book reviews – Secret Thoughts

Harry Potter (Full-Cast Editions)

Audible had been continuously hawking the Harry Potter full-cast editions at me. I didn’t know what else to spend my credits on. Plus, I’d just listened to the AI-generated slop audiobook True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition and needed to cancel it out with some decent narration. So I decided to give them a try.

They were so good! They’re like listening to unabridged Harry Potter movies with a music score and sound effects. Lines are delivered with perfect comedic timing and dramatic flair. Usually, full-cast audiobooks are more like radio plays where there’s no narrator, only character dialogue and sound effects, which sometimes gets confusing. These audiobooks, however, have a narrator. Everything in the books is in the audiobooks.

I’m of Kiera Knightly’s opinion that I don’t care what J.K. Rowling has said. How cool is it that seven 8- to 26-hour-long, full-cast, fully narrated audiobooks exist? Such things could only exist if someone has a lot of money and a large fanbase to support it.

The only parts of these audiobooks that lost me were the fight scenes. These tended to be heavy on action music and sound effects, sometimes threatening to drown out the narrator. Even without that, I lost track of what was happening. I don’t think my getting lost is specific to these audiobooks though. It’s often a problem I have with audiobooks in general. The problem was more pronounced when it happened with these books though because the rest of these books were so good.

Additionally, sometimes it sounded like one or two of the actors in a scene got the shitty microphone. They sounded inappropriately muffled or distant in comparison to everyone else. This happened most often in the first two or three books, however, where I was listening to them with one earpiece. For most of the rest of the books, I used two earpieces and didn’t notice the same problem. Perhaps it was an issue with the audio balance or my phone failing to recognize that I was only using one earpiece.

Besides those two minor issues, these books were great! So good! Below are some thoughts I had on each specific book.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

I wonder if the opening scene from Mr. Dursley’s perspective was added to this edition. Or the moment where all the houses sung a song in the Hogwarts’ great hall.

*looks it up in a physical copy of the book* Oh, they exist! The houses singing a song was pretty awkward, so it makes sense it was in the full-cast edition because it was in the book.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I didn’t catch anything strange going on with Ginny except for in one scene. Listening to it a second time, I caught the hints better though. Maybe it was easier to read the hints in the first book because I remembered Professor Quirrell was the culprit.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Here are a couple quotes (perhaps paraphrased) that I thought were hilarious and well delivered:

“There is no Harry Potter here! Never call this number again! Stay away from my family!”

“Do something about your hair!”

I don’t remember Harry’s father being an Animagus. Then again, I also don’t remember Crookshanks.

The explanation for Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew seemed convoluted like the characters were saying the same thing in different ways repeatedly. I wonder how different the movie was from the book, specifically how many things it changed to make explaining Sirius concise.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

All the characters’ voices dropped at the same time, even Colin Creevy who isn’t even in Harry’s grade.

Hedwig looked EXTREMELY offended. A lot of people are extremely something in fact.

Harry doesn’t solve how to open the egg or how to swim underwater for an hour on his own. In fact, he has the answer spelled out for him or given to him. *continues listening* Oh, that was intentional!

Harry Potter’s voice actor can’t scream in pain to save his life.

Dumbledore mentions the room of requirement. Teasers for the Order of the Phoenix!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I remember Order of the Phoenix being my least favorite in the series to read, but for whatever reason, it’s my favorite of the full cast editions. The understandability of the ending fell apart a little, but otherwise, I loved this rendition and immediately wanted to listen to the whole thing again. Maybe it’s the level of misery Harry is subjected to. He may not be able to scream in pain, but Harry’s voice actor can play the hell out of an angsty teenager.

I wonder if there were hints in previous books that Aunt Petunia cares more about the wizarding world than she claims.

What qualifies someone to be a prefect or a best boy or best girl? Are they just Professor Dumbledor’s arbitrary favorites?

Kiera Knightly played Dolores Umbridge? I didn’t recognize her!

“Wotcher” means “What are you up to?” or “What cheer?”

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

I think Harry’s theories are wrong in every book except this one. In this one, he’s right about everything… about Snape and Malfoy at least.

Did Harry always have a relationship with Ginny in this book? *looks it up in a physical copy* He did! I always recall his marriage to Ginny coming out of left field, but reading this book again, it’s fitting. It’s probably just the movies where it doesn’t make sense.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

For how much Harry likes Quidditch, he never gets to play it for a full school year. In book 1, he was hospitalized after fighting Voldemort. In book 2, Quidditch was canceled because the monster from the Chamber of Secrets had petrified so many people that the school was locked down. In book 3, Harry was harassed into unconsciousness by dementors (although I think he actually did finish the season). In book 4, Quidditch was canceled to make way for the Triwizard Tournament. In book 5, Professor Umbridge bans Harry. In book 6, he gets detention for cursing Malfoy and misses the last Quidditch game. And in book 7, he doesn’t go to school. That sucks.

I imagine Harry’s voice actor had fun impersonating other characters for The Seven Harry’s chapter. The actors probably had fun impersonating main characters throughout the book actually.

Killing Fred, Tonks, and Lupin? That’s brutal.

There’s always a scene toward the end of a Harry Potter book where everything is explained. It seems like a comfort provided to the reader that everything will always make sense in the end. I’m sure people who get pissed off by explanatory scenes would be pissed off about it though.

Harry’s parents died in 1981, which means Harry was born in 1980… 80s nostalgia strikes again!!!

Hermione, Harry, and Ron’s voices dropped again as adults. Weird. Why would the audiobook creators decide to do that?

Eldest

Despite killing a major character and disappearing another within the first ten pages, Eldest by Christopher Paolini is much slower than its predecessor Eragon. No more do paragraphs summarize weeks worth of events. The book occasionally, however, forces odd topics into character conversations. I can almost hear Paolini saying, “I need these characters to talk about this thing now.”

Another enhancement is that Eldest has multiple narrators. Eragon and his adopted brother Roran are the primary narrators. Nasuada, the leader of the Varden resistance, also narrates a couple chapters, but it feels random, like she’s a narrator only because Paolini found no other way to introduce important characters and concepts. I also had the feeling that Roran was a narrator to slow the book down and prevent Eragon from plowing through the plot as he had in the first book, but overall, the pair of them swapping chapters as narrators feels fitting and intentional.

I believe Paolini also reveals himself as a fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF when a side character exclaims, “Barges? Barges? We don’t want no stinking barges!” It sounds so out of place and suspiciously similar to a quote from UHF, that it has to be an allusion to, “Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers!”

As my final random thought… I’ve read Eldest at least three times now. I’ve always accepted that it made sense for the elves to reject eating meat. It was an admirable lifestyle even. I’ve since been spoiled, however, with keto and lion diet ideology, fitness nutrition, and conservative talking points. How can the elves possibly get enough protein from plants to maintain their inhuman strength? They would need to have industrial-level production of soy and beans. Even Mark Boyle, who recounted his experience living off the land and rejecting modern technology in his autobiographical account The Way Home, conceded that he had to give up his vegetarian diet and eat meat to survive. He would no longer have access to all those canned beans and soy products from distant lands to supplement his vegetables. I suppose the elves have magical abilities that include speeding up and manipulating the growth of plants, but it’s still ridiculous. I’ll save most of my complaints about this point for the next book in the series Brisingr though, where Eragon’s choice to also abstain from eating meat makes even less sense.

True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition (Book 1-3)

An omnibus is a volume containing several novels or items that were previously published separately. In the introduction to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition, author Romeo Vitelli justifies his choice of publishing the book as an omnibus by claiming that together his books form a more coherent whole. Each book is a collection of assorted true crime stories based on posts from Vitelli’s blog. If he means that together they form a more complete history of all crimes that have ever been committed, I suppose.

His writing reminds me of David Paulides’ Missing 411 series in which he chronicles missing person cases with strange circumstances and commonalities and seemingly supernatural elements. At the end of each case, he has a tendency to insert himself as the researcher, tying the case to similar cases, reiterating his confusions or amazement with the circumstances, or describing his frustrations with the authorities. It comes off as amateurish and repetitive. While Vitelli isn’t as egregious in self-referencing his research efforts, his writing still sounds amateurish. His style is inappropriately belittling and informal for the subject matter. Using phrases and words like “somehow” and “for some reason,” it’s like listening to a narrator who finds his own stories and the people in them ridiculous.

What attracted me to listen to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe, however, was the narrator “Virtual Voice,” a computer-generated narrator for audiobooks as Audible explains. I’d never listened to narration produced by AI and was curious what it sounded like.

Well… with all the time they saved by having AI read a 17-hour-long audiobook, they could have at least listened to it and revised their prompts accordingly. Or maybe the producer of True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe did listen to it and, despite all the pronunciation inconsistencies and other signs of Virtual Voice lacking comprehension of the English language, decided to dump it on Audible anyway.

Here are a few highlights:

Virtual Voice pronounced EEG (electroencephalogram) as “eeeeeeg.”

A few stories included excerpts from song lyrics or poems. Virtual Voice ended each line with a verbal “slash” rather than a pause.

Vitelli snarkily wrote something like, “Why would he be there in the first place?” Virtual Voice read this as if “the first place” was an actual place rather than a phrase.

“etc. etc.” was pronounced as “Et See. Et See.”

One story featured a legend about wendigos. It also featured every possible pronunciation of “wendigo”: WENdigo, wenDIgo, WINdigo, etc.

Frankenstein

I listened to the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley on Audible. It was interesting.

After discovering the “epistolary novel” in Who Was Jane Austen? Sorting Fact from Fiction, I was eager to read one of the classics for an example of one. Frankenstein is told through the narrator Robert Walton, a sea captain on an Arctic expedition. The introduction of the novel is a series of letters Walton writes to his sister. The rest of the novel is a novel that Walton writes for his sister, relating the story Frankenstein tells him, the story Frankenstein’s monster tells him, and Walton’s own experiences of the two.

In some ways, Frankenstein seems like a deeply flawed novel, at least by modern standards. Arguably, Walton is discardable, and his presence negates the need for Frankenstein and his monster to ever interact or make peace with one another by telling each other their story. Walton serves as the link to reader in telling the two stories.

The melodramatic writing could also be seen as a problem. Today, melodramatic writing is mocked and discouraged, but Victor isn’t shy about telling the reader/Walton repeatedly how dearly he loves his dear friend Henry and his dear childhood friend Elizabeth and how wretched he is without them. His monster is equally verbose is recounting his wretchedness. Both of them go into detail about how pitiable they are, Victor suffering from mental breakdowns and the deaths of his closest friends and family and the monster lamenting what an outcast he is. While Frankenstein (2025) suggests that Victor is the asshole playing the victim, both of them put on quite the pity party for themselves in the book. Walton himself also tells his sister repeatedly how much he pities Victor and wants to help him. The book ends with Victor dying and the monster proclaiming he will burn himself to death on a pyre. It’s such a bleak book with such a bleak ending it’s laughable.

Perhaps its flaws are why Frankenstein has been adapted so many times and in so many different ways. When I think of “Frankenstein,” I think of the image of Victor screaming with maniacal enthusiasm, “It’s alive!” something I can’t imagine the Victor in the book ever doing. Mary Shelley never even says that electricity resurrected the monster, but that’s primarily how adaptations portray it. To name some other changes adaptations have made

Frankenstein is a mad scientist and the bad guy.
The monster is a mindless beast and the bad guy.
Frankenstein actually creates a bride for the monster.
The monster falls in love with Elizabeth.
Robert Walton is discarded as a narrator.
The monster is called Frankenstein.

It’s as if everyone who made an adaptation of Frankenstein saw the seed of a great idea but poorly executed and proceeded to bring what they saw to light. It’s kind of amazing how many different great ideas people imagined from the same source material.

Eragon

I reread Eragon by Christopher Paolini (for at least the third time since it was release in 2002) in preparation to read the latest novel related to the Inheritance Cycle Murtagh. Reading it more than 20 years later, the writing has qualities that feel rushed and amateurish. Dialogue and actions for multiple characters are sometimes crammed into single paragraphs for example. A lot of traveling, training, and other things can happen in a few paragraphs. Scenes can end and focus can change quite abruptly as well.

I don’t remember watching the Eragon movie multiple times, but for some reason, reading this book reminded me so much of it. Perhaps that’s only because of my ruthless mocking and criticism of it. I distinctly remember my brother screaming, “Murtagh, I’m on fire!” in response to a prison scene where a flaming Urgal (or was it just a person?) smashed through a flimsy wooden jail that was somehow sturdy enough to imprison Murtagh. I also remember how Saphira flew away as a baby and returned as a full grown dragon capable of fluent telepathic speech.

I suppose I don’t blame the movie’s creators for not emphasizing the injury Durza gives the protagonist Eragon at the end. This injury serves as a major obstacle for Eragon in the sequel Eldest, but Eragon does end rather abruptly, placing more emphasis on a memory/nightmare montage Eragon has than his grievous injury. Eragon doesn’t even see the end of the last battle.

Still, they screwed themselves, dooming the Eldest movie to never be created. Although, an Eragon TV series is in development for Disney+ now. We’ll see if it actually manifests (which would be neat), but that’s another reason to reread the Inheritance Cycle.

Her Last Christmas

Similar to my thoughts on Silent Hill f–and really any story that features the protagonist’s loveless relationship with their significant other–Her Last Christmas by Claire McGowan made me wonder, “What is this lady even doing with this guy?” The protagonist Emma joins her boyfriend Michael and his fellow wealthy friends for Friendsmas in the Alps. Emma doesn’t know how to ski; Michael’s friends are unwelcoming, drunk, and high; and Michael, seeming to prefer his friends’ company, does little to nothing to help Emma feel comfortable.

In the end, I determined their relationship makes sense in a similar way that Hinako and Shu’s relationship makes sense in Silent Hill f. Her Last Christmas is told from Emma’s distorted, first-person perspective. She claims she doesn’t partake in excessive alcohol or drugs, she paints herself as a victim, and speaks somewhat demeaningly about the other characters’ relationships and careers. That is, she makes herself sound good to the reader, perhaps better than she is in reality. There must be a reason she attracted people like this, including Michael, into her life though. Indeed, the end of the book reveals that Emma is as willing to set her morals aside to protect her career as the other characters are to protect theirs. Emma choosing Michael, a popular politician, was likely motivated by her desire for status, wealth, and career advancement. While she decides to part ways with him, she still participates in covering up a murder.

A couple funny thoughts I had while reading…

Toward the end of the book, Emma runs into a snow storm without proper clothes in a fit of hysteria. She tells the reader repeatedly she knows this is a bad idea but doesn’t know what else to do. I thought to myself of the author, “I can hear you telling your beta readers that you know your protagonist is being an idiot.”

Emma: “[Michael’s] wife had accused him of domestic abuse, and women didn’t lie about that sort of thing.”
Me: Why did you give Ms. Heard muffins!?

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

First of all, buying this book as an audiobook was a mistake. It’s a textbook with diagrams to look at, best absorbed through reading. Also, I work as a software engineering team lead. Spending my free time reading books about what I do for work everyday is a quick way to burn out.

That said, the information is interesting. It explains different patterns of structuring teams within an organization based on the organization of the code for the software the business supports and how these patterns ease development of the software. For example, a system for sending and receiving packages might be organized into two teams: one that handles everything about sending packages and one that handles everything about receiving packages. This allows developers to specialize in one area and communicate often with other specialists on their team rather than requiring all developers to know a lot about both areas. This reduction in cognitive load increases the speed and quality of development, reduces mistakes, and improves developer experience. The company I work for has been practicing these principles for the past year and a half. It works well, much better than the team structure we had before.

The book also made me feel like an imposter. It states that toxic team members need to be identified and removed for the health of the team. Individuals must put the team before themselves by, for example, being on time to meetings and helping team members to complete current work before starting new work. Me, I’m chronically late to meetings, I’m a rule bender and breaker, and I split my time between current and future work. I reason that I’m late to meetings when I don’t see the point of them, especially at 7:30am. Developers may have work now, but they won’t have enough or any if no one is figuring out what happens next. I’m a free-minded introvert operating the best I can in an extroverted world. And it’s been working pretty well. My team and I get a lot of work done.

Still, I’m a team lead. I’m supposed to be showing my developers how to behave professionally, even when I think nobody gives a crap about me or needs an announcement that I’m going to be at an appointment for the next hour. It’s very possible that I’m a toxic team member that makes team topologies fall apart.

The Nuremberg Trial

For being a 25-hour-long audiobook about post-World War II, The Nuremberg Trial by Ann Tusa and John Tusa was surprisingly interesting. My favorite section of the book, about the first third, was dedicated to explaining the many complications of executing a fair trial against 22 German military and political leaders. The first decision was who would judge the Germans. The Polish were ultimately excluded, leaving the trial to be overseen by French, English, American, and Russian judges. This required enough collaboration between the four nations, Germany, and their slightly differing views of fair judgement. The Russian view was the most troubling as it came with a preconception that the purpose of the trial was to exact punishment, not determine guilt. That Germans had knowledge that they were committing crimes against humanity throughout the war also had to be established for there to be grounds to even hold a trial. A location needed to be found for the trial to take place, somewhere with prison facilities to keep the defendants secure and comfortable accommodations for lawyers, judges, attendants, and viewers of the court proceedings. Germany was the most appropriate place, but much of it was war torn and destitute. After much reasoning with the Russians, who insisted the trial take place in Berlin, Nuremberg was chosen for its historical significance and for being fairly intact. Lawyers willing to defend the defendants needed to be provided. Food for everyone needed to be provided, of which American provisions were the best. Someone needed to pay for all this. The judges even had to decide such trivialities as what to wear. Wigs and dresses? Military uniforms? Black gowns? After all the previous decisions and coordination, it’s not surprising that they settled on wearing whatever they wanted.

The most interesting complication, however, was solving the language barrier. The trial was conducted in four languages: English, Russian, French, and German. All documents associated with the trial had to be translated into all four languages, which was more difficult to accomplish for some languages than others. For live court proceedings, the trial used IBM’s universal simultaneous translation system. The first time I heard this term, I thought the narrator was going to tell me about some Star Trek-esque futuristic device. In reality, everyone in the court room was provided a set of wired headphones. The listeners could switch between four channels, each connected to the microphone of a human translator for that language. The translators were seated in isolated compartments within the courtroom where they could hear the court proceedings but minimize the noise of each other’s translations. Judges, lawyers, defendants, and other speakers in the court room also had visibility to two lights. Yellow was an indicator from the translators to slow down. Red indicated to stop speaking to allow the translators to catch up. I thought it was an impressive use of technology for the time period but also adorable for its primitiveness.

After all the introduction, preparation, resolution of conflicts, and coordination leading up to and continuing throughout the trial, it’s amazing that this trial happened, and as fairly as it was, at all.

The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

In The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, Mark Boyle relates how he created a lifestyle without electricity, plumbing, and other technological commodities. To demonstrate the practicality of living this way to the reader, he builds the cabin he and his wife live in, an outhouse area, a garden, and interestingly, a natural hot tub powered by firewood, presumably on a piece of land he owns and has enough money to pay taxes on for at least the one year he wanted to experiment with living this way. He makes allowances for some technology like pencils and paper for writing but rejects other tools that would make his work easier in favor of more primitive tools or doing the work by hand. I can’t remember specific examples from the book, but as a generic example, rather than using a wheelbarrow to move stones, he would carry stones by hand. Seeming to contradict his purpose, he indirectly makes use of cars to hitchhike to visit his parents, the local pub to visit with his neighbors, and the modern mail service to send and receive letters.

I don’t think the point of the book was to strictly live without technology though. The author’s purpose was rather to connect himself more to nature and people. His selective use of technology seemed to be for the purpose of forwarding those goals. I related to his rejection of the Internet and phones the most. In our ability to connect with people around the world, we’ve forgotten about the people immediately surrounding us. The convenience of speaking to loves ones over the phone means, conflictingly, visiting them in person less. Despite their appearance of creating connections, these things have separated us from people by being too convenient, too far from our immediate reality, and too difficult to resist.

Ironically, the author’s wife left him toward the end of the book. I can’t say I’d want to live like this either. I don’t like living in reality. 😛 Although, I suppose the author also doesn’t like living in reality, the one where humans are naturally inclined toward progress and efficiency. Still, Boyle has some interesting perspectives nurtured by his enjoyment and sense of purpose in living this lifestyle.

400 Things Cops Know

I’ve been reading cop-related books lately for some writing research. Here’s a few relevant things I learned while reading 400 Things Cops Know by Adam Plantinga:

To kick open a door, kick it immediately beneath the knob.

Mediation Clinics offer mediators, often law students, to help resolve disputes between family members, tenants and landlords, neighbors, and other people outside of court. I had created a concept like this in a book I’m writing and was surprised that such a thing actually exists!

Cops don’t advertise that they’re cops outside of work because it attracts the attention of people who don’t like cops. This potentially puts the cop and/or their family and friends in danger.

Police are required to read someone their Miranda rights only after they are in custody, and they have begun interrogating them. They don’t have to tell them their rights immediately, contrary to what commonly happens on TV. What suspects say prior to being read their rights and interrogated can still be used in court.

The best TV show about cops is The Wire created by David Simon.

The best book about cops is Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.