What A Load Of Tolkien

I was perusing my audiobooks in iTunes to see what I'd like to listen to or listen to again before the release of the next Harry Potter book.
I have quite a few audiobooks now and as I was scrolling though and I was surprised at just how much Tolkien I had. In total I have 4:15:51:41 of Tolkien. That's 4 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes, and 41 seconds of Middle Earth goodness. I had forgotten that I had Radio Dramatizations of the books as well as the audio versions of the books.

The Silmarillion (unabridged audiobook) : 14 hours, 49 minutes, 53 seconds.
Martin Shaw's reading is grave and resonant, conveying all the powerful events and emotions that shaped elven/men/dwarf history and Middle Earth itself.

The Hobbit (unabridged audiobook) : 11 hours, 4 minutes, 51 seconds.
The Fellowship Of The Ring (unabridged audiobook) : 19 hours, 9 minutes, 54 seconds.
The Two Towers (unabridged audiobook) : 16 hours, 43 minutes, 18 seconds.
The Return Of The King (unabridged audiobook) : 18 hours, 22 minutes, 57 seconds.
All read by Rob Inglis in 1990. Inglis has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his old-school English voice is a perfect match for the books. He shines with comedy, but he's also good at conveying solemnity, and his reading of the madness of Denethor was genuinely frightening. His voice of Gollum is the most distinctive, and clearly the one he had the most fun with: cackling, gurgling, whining, and hissing, simultaneously hilarious and pathetic. Even if you've read the books many times yourself, hearing them aloud is different. You are forced to listen to passages you might have otherwise skipped or hurried over, and many of them yield up unexpected treasures, a turn of phrase or simile that you never noticed before. We can never again read them for the first time; but this is the next best thing.

American Dramatizations
The Hobbit : 4 hours, 42 minutes, 51 seconds.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy : 10 hours, 26 minutes, 50 seconds.
A 1979 dramatization of The Lord of the Rings was broadcast in the USA. No cast or credits appear on the audio packaging. Each of the actors was apparently recorded separately and then the various parts were edited together. There is an old-school charm to these old analog recordings. This version is chalked full of fun songs. There is a charming renascence style to the instrumentation. The Dwarf songs are catchy and some what hypnotic.

BBC Dramatization
The Hobbit : 3 hours, 42 minutes, 51 seconds.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy : 13 hours, 15 minutes, 13 seconds.
In 1981 the BBC broadcast The Lord of the Rings, a new, ambitious dramatisation in 26 half-hour installments. It stared Ian Holm as Frodo Baggins, who played Bilbo Baggins, his character's cousin/uncle, in the live-action trilogy.

Yes, that's Leonard Nimoy a.k.a. Mr. Spock crooning about Bilbo in the video below.

World War Z

This book is really a sister book to the Zombie Survival Guide, not a sequel. They are both written by Max Brooks but have completely different styles of writing. World War Z is a collection of short stories that can stand alone but work well built on each other to create a time line of the Zombie War.
There is a ten episode podcast available for free on iTunes that offers entire short stories extracted out of the book. I listened to them before I listened to the WWZ audiobook. They are very entertaining but there is some stuff in there that just goes sort of in-one-ear-out-the-other since you are listening to the stories out of sequence. As I listened to the stories again in the audiobook I found myself thinking, "ah, that makes more sense or ah, that seems to have more meaning".
I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I was thinking how if you removed the zombie element, kept everything else the same, just exchanged the undead for some kind of lethal virus that was killing everyone on the planet, this would be one of the scariest end-of-the-world books out there. This book sucked me in. It is performed incredibly well by an impressive cast of actors. Whoever cast the readers of this book is a genius. They picked the perfect actors for each of the stories. One of my favorites was none other than Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. His voice fits his character perfectly. After years of doing characters for animation Hamill is an old pro.
The other familiar voice I enjoyed was Alan Alda. His character, to me, seemed as if Hawkeye Pierce from Mash had gone on to work a government job after the war. The character is played with a been-there-done-that-seen-it-survived-it tone.

WORLD WAR Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a recounting of these apocalyptic and horrifying years that will make sure we never forget how close we came to total annihilation. Told from the perspective of numerous survivors from all over the world, from Denver to South Africa, Sydney to Yonkers, Malibu to India, WORLD WAR Z captures the sacrifices and, toward the end, the ingenuity of our race to defend and save our cities, towns, and villages from a plague that seemed virtually impossible to stop.
Brooks tells a moving story of courage and survival and gives us insight into the key military strategies that helped us take our world back. To this day, controversy and conversation still revolves around some key issues that WORLD WAR Z addresses such as:

- How the Walking Plague was initially covered up by corrupt governments
- Why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services downplayed the Great Panic
- A zealous American President's mistake in putting his party's needs in an election year ahead of the safety of his people.

I wish there was an unabridged version of the audiobook.

The Zombie Survival Guide

I LOVE any and all things ZOMBIE!
I love the campiness, the impending apocalyptic doom, the sucker-punch scares, the mythology, the volumes upon volumes of crappy and cheaply indie made "B" films.
I love all the spin-offs of George A. Romero's films. I love the makeup and gore effects. I love the twisted visual gages and jokes. I love the badly-written story lines and the over-blown special effects budgets. I love everything from 28 Days Later to Shaun of the Dead and Bubba Ho-Tep (what's better than a geriatric Elvis in a nursing home battling an Egyptian Mummy) and everything in between. I love other people who love the Zombie stuff. There is an affinity for the undead floating amongst people that crosses gender and cultural lines. Like Trekkies only it's a little more underground and less organized. For me there is a sense of a guilty pleasure in my affection to the Zombie world. It's fun to come across other fans. You either love it or you don't get it. You can rent the cheesiest titled B-rated Zombie flick with a super over the top cover and you wonder what kind of reaction you are going to get from the person at the counter. Are they some teenager who looks at you weird as they read the title and tell you when it's due back? Or are they the kind of person who says "I've seen this five times and if you like this you should check out..." There seems to be an instant camaraderie that springs up in meeting a fellow Zombie lover. The Zombie world is huge from Zombie related television shows, to Zombie films, to Zombie comics, to Zombie books, to Zombie art, to Zombie video games, to my personal favorite the Zombie Pub Crawl (playing a show that is apart of that is a goal of mine) and then there's even Rob Zombie.

I think I'd be equally excited and scared to meet him.

So all of that is an intro to The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, son of the comedy genius Mel Brooks, a Saturday Night Live alumni writer, and fellow Zombie enthusiast. This book is great! I will say that I think you have to have some interest in the Zombie world to get this book. It is brilliantly read, strait and dead pan. No pun intended. Ironically this book could be useful if the world was faced with a real world-wide pandemic.

Below is a description of the book.
The Zombie Survival Guide is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now. Exhaustively comprehensive, this book covers everything you need to know, including how to understand Zombie physiology and behavior, the most effective defense tactics and weaponry, ways to outfit your home for a long siege, and how to survive and adapt in any territory or terrain.

Top 10 Lessons for Surviving a Zombie Attack:
1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don't need reloading.
5. Ideal protection: tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The Zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

Don't be carefree and foolish with your most precious asset: life. The Zombie Survival Guide offers complete protection through trusted, proven tips for safeguarding yourself and your loved ones against the living dead. It is an audiobook that can save your life.

I'm excited to listen to and review World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I'm beginning to appreciate old school fiction more and more. After listening to Frankenstein and now the Time Machine my interest in this genera has been highly piqued.
Here is a very brief run down of the plot without spoiling anything.
The main character is never mentioned by name. He is simply called "the Time Traveller". The story opens with the Time Traveler sitting in a tavern demonstrating to colleges and peers, using a fully functioning model, that time is a dimension. They are familiar with three dimensional space since they live in it. The fourth dimension, being time, is hard for them to grasp. When the miniature model time machine disappears from the table in front of them they pass it off as a magic trick, an illusion of sorts. His frustration with their disbelief is the push he needs to get inside the full sized machine he built and take it for a joyride. He then immediately sets off on a journey into the future. H.G. Wells does a wonderful job of describing what it looks like to travel through time, his machine allows the Time Traveller to observe the changes of the outside world in fast motion. The sun and moon spin around the sky forming a band of blurry light. He also goes into some detail of the changes to the buildings and landscape around him as he travels through time. His journey takes him to the year 802,701 A.D. where he finds an apparently peaceful and primitive future filled with a simple race called the Eloi. They appear to be quite unintelligent and child-like and live without quarrels or conflict. The story follows the Time Traveller's interaction and relationship building with them.
One evening the Time Traveller returns to his usual place to sleep and he suddenly realises that the time machine is missing. He soon discovers that the Eloi are not the only race to inhabit the Earth. He discovers that the human race has diverged into two branches. He learns of the race of Morlocks, large, nocturnal, cannibals who resemble albino apes and who dwell underground. They are the ones who have taken the time machine. The story then follows the Time Traveller as he battles the Morlocks to recover and reactivate the Time Machine.

Much like Frankenstein, I was surprised at how long ago the book was published. The Time Machine was first published in 1895.

Frankenstein

I just finished listening to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein on audiobook.
I have a hard time reading books for several reasons.
Some of the heavy hitters are I'm slightly dyslexic, after a page or two my eyes wig out with astigmatism, I'm a little A.D.D. and I have a hard time finding time to sit down to read.
Solution: Audiobooks. Love 'em! I can put on an audiobook while I'm at work doing low brain activity stuff like Photoshop and simple After Effects projects.
I can let my imagination go nuts for a few hours at a time and I can plow through an audiobook in a couple days. I think it took me almost a year to read through the Lord of the Rings books and a week and a half to listen to the audiobooks.

I've had Frankenstein in my to-listen-to list for a while. I've just been working on some projects that I wouldn't be able to multitask very well.

As a kid I was familiar with the pop culture Frankenstein from television and movies. There was everything from Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein to Fred Gwynn's Herman Munster to Franken-Berry cereal. I had seen the film Mary Shelly's Frankenstein directed by Kenneth Branagh back in 1994 and the classic Boris Karloff Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale on television when I was a kid. I think it was one of those Sunday afternoon scare-a-thons hosted by Elvira around Halloween.

I really enjoyed this book. It is a dark and tragic tale that sucked me in.
There are some wonderful themes that were never quite captured in film format.
(or breakfast cereal format either)
I enjoyed the dramatic roller coaster of Victor and the Monster.
I enjoyed how themes crisscrossed. You meet Victor when he's creating the monster. You are scared of his character. He's truly a mad scientist bent on his experiments to unlock the mysteries of life itself.
By the end of the story you are very sympathetic for the hell he has created for himself.
When you are introduced to the Monster you are sympathetic towards his character. Before he becomes self aware and educated he is a selfless kind creature who's first act is to do anonymous charity work for a family who is living in poverty. After he is rejected, hurt, and educated of what he is and how ugly and cruel the society of man is, his second act is to have revenge on his creator. He begins killing those who are loved ones of his creator.
There are a lot of elements and themes that you can pull out and compare to life today which goes to show how great of a writer Mary Shelly was since it was written way back in 1817.