Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2020-01-01 05:45 pm
edenfalling) wrote2020-01-01 05:45 pm
Entry tags:
audiobook list, November and December 2019
The following is a list of the 4 audiobooks (for varying definitions of "book") that I have listened to in November and December, 2019. They are in chronological order by initial listening date.
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35. War and World History, by Jonathan P. Roth (Great Courses, 25 hours 1 minutes)
-----Basically a history of war and related issues (politics, culture, economics, religion, technology, etc.) from a global perspective, focusing mostly on the "core" (western/southern Europe and western/northern Africa east through China and Japan) as a unified area where military technology and ideas traveled easily from culture to culture, and glancing less frequently at the "marginal" areas outside that unified geographic region (which then obviously shifts after Columbus et al). I think this course works best if you have a decent grounding in general world history to start with, so you have a solid foundation to stick any new information on top of, but it's fascinating and I really like Prof. Roth's unifying approach and refusal to treat Europe, India, China, the Middle East, and so on as walled-off areas, and instead his interest in tracing the back-and-forth flow of influences from one region to another and the reasons why various regions adopted or failed to adopt various innovations over the millennia. I would also be really interested in a few supplemental lectures to get his perspective on military history developments since 2008, which is the stop date/publication date for this course.
36. The Early Middle Ages, by Philip Daileader (Great Courses, 12 hours 32 minutes)
-----I actually listened to this series on CD about... two years ago now? That sounds about right. Anyway, Prof. Daileader did a trilogy of courses about the Middle Ages, but he started with the High Middle Ages because that seemed most likely to be of general interest. I believe this was the second series he recorded. The first part is about Late Antiquity, i.e., the slow alteration of the western Roman Empire into a very different form of society, with some attention paid to the related changes going on in the eastern half of the Empire, and then moves into developments in the new "barbarian" kingdoms of western Europe and the growth of the Carolingian Empire, with tangents on the growth of the Islamic world, the British Isles, and the Balkans and other Slavic lands. (The Vikings get salted in to a handful of lectures.) Very interesting, engaging, and informative.
37. Sleep Better, by Jade Alexis (Aaptiv free Audible member offer, 1 hour 58 minutes)
-----This is a series of seven guided meditations to aid in falling asleep. They start about 10 minutes long, and gradually lengthen until the seventh is about 30 minutes long. I play them at 75% speed because that's more restful for me. I found the third meditation less than useless for idiosyncratic visualization reasons, but the others are very relaxing. In fact, I have not yet managed to hear the end of the sixth and seventh meditations, because I fall asleep before then... which I guess is a pretty good anecdotal recommendation. *wry*
38. The High Middle Ages, by Philip Daileader (Great Courses, 12 hours 25 minutes)
-----Again, I previously listened to this series on CD a year or two ago. This course takes a more thematic approach than Prof. Daileader's lectures on the Early Middle Ages, with the first third being social history, the next third being mostly religious and intellectual history, and the final third being events and politics.
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In non-audiobook but still audio media news, I have picked up another podcast and am working my way through its... um... back catalog? *wry* Namely, The Magnus Archives, which is sort of a supernatural horror anthology with a unifying plot that starts sneaking in around the edges after a few episodes, and which apparently comes more and more to the fore over the seasons. I'm still in season one, but it's quite enjoyable despite my usual issues with listening to people read written fiction. I think that's partly because these episodes were written specifically to be heard rather than to be read visually, but partly also because the conceit of a lot of the initial episodes is a person reading other people's personal statements of paranormal/horror encounters aloud so the Magnus Archives will have an audio record as well as a written record, for accessibility reasons. And then there are some episodes that are actually structured as in-person recorded interviews, so overall the whole effect is more like a radio play than an audiobook.
Anyway, I like this series very much so far. (The fandom is also pretty cool, fyi.)
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35. War and World History, by Jonathan P. Roth (Great Courses, 25 hours 1 minutes)
-----Basically a history of war and related issues (politics, culture, economics, religion, technology, etc.) from a global perspective, focusing mostly on the "core" (western/southern Europe and western/northern Africa east through China and Japan) as a unified area where military technology and ideas traveled easily from culture to culture, and glancing less frequently at the "marginal" areas outside that unified geographic region (which then obviously shifts after Columbus et al). I think this course works best if you have a decent grounding in general world history to start with, so you have a solid foundation to stick any new information on top of, but it's fascinating and I really like Prof. Roth's unifying approach and refusal to treat Europe, India, China, the Middle East, and so on as walled-off areas, and instead his interest in tracing the back-and-forth flow of influences from one region to another and the reasons why various regions adopted or failed to adopt various innovations over the millennia. I would also be really interested in a few supplemental lectures to get his perspective on military history developments since 2008, which is the stop date/publication date for this course.
36. The Early Middle Ages, by Philip Daileader (Great Courses, 12 hours 32 minutes)
-----I actually listened to this series on CD about... two years ago now? That sounds about right. Anyway, Prof. Daileader did a trilogy of courses about the Middle Ages, but he started with the High Middle Ages because that seemed most likely to be of general interest. I believe this was the second series he recorded. The first part is about Late Antiquity, i.e., the slow alteration of the western Roman Empire into a very different form of society, with some attention paid to the related changes going on in the eastern half of the Empire, and then moves into developments in the new "barbarian" kingdoms of western Europe and the growth of the Carolingian Empire, with tangents on the growth of the Islamic world, the British Isles, and the Balkans and other Slavic lands. (The Vikings get salted in to a handful of lectures.) Very interesting, engaging, and informative.
37. Sleep Better, by Jade Alexis (Aaptiv free Audible member offer, 1 hour 58 minutes)
-----This is a series of seven guided meditations to aid in falling asleep. They start about 10 minutes long, and gradually lengthen until the seventh is about 30 minutes long. I play them at 75% speed because that's more restful for me. I found the third meditation less than useless for idiosyncratic visualization reasons, but the others are very relaxing. In fact, I have not yet managed to hear the end of the sixth and seventh meditations, because I fall asleep before then... which I guess is a pretty good anecdotal recommendation. *wry*
38. The High Middle Ages, by Philip Daileader (Great Courses, 12 hours 25 minutes)
-----Again, I previously listened to this series on CD a year or two ago. This course takes a more thematic approach than Prof. Daileader's lectures on the Early Middle Ages, with the first third being social history, the next third being mostly religious and intellectual history, and the final third being events and politics.
---------------
---------------
In non-audiobook but still audio media news, I have picked up another podcast and am working my way through its... um... back catalog? *wry* Namely, The Magnus Archives, which is sort of a supernatural horror anthology with a unifying plot that starts sneaking in around the edges after a few episodes, and which apparently comes more and more to the fore over the seasons. I'm still in season one, but it's quite enjoyable despite my usual issues with listening to people read written fiction. I think that's partly because these episodes were written specifically to be heard rather than to be read visually, but partly also because the conceit of a lot of the initial episodes is a person reading other people's personal statements of paranormal/horror encounters aloud so the Magnus Archives will have an audio record as well as a written record, for accessibility reasons. And then there are some episodes that are actually structured as in-person recorded interviews, so overall the whole effect is more like a radio play than an audiobook.
Anyway, I like this series very much so far. (The fandom is also pretty cool, fyi.)