audiobook

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Full Cast Audio (Audible, 2025)

One last Short Take for 2025. I finished listening today to the adaptation of the first Harry Potter book. I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies, basically once. (My wife can quote whole passages by heart.)

We have been fans of HP from near the beginning. I have the dubious honor of having gone to a bookstore at midnight to pick up each of the last two books, which my wife started reading until she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and leaving the next day open until she was finished. (At which point I was allowed to read them.)

This production is well-done, clocking in at a little over eight hours. None of the voices are jarring. Part of the fun is coming upon some of the more well-known names as you hear them for the first time, but I have to give special kudos to Michelle Gomez as Professor McGonagall. I enjoyed her performance the most! “Full-cast Audio” means there is some music, background noise/effects, and ‘Foley’ effects like footprints or creaking doors, with many different voice actors for the characters.

I got this free from Audible on a special sale. With all of the controversy that J.K. Rowling now stirs up, she’s joined that category of creators where you really wish they’d just keep their mouths shut. In hearing this audio version, it’s nice that her work still brings enjoyment. I’ll be looking for more sales or deals to hear the rest of the series.

Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth edited by Arvind Ethan David (2025)

I saw this as a Kickstarter last year and backed it, though not as an earlybird to get every bonus. I did get bonus audio. It came out in June 2025 and I got around to listening to it from the end of September until today.

I admit I had the wrong idea about this audiobook and was initially disappointed, as I looked at the surface for the “from the Adams Archives,” and not the “discussions about topics Adams felt strongly about”. The main audiobook is about 5 hours with almost the same in the bonus material (which is not available with the public release).

The star of this are the excerpts from Douglas’ speeches. He was an engaging speaker and the bits from the horses’ mouth are the best part. There are many readings and ‘dramatizations’ of excerpts from all of Adams’ work, which are good to hear. I could have done without most of the sound effects that were added to readings as they were distracting. For a book that wants you to focus on the meanings, it’s a bad choice.

The editor/author of this collection was an intern at Douglas’ company Digital Village and has long been adapting and presenting Adams’ work. His reverence for Douglas borders on fawning at times–we get it, we’re listening already. As I have found with some other interviewers, they bring a little too much of their own biography into the interviews, which gets repeated since there are multiple interviews collected (essentially one interview per topic).

The collection centers around several topics, which break the book into easy chapters: Creativity & Writing, Animal Conservation, Tech/Internet/AI, Politics & Capitalism, and Atheism. David has enlisted a good range of interview subjects, some who knew Adams well. Stephen Fry was the best of the interviews, although all were interesting. My perk of bonus audio gave me the full keynote from one of Adams’ conference talks plus the unedited interviews of three of the participants in the book.

A interesting strategy for this audiobook is that it’s being released through podcast app services–you can’t buy it directly as a download (unless you were a kickstarter backer). You can find out more about it at the link.

I’m glad I got this audiobook as I’ve collected most of what has been written by or published about Douglas Adams. It ranks with Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing… as something that a completist will want but that the casual fan will probably skip.

The “Seafort Saga” on Audiobook (Audible)

I started listening to book one (Midshipman’s Hope) in November 2024 and finished with book seven (Children of Hope) at the end of September 2025. These are long books, between eighteen and twenty-four hours. Vikas Adam narrated five books, Jed Drummond one, and Josh Hurley also just one. Truth be told, they all had flaws that irritated me. Adam had several grating pronunciations that Hurley also used. All mispronounced words; Drummond had the fewest.

The “Seafort Saga” is one of my favorite novel series, but I have to admit that it was extremely painful to listen to at times. You just want to slap the characters for being prideful or for adhering to the very strict moral code that the space Naval Service adheres to.

Even though it would lengthen them even more, I would love to hear at least the first three redone as “full cast” audios with multiple voices. There were times that the narrators just weren’t up to the varied voices and book five (Voices of Hope) that deals with ‘transpops’ (think New Yorkers with a degraded slang speech) almost gave me a headache at times to listen to.

I have mixed feelings about this set. I acquired each book over time with months of getting Audible deals, so it didn’t cost me a lot, but I wish it could be done by a better studio.

Meeting David Feintuch at BucConeer (56th WorldCon and my first) in 1998 was an amazing afternoon that cemented my love of SF fandom. I just wish the audiobooks left him a better legacy.