Audiobook Books

In this installment of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, the characters mature in parallel to the scope and urgency of the conflict. Annabeth, Percy, Grover, Clarisse and others wisen and deepen as the conflict takes on a more personal edge.

It opens light-hearted enough: Percy has a run-in with some not-so-peppy cheerleaders and manages to put Annabeth in a jealousy-inspired fit in the process. However, as we find out more about the approaching war with the Titans, the reader is quickly drawn into a literal maze of difficulties.

All of the main characters have crucial choices they have to make, and this drives the plot forward: Percy has to deliberately decide several times to renounce his own desires in favor of others' needs; Annabeth has to exercise both her wisdom and humility; Grover has to simply grow; and we even see some beautiful character-deepening in Clarisse and Mr. D.

My favorite aspect of this part of the series is how the personal choices of the characters--whether major or minor characters--so profoundly affect the overall battle between good and evil. In literature, it is too easy to allow these forces to runaway and not ultimately be affected by individual decisions, but if it is to be real, and real fantasy, this element is essential. Riordan masters this chillingly well; even in the stunning, picturesque comeback of Kronos he reminds us of the importance of individual choice. Book 4 goes necessarily deeper than the previous books, so much so that I am still mulling over it several days after completing it.

While it cannot exactly be a cliffhanger, Riordan is definitely segueing into The Last Olympian. Book 4 is a wonderful story in and of itself, but we are painstakingly set up for the conclusion, and it's just a shame we have to wait so long to get it!

These books are always enjoyable. I've been a mythology enthusiast since I was a kid and am still a sucker for creative variations on Greek Myths. I had to particularly laugh at the Sphinx who ditches the traditional riddle contest for a standardized test. Her lines are classic.

"Think? How am I supposed to test whether you can think?, that's ridiculous!"

"If you won't pass, you fail. And since we can't allow any children to be held back, you'll be eaten!"

"My grading machine! I can't be exemplary without my test scores!"

OK, I'm a teacher. I probably found this much more amusing than the kids that this book is targeted toward.

This is the 4th book in the Percy and the Olympians series. I have heard that there are supposed to be 5 books in the series. This book was as good as the previous ones and follows the same basic formula as those ones. I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was very well done!

Percy is going to orientation at yet another new school. This time more is at stake because he was allowed into this school on a recommendation from his mother's boyfriend. As usual trouble ensues and he is attacked right off the bat by evil monster cheerleaders. So starts another fun fast-paced adventure with Percy and his buddies.

Percy flees the scene meeting Annabeth on the way and they end up back at camp half-blood where Annabeth is finally given a quest. Her quest will take her, Tyson, Percy, and Grover through the depths of the fabled Labyrinth and through many other fantastical areas of Greek mythology. As Aphrodite promised Percy's "love life" begins to get difficult with the addition of Elizabeth Rachel Dare to the story.

This was another great book. I continue to love how the Greek myths are woven in with everyday reality. I love the characters. I love how even Percy's everyday normal mortal life is kept track of and not forgotten about. This is just an all-in-all great book. I love this series and am very excited to see how it ends.

Great book!
Karissabooks.blogspot.com

I had purchased The Lightning Thief (1st book in the series of 4, so far...) for my 11 year old son who does NOT like to read silently, figuring that we could read it aloud together, and to try to get him interested in non-fiction. It also coincided with Greek Mythology a social studies subject in 6th grade. It was fabulous, and we have since read books 2 and 3. He was THRILLED that a new installment was avaailable and even read it himself! Can't wait for book 5, Riordan is a genius!

The Battle of the Labyrinth, I have to say, is my second favorite book in the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians series." The Lightning Thief is my favorite. The Battle of the Labyrinth is thrilling and spectacular. If you like mystery and adventure, read this book.
Percy Jackson is the main character who is brave and courageous. He is a half-blood, meaning his dad is a god, Poseidon, and his mom is mortal. He is a fourteen-year-old teenager who is learning about the powers that he possesses. He needs to learn how to use his powers appropriately or run away. Percy, also, can be obnoxious because he makes stupid jokes at the worst times.
This epic starts with a surprise attack on Percy by a demon-cheerleader while he is at summer orientation for another new school. As he flees, he takes a taxi to Camp Half-Blood and the real adventure begins. Percy and his friends, Annabeth, Grover, and Tyson, find a secret entrance to the labyrinth and searches for its inventor, Daedalus, and a way to stop the evil Titan lord's , Kronos, invasion. Inside the labyrinth, it is dark, murky, chilly, and ever changing. It is full of entrances, exits, changing paths, and monsters. Percy kills monster after monster with his pen that turns into a 3-foot sword named Riptide. Inside Daedalus' workshop, they ask for the addias string, which is a guide that point the way through the labyrinth. They leave the labyrinth to get ready to destroy Kronos and his army. The camp was losing to the evil army until Daedalus sacrifices himself to destroy his creation, the labyrinth. Percy thinks his adventure of fighting Kronos is over but he was mistaken. (We will have to read the next book to find out what happens.)
The theme of The Battle of the Labyrinth is to have great friends that you can trust, because friendships must prevail no matter the odds.

We chanced upon the Rabbit Ears series when my cousin came to town for a visit. What a wonderful treat for our granddaughters. Kipling has always been a favorite of mine, and it was fun to share him. The recordings are quite good, and they easily held the interest of various cousins ranging from 3 to 11 years old ( even the very cool 14 year old was listening).

The Monkey People story is a very sophisticated and easy to understand story that can be enjoyed by all age persons. Further it teaches a moral lesson about the need to take action rather than just talk.

The voices and the music are so well done on these that they are great for the whole family!

This is a fun collection of the Just So Stories. The readers add so much fun and the music adds sparkle to these classic tales.

Life in the 1800's in the woods sure is different than it is here. I bet if that family ever came here they would be amazed. Heck, if I ever had to shoot guns or collect sap from trees I would fall asleep during it. Pa is my favorite character. He goes into town to get supplies and hunts at night what about those stories? My favorite part is when Pa is alone in the woods at night and he thinks he sees a bear but it is really a tree. This is the first Little House book I read and I would like to read Little House on the Prairie next. I hope all you readers read it!

The audio for this book Little House in the Big Woods is wonderful for my students in the classroom. This allows my students due to the diversity of my students the ability to hear it read aloud(not just by me as the teacher). I can reach many modalities with this. Thank you.

Reading this book was was very easy for me to imagine life back when cards didn't exist and people's nearest neighbor was 1-2 miles away. Wholesome fun for a family that truely survived on what nature had to offer them. Great reading for the family.

This book is wonderful in every way, from the detailed, fresh descriptions of life over a hundred years ago, to the beautiful drawings by Garth Williams.

My six year old daughter loves the story of Laura Ingalls and her
family. It gives good information on how they live long time
ago. teaches her to be thankful, obedient, diligent and to be
thankful on what she have.

This is a fabulous, UNabridged version of A Christmas Carol. Jim Dale does fabulous voice characterizations, and really captures the mood of each scene. Just love it.

This was a great way to share the beauty of Dickens with students that are not quite ready to read it on their own.

The quintessential Christmas story read by Jim Dale with all the skill (and voices) with which he read the Harry Potter novels. Wonderful to listen to as you do your Christmas decorating or baking. I bought copies to give as gifts for several people this year.

Fabulous from beginning to end. Jim Dale's performance makes the characters in the book come to life. I highly recommend it.

Wonderful! In this busy time of year it's hard to find time to sit down long enough to read through the printed Dickens. Having an unabridged copy of A Christmas Carol in an audio format is a great treat. I managed to listen to it twice, once on my own while wrapping gifts and baking, and once with my kids.
Jim Dale, as usual reads it beautifully, embuing each character with it's own personality.

Everyone should read this book.Find who is getting a free lunch and most are only getting table scraps!

This book is probably best read in small portions, as the average person will become incensed at the greed that takes from the less and gives to the more. Fortunately, each chapter covers a specific rip off of the taxpayer, and is not too long. It might raise the blood pressure of the average person to read too many chapters at one time.

Yes, the wealthy and connected have rigged the system to flow the riches to themselves.

If there is one theme to the book, it is the Adam Smith's advice that government should not favor one endeavor over another is deaf to the people that continually use Adam Smith as the reason for government getting out of the way. It is not free enterprise when government takes one side, which is what the wealthy and well connected have the government do.

A good companion is Hostile Takeover by David Sirota (available on Amazon Kindle).Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--And How We Take It Back

His prior book, Perfectly Legal, is a good primer, although a bit dated as to how the wealthy avoid taxes. In Free Lunch, it is how the wealthy get subsidies. Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else

An excellent, well-documented and readable investigation and analysis of how the whole system of American government, at Federal, State and Local levels, has been used for the past 30 years or so to tax the poor and the middle class in order to enrich the already wealthy. If you think this sounds like the system in France in 1788, you are absolutely right. If you are not angry already, you need to read this book. If you are angry already, you still need to read this book in order to confirm all your worst suspicions. There is something rotten in the States of America, and if the infection of our body politic is not dealt with soon, it will turn to gangrene and kill democracy completely.

Very well written book. It's very sad, especially since you read it and don't have any power to do anything about it, but it's very well written.

A very informative and straight-ahead book revealing, anecdote by real-life anecdote, how, during the Bush/Clinton/Bush administrations, our public commons -- in other words, our tax dollars -- increasingly have been routinely commandeered by a tiny and superrich elite for their own exhorbitant profit. In the form of public subsidies for private developers and retailers, such as Cabelas and Wal-Mart, and through privatization of our utility companies starting with Enron's massive rip-off of our public commons, Johnston shows how the wolves (greedy privateers) have not only gained entrance into the henhouse of our national treasury but, through intensive lobbying efforts, are exercising too much control over our elected officials today, basically funding the rewriting of our national laws to ensure their own dominant position and ongoing aggregation of riches.

The book makes sense of a lot of things that were not adding up to me when looking around our current landscape -- like why my electric bill has skyrocketed in the last couple of years (thank you, Kenny Lay), or what kind of business "sense" was behind that monstrous box store of Cabelas on Rte. 78 in Hamburg, PA. Or even why oil and gas prices are going through the roof right now. It's not supply and demand at all, it's sleight of hand and basic greed and power-grabbing. Johnston shows how the scales of supply and demand no longer balance the markets, as the PR mavens would like us to believe. When private companies are subsidized with public funds, Adam Smith-type free market competition proves but a chimera, a smokescreen behind which privateers hide, avidly sucking our economy dry and bankrupting our society. Read the book.

I love this book, it is the first book i have read by this author and it makes me laugh, cry and everything in between. Very good book and makes me think ALOT

I picked up "Babyville" a couple of weeks ago and realized that I have read it or have read so many books like this one that I have forgotten it. So I didn't finish reading it since there are so many other books clamoring for my attention and "Babyville" just didn't grab my attention. When the library called and told me that "The Beach House" was in, I thought it was going to be funny.

It is, but it isn't. The best thing about this book is that it's a very fast read. I read it in almost two days. Thankfully. It didn't drag nor did it sink. It is just a so-so novel from an author that I know is quite capable of producing better books. This is definitely not her best book and it is definitely right for a beach read or for a long plane ride.

This book reminds me of Maeve Binchy's short stories collection, where you have five different characters with different viewpoints and their stories intermeshed somehow into making this a novel. Green really needs to stick with novels with one main character as that is her strongest strength ... not books like this one.

There is Nan, matriach and widow who lives on Nantucket. She lives in the ancient Powell home and her son, Michael, returns home from NYC in disgrace. Then there's Daniel, a gay man who just outed himself for the first time and is in the midst of a divorce where he worries about never seeing his two daughters again. Then there's Daff, a young divorcee with a very moody teen-age daughter who decided to spend the summer with her dad. The stories are stereotpyical and predictable and unrealistic.

But if you want to escape reality for a few hours, this book would do the trick. However, hopefully sometime soon, Green will go back and write her fun novels and stick with a formula that is truly hers instead of just cranking out books that doesn't inspire readers to keep reading.

10/6/08

Loved this book so much I was sad when it came to an end..... I could not put it down. I loved all the relationships and witty words...such a wonderful story of Nan and her new "found" family...and the unsuspecting turns her life takes (don't want to give anything away)...really great real life lessons in this book..... funny and clever... A great story that really sticks with you... I want to be like Nan when I grow up..her attitude..and fox like smarts..!! THANK YOU! Jane Green for such a wonderful book to read on my vacation! Cheers!!!

The last few Jane Green books I have read seem to have the exact same people going through infidelity, divorce, pregnancy issues, etc, the only difference is that she changes the characters names.

I really wish Jane Green would get back to writing novels with a main protaginist instead of having the plethera of characters she keeps throwing in her novels. It drove me nuts that once I got involved in someone's story the next chapter moved on to someone else.

I finished The Beach House in one afternoon and all in all I have to say the entire book just had me feeling unsatisfied since there were way too many plots going on and I think she would have been better served in just writing several different books or short stories instead of trying to tie things together with everyone staying at at "beach house" for the summer and having the wise old woman solving all of their problems. All of the plots were tied up too neatly.

I would recommend this book if you like sweet stories that wrap up into a nice little package at the end, but it's not for the serious, discerning reader. It was somewhat unoriginal, with little character development and a very predictable outcome. But I did enjoy the Nantucket setting and it left me feeling nice at the end, although it was incredibly unrealistic.

This short novel for boys tells how a white American boy becomes marooned with an old West Indian black man on a tiny island during World War II. It's simple, direct, often exciting, truthful, and well-observed. Along with the story of this archetypal relationship (which is much like that between Huckleberry Finn and Jim) it tells a good deal about the fundamentals of life on a Caribbean reef island (the "cay") and about the direct experience of a hurricane. This is a solid, serious, engaging and accessible book that rightfully been in print since 1969. Take Me With You When You Go

this is a wonderful book
very intense and emotional which makes it even more intresting
this book is my favirote all should enjoy and read this!!!
Wonderful life lesson taught!!!!
2 thumbs up!!

Oh my God! This book was so boring. I would have rather watched grass grow. The characters were not likable at all. I found myself cheering when Timothy died. There are many dessciptions of Phillip clutched to Timothy's naked body. So many of these referances that my friends and I started calling it "The Gay". The racial thing wasn't that big a deal. Like OMG!! Phillip dosen't like black people, now he does! I'm shaking from the experiance. DON'T READ IT.

My favorite book is The Cay. The author is Theodore Taylor. The reason why I like this book is because it's all about adventure, and you never know what will happen next. My favorite part is when Phillip gets hit in the head, and when he looks at the sun too long, and he realizes he is blind. The author wrote very good details about what happened to Phillip and Timothy on the cay. I would recommend The Cay to anyone who likes adventure. When I read The Cay I never wanted to stop reading it. It has so many adventures, and things in it. You will never want to stop reading it too.

I like the book The Cay because it is adventure. The book is about a boy named Phillip that goes on a ship with his family and then the ship gets sunk. The next thing he knows is that he is on a rubber raft with a African American man named Timothy. He goes on an island and Timothy dies by a hurricane. But Phillip survives because Timothy risked his life to save Phillips life. Phillip survived on the cay by fishing with the poles that Timothy made for him before he died. Later on he heard a airplane and then set a fire to get the planes attention. Then he put sea grapes in the fire that started smoke and later he was rescued by a ship. I recommend this book for children that are 9 or older. And that is why I like this book because it is a adventure.

Creepy-cool history of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, intertwined with the history of the serial killer H. H. Holmes who was operating at and around the Fair and may have accounted for anywhere from 9 (confirmed) to 50 (suspected) to even 200 (conjectured) murders.

Reads like an atmospheric slasher novel, except it is history, and thoroughly footnoted from contemporary accounts as well as secondary sources. The couple of scenes where Larson assumes an omniscient authorial viewpoint are noted and his historical sources for the conjectural fiction are noted and explained.

Oh, yes, and there was a World's Fair going on at the same time, and that story fascinates as well, with the conflicts of personalities and politics that plague every large public project. These interactions result in sometimes bizarre, sometimes postmodernicly hip juxtapositions of buildings, events, and landscapes where millions would celebrate the latest of everything in their world.

If you live in Chicago or have lived in Chicago or just love Chicago you must read this book. My appreciation of the city, especially the architecture, is greater. And my knowledge of the city's history (an incredibly fascinating history) grew as well. I am a much better tour guide of Chicago to friends and family because of this book!

The book has a quick pace and reads like fiction. And there are sections, such as the ones regarding Holmes, that you wish were fiction. The writing style is uncluttered and straightforward. And the story progresses smoothly. It is a wonderful read.

As an urban planner, I found the history of the 1893 World's Fair fascinating, but what was great is that this book was a good beach read. So the other plot of a Jack-the-Ripper (true story) murderer spiced things up.

It's amazing what a huge effect that World's Fair had on our lives even 110 years later.

I enjoyed this book because I just returned from Chicago and heard rave reviews about it from city tour guides etc. The book is a fascinating look back on the Worlds Fair in Chicago plus serial killings going on at the same time.

The Chicago World's Fair at the turn of the century and a gruesome serial killer. The 1891 World's Fair was America's coming out party...

Dr. Andrew Weil and Jon Kabot-Zinn are two of the best in their fields. They make a great team!! The information continues to help me keep my focus and grow in awareness of myself and my world. Thanks.

I have several meditation/healing cd's from Andrew Weil, which I enjoy. This is not one of them. Perhaps as an introduction to meditation there is some useful content, but I did not find it helpful.

This CD was recommended to me and I have heard good things about Dr. Weil, but I have to say the CD's were a let down. The lecture was too long and i thought it would have been better to simply be text. The actual breathing exercises were not that inspiring and quite short. Although it was instructional to go through the breathing exercises along with the CD it would have been better if that part was expanded.

this is a great cd. you just listen to it and follow the instructions and can actually learn to meditate. great

Terrific 2 CD set - enjoyable to listen to, highly informative, short and sweet. You are on your way to using the techniques immediately. Nice addition to my "arsenal" of self-healing techniques.