A note on audiobooks and Catherine Asaro

I had started to post this list of books for my friend Jeffy a few months back but got distracted and didn't get it done.

I have been audiobooking (mostly via Audible and Ipod) for a couple of years now. I always thought that since I'm such a reader I wouldn't get much out of listening to a book being read.

Instead I find that it's a different experience, and valuable in that I find myself
willing to audiobook books that I never get around to reading. Also I find that I
respond more emotionally to audiobooks than to reading the same book. I thus speculated that if I responded to an audiobook it would be likely that my Lovely Wife Kate would enjoy reading the book. And it has worked out that way.

I came across Catherine Asaro in going through Nebula winners. I started with her Primary Inversion and progressed through other "Skolian Empire" works The Radiant Seas, The Last Hawk, Ascendant Sun, and The Quantum Rose (which won the 2001 Nebula), all in audiobook form, and I enjoyed all of them.

I bought Kate these for Christmas (2007) and she's been devouring them. Success!

I also enjoyed audiobooking another Nebula winner, Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, and reading its sequel Darwin's Children. The two books are on Kate's stack to try next. I'm not sure she'll like them as much as she's liked Asaro, but I'm hopeful.

You've no doubt noticed that I use 'audiobook' as a verb. I just don't see another way to do it ... I "listened to" that book? That doesn't capture it!

Peak oil: a movie, 2 websites, a disaster preparedness diary

I am visiting my aunt in Virginia this weekend and took the opportunity
to watch A Crude Awakening ... Nothing much new here for anybody who's read several of the books on this subject, but well done and possibly a good whack on the side of the head for anybody you can't get to read a book. Mentions the 1970's gas lines as a warmup for what's coming next, which I think hasn't been done enough. Mentions but soft-pedals the reduction in our ability to support the current 6.x billion without oil; it's realistically downbeat but not a dieoff clone.

One of the talking heads in the movie runs a website Life after the oil crash, where I found a republication of an outstanding disaster preparedness blog posting by a guy who calls himself AlphaGeek ... the original being better formatted and more readable than the republication. Originally posted in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and with some broken merchandise links, but
still oh-so-relevant. Not particularly peak-oil related, but there are plenty
of other disasters to prepare for ... and in any event my view of the peak oil
phenomenon is that it's likely to be a fraying of the fabric of industrial
civilization that makes us poorer and makes disasters and disruptions much
more likely over time rather than being a Katrina-like disaster itself.

Finally, a site with stunning graphs of the oil peak, as well as a lot of
other relevant info ...