I just loved that toward the end of the story, emissions start to fall. The first step to change is being able to imagine how it could happen. If you\’re picky about your narration, you might want to read it rather than listen to the audiobook. All that aside, it\’s an important book and well worth engaging with one way or the other. I got to the point where my heart sank every time she came back on to start a new chapter, and I almost didn\’t make it through to the end as the result. This is a real shame because Mary becomes the novel\’s main protagonist and her chapters are long. This happens throughout, but I got especially frustrated by the Irish narrator who reads Mary\’s chapters: her idea of doing a mans voice is make her voice as closed and raspy as possible, her Russian and Indian accents have wild sing-songy intonations, and her American accent is whiney. The biggest problem I had though is that some of the voices are just over-wrought, over-done, garish and cartoony. So, different characters voices sound radically different at different times. This is a huge cast, and it seems like they just mailed out the chapters to a bunch of voice actors with little coordination or direction. I found the narration of this audiobook uneven and sometimes quite irritating. The novel is well worth reading for that reason alone, though be warned at times the story and the characters definitely take a back seat to the ideas.
It definitely made me see the climate crisis in a new light, and got me thinking seriously about all kinds of things, and that\’s what a novel of ideas is supposed to do: make you think. It is at times tragic and depressing, at other times optimistic. It\’s really about envisioning the future: what the climate catastrophe will look like, and how the world might change to address it. This is a novel of ideas in the truest sense. I downloaded to this audiobook because Ezra Klein said it was the most important book he had read in 2020-not for the story or literary quality so much as for the realistic and comprehensive way it addresses the coming climate crisis.
0 kommentar(er)
