Audiobooks Vs. Podcasts: two extremes

There has been an explosion in good podcasts recently; there are enough out that they tend to make my Audible subscription recede into the background when I don't have a super-compelling audiobook at the top of the stack.

A recent pair of examples:

It took me a while to get into this one ... it's a very somber war story. It's based in some future where there is faster-than-light travel and some part of humanity has splintered off and become "savages" with different/greater capabilities and who think it's their duty to wipe out the previous version of humanity.

OK ... I gave this enough time to get to the moderately-compelling last part of the book: "Colonel Marx" is revealed to be ... well, I won't spoil the story by giving this one but overall ... well, 3 stars. I paused every time I had a marginally compelling podcast to listen to.

A vivid contrast:

This is the end of a trilogy that starts with The Collapsing Empire ... the first two of these are compelling enough, but not a blockbuster like this one. I stopped most podcast listening and even stayed up later than usual to listen to the end of this one ... one of the most fun endings of a novel I've experienced in a long time! (Even better than Scalzi's Android's Dream!)  Five stars!

Since I finished this two nights ago I have been catching up on podcasts, notably Marketplace, Freakonomics and Radiolab ...

I started "rereading" (via audiobook) the first of the trilogy to see if the first two were more fabulous than I remembered ... not so far. I wouldn't be surprised if everything was to set up the fabulous third book, sneaky and talented Scalzi!