trying to do.

Originally Xenocide and Children of the Mind were supposed to be one book.  But Card got carried away and had to split it into two books. There are just too many ideas and too much going on in these books.

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Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.

One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about.  European history is one of those areas.  So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year.  This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.

A detailed history book like this is hard to review.  I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.)  There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.)  But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war.  It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong.  So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.

It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were.  Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops.  Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started.  At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.

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Summary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.

Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale.  Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.

Both were narrated by a single character.  Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.

Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary.  But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book.  The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.

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