Everyone, I think…I think I’m an audiobook convert.
Last summer, Elyse wrote a Lightning Review of Sleeping Giants, a scifi novel with a scientist heroine, an interesting cast of characters, and epistolary elements. Definitely check out her review! Just as Elyse did in her review, my plot points will be minimal because the book has a lot of twists and turns. Instead, I’m going to focus on how Sleeping Giants functions as an audiobook and why you should be putting it in your earholes immediately.
Sleeping Giants opens with a young Rose Franklin who, while taking her new bike for a spin, discovers a giant hole where a huge metal hand is buried. Cut several years later and Rose is a physicist working on figuring out what this hand is and what it means. She’s assembled a team – pilots, linguists, geneticists, etc.
All but the prologue is told through a series of interviews and logs. The interviewer is a mysterious unknown man (hereafter called Unknown Narrator or UN) and man, is he a wily one.
Because the book is just one interview after another, being recorded by UN, it feels a lot like a radio drama since everything is dialogue. And I loved it.
Before Sleeping Giants, I had never been able to successfully listen to an audiobook. My mind wandered or other things competed for my attention. Since starting to cross stitch, I need background noise. There’s no way I can stitch in silence. Sometimes, I listen to podcasts, but I catch up on new episodes rather quickly and one of my 2017 goals is to read more. I didn’t meet my Goodreads Reading Challenge last year, so I’m making a more concerted effort to have daily reading time.
I asked for audiobook suggestions on Twitter and author Bree Bridges suggested Sleeping Giants because it felt more like a drama than someone reading to you, and she was completely right! The back and forth of voices and characters was just what I needed to keep me engaged and prevent me from zoning out. I only had to backtrack once for missing something.
The UN was really what made the audiobook for me. I’m unsure of who did the voice. Googling has only show me a list of the entire cast and not who voiced what character. But whoever did UN’s narration was amazing. He reminds me a lot of The Smoking Man from The X-Files, but sassier. You never really know his motivations and you can practically hear the knowing smirk in his voice. His interactions with the Assistant to the President of the United States are my favorite, given their antagonistic relationship. You can also hear him slowly become attached to Rose and her team. It’s amazing how he conveys these emotions, just with his voice.
What I really liked about the audio format is that it prevented me from accidentally peeking ahead. Sometimes, as readers, we’ll catch something farther down the page or flip ahead to count page numbers and see something we shouldn’t. Because I can’t do that with audio unless I deliberately skip ahead, each twist packed a punch because I truly didn’t see things coming. Whether that’s more of a testament to the writing over the format, or a bit of both, I’m not sure.
I think the most frustrating thing for me was how…slow things felt. The audiobook clocks in at eight and a half hours for 304 pages. It took me nearly a week to get through the audiobook, as I only listened to it while cross stitching. If I had read the physical book, I could have finished it much sooner. I know you can increase the speed, but I’m not quite ready for that yet. I tried bumping it up to 1.25x and I had a moment of panic because just that little bit was too much for me as an audiobook newbie.
I’m not sure if it was the book itself or if I was just impatient with how long things were taking, but the book felt slow in some parts and the momentum seemed to wane. The interviews were still interesting because I wanted to know what UN would say and do next to further his mysterious goals, but I was less rapt around the middle to three-quarters mark than I was at the beginning and end. And while the UN’s narration was great, other characters’ voice acting wasn’t as strong, especially the mysterious and cruel Balkan geneticist. The character has a stutter and the performance felt rather forced. But the character herself is a bit secretive, so I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn later on that the stutter was fake.
The next book in the series, Waking Gods, comes out April 4th. If you haven’t finished the first book, I caution you not to read the sequel’s description as it does contain a spoiler. But because I loved Sleeping Giants so much an audio, there’s no way I’m just going to simply read the next book. Audio or bust for me. There’s something about hearing an emotion in a character’s voice or capturing their personalities simply by their narration, given the lack of straight exposition. At times, it made me giddy. Others, I gasped in surprise. It was like watching (or listening?) to a movie and you had no clue what was next. And while I’m sure the second book will be a great read, I desperately want to return the Unknown Narrator’s mysterious and slightly amused voice, to smirk at Kara’s exasperated sarcasm, and of course, to hear the accent of Québécois Vincent.
As for my audiobook journey, I have no clue what to listen to next. Books with various narrators will probably appeal more to me than a single narrator, with maybe the exception of funny nonfiction. If you have any suggestions, definitely drop them in the comments below!